What happens when your e-commerce provider shuts down the product you’re using to run your online store? That’s what about 10,000 small business owners now face as eBay announced that it would be shutting down its Magento Go and ProStores.

Even though the business owners have been given until February 15th of next year, that could still be prohibitive for companies that have quite a few products. Magento hopes that some of the business owners opt to upgrade to its Enterprise or Community Edition software offerings, but hasn’t formally made any special offers.

We at BannerView.com find this interesting, as we offer customers our own e-commerce store through BannerMerchant. Though we try to make the setup and maintenance of our customer’s online stores as easy as possible, it still takes a certain amount of time and labor to input the data and media associated with each and every product. Imagine having your landlord coming to your brick and mortar location and telling you that you had less than a year to vacate and find a new location.

Yes, it does seem that they’ve handled successful migrations in the past. The issue that concerns most business owners is that losing even the most minuscule of data can cause disruption in a business. Planning a move (or migration) takes just as much time as performing the move. Yet, even the most detailed of plans do not account for every scenario that may happen.

We hope that eBay offers their Magento customers the easiest of transitions over the next couple of months. Online shopping has become increasingly popular over the past decade. Spending in the United States hit approximately $262 billion in 2013, up 13.4% from $231 billion in 2012, according to Forrester Research Inc. Advances in mobile technology will only push that growth exponentially.

If we look at a couple of interesting statistics, business online is a crucial element to any companies success:

• 56% of American adults are now smartphone owners
• 95% of tablet shoppers who make a purchase with their devices do so at home
• 27% of companies worldwide plan to implement location-based marketing
• 71% of social media users are more likely to purchase from brands they follow online
• 52% of U.S. consumers buy directly from brands online

We recognize this growth and continue to add enhancements to our own e-commerce offerings. BannerMerchant, like Magento Go and ProStores is a fully functional online store with shopping cart. A benefit of BannerMerchant is the web content management platform upon which it runs. BannerOS not only provides the option of product selling through BannerMerchant, it also can be tied to event registration, membership management and a host of other functions beneficial to businesses operating online.

For interested parties, BannerView.com is helping businesses get a website built for FREE. Whether in the market for a new website or just in need of a website redesign, we work with companies in a transitional phase like these Magento users and help them make the right decisions regarding the future of their online business.

We wish those businesses affected the best of luck in their transition to a new platform over the next couple of months. It’ll be challenging, time-consuming and most definitely stressful. It makes us appreciate and work a little harder in providing e-commerce efficiency to our customers.