We’re continuing our series about how using ready-made Amasty solutions for Magento e-commerce websites helps avoid increasing TCO and cuts off maintenance and support burden for teams. Today, our client Aric Pearson, the Director of Ecommerce and Digital Strategy at West Music, shares the story of the company’s success with Amasty solutions and Magento ecosystem.
Also read: Amasty Case Study: Optimizing TCO, Speed, and Scalability for a Magento Footwear Store
Company & Project Background
Our main business goals and growth priorities for e-commerce are to increase market share in the musical instruments, products, and accessories space, while reinforcing our position as the leading provider of instruments and accessories for general music classrooms in the United States.
Along with that broader market position, we are focused on growing sales, improving conversion rates, expanding our customer base, and continuing to improve the customer experience across both our B2C and B2B channels.
Platform Decision
We initially chose Magento because of its extensibility and its ability to support complex business logic.
Our business has meaningful complexity across B2B and B2C, as well as local and national customer relationships. On the B2B side, we also manage more advanced structures such as parent-child customer relationships, companies, contacts, and workflows that require flexibility.
Magento was the best fit because it could support those business and technical requirements while also aligning with our order flow and system architecture. In particular, we needed a platform that could integrate effectively with our ERP, which serves as the source of truth for e-commerce customers and transactions.
Solution Architecture & Setup
Our current setup is Adobe Commerce Cloud on the latest version. That gives us the benefits of Adobe hosting, Adobe SSL certificates, and Adobe CDN services within the platform environment.
At this time, we are not using Hyvä features.
In terms of architecture, we rely on a mix of ready-made extensions and custom development. We use many extensions from Amasty and other providers, while also maintaining custom work where our business logic requires it. For example, our connectors are customized for both our PIM, Perfion, and our ERP connection to Microsoft NAV.
In general, ready-made extensions help us move faster and reduce implementation time, while custom development fills the gaps that are unique to our business model, integrations, and operational workflows.
TCO & Cost Efficiency
Total cost of ownership for a Magento store is substantial. There is the initial implementation effort, which for us took multiple years, along with ongoing upgrade cycles, extension licensing, support, and maintenance costs.
The comparison between custom development and ready-made solutions is not always straightforward. Extensions save time and reduce the need for internal development, but they also come with recurring costs for renewals, upgrades, and support. In our case, we use Amasty’s corporate support subscription. That is an added annual cost, but it can still be more economical than repurchasing individual extensions or managing separate support arrangements across multiple vendors.
Custom development can sometimes be less expensive over time because you own the code, but it also creates more responsibility for maintenance, upgrades, and security. In our experience, the right balance depends on the feature, the quality of implementation, and how central that capability is to the business.
Use of Amasty Solutions
We were originally introduced to Amasty by the partner that helped us launch on Magento. They strongly recommended Amasty, and from the beginning we built a significant footprint of Amasty extensions into our store.
Today, Amasty solutions are an important part of our infrastructure. We use more than a dozen modules, and several of them are central to how the store operates. Some of the most valuable include:
In particular, One Step Checkout, Payment Restrictions, Product Feed, SEO Toolkit Pro, and Custom Stock Status are especially important to our approach.
Amasty extensions have helped us avoid custom development in many areas by giving us mature functionality that would otherwise have required significant internal effort to build and maintain.
Innovation & Technology Adoption
We are consistently evaluating new technologies and capabilities. At the moment, we are looking at Amasty Advanced Product Reviews as a possible future enhancement.
We recently upgraded to Magento 2.4.8, which supports our goals around security, performance, and long-term maintainability.
We have not implemented Hyvä at this point, although it remains something we may consider in the future. Our current use of AI is more focused on back-office and operational workflows than directly within the Magento storefront stack.
Recent Improvements & Business Impact
One recent improvement was upgrading our store to Magento 2.4.8 on Adobe Commerce Cloud. We chose this approach because keeping the platform current is important for security, speed, performance, and long-term maintainability. While this was primarily a platform-level initiative rather than a single customer-facing feature, it plays an important role in protecting the store and supporting a more stable and efficient storefront experience.
Another recent and more directly commercial improvement was our integration with ClassWallet through the ClassWallet marketplace, including support for cXML-based purchasing. This was a significant market expansion opportunity for us and aligns closely with our education-focused customer base.
That integration is already generating meaningful incremental revenue in the five-digit range per month and is also helping improve conversion because these customers tend to arrive with strong purchase intent. It has also reinforced our broader interest in expanding additional cXML connections where they make strategic sense.
Strategic Insights
My advice to other e-commerce businesses choosing between custom development and ready-made Magento solutions is to base that decision on the complexity and scope of the problem.
If you are trying to make a relatively small change, such as adjusting one element of functionality or customizing a limited part of the experience, custom development can make sense.
If you are trying to introduce a larger capability, especially one that customers will directly interact with, or if you are adding an entirely new tool or functional area, ready-made solutions often provide better value. They can reduce implementation time, improve predictability, and lower the amount of long-term maintenance required.
For us, the best approach has been a combination of both. We use extensions where there is a mature, well-supported solution available, and we reserve custom development for the areas that are unique to our business logic and integrations.
When evaluating extensions, we compare multiple options and make decisions case by case. In practice, having Amasty’s corporate support subscription also makes it more attractive to continue expanding within that ecosystem, because updates and support are already part of the equation.
