At the Magento
Imagine eCommerce 2013 conference today Magento, the leading
eCommerce platform*, released the newest edition of Magento Enterprise
to enable large and growing merchants to scale more effectively and
support ever greater numbers of visitors and buyers to their core
ecommerce sites while streamlining their back-end operations. Optimized
catalogue indexing, improved content caching, streamlined checkout flow,
and improved tax recommendations enable Magento
Enterprise (version 1.13) customers to extract ever-greater value,
including faster load times and lower overall costs, from their Magento
platform. Magento is also introducing new quality control requirements
and themes categorization to the Magento Connect ecommerce marketplace,
making it easier for merchants to find the extensions they need to
tailor their engagement with customers. Magento and PayPal also revealed
two new developer extensions – “order ahead’ and “in-aisle selling”
–available to merchants. The order ahead extension allows consumers to
order and pay for products through the PayPal mobile app and pick up
their orders in store. The in-aisle selling extension allows merchants
to complete the transaction anywhere in their stores by connecting their
Magento store to PayPal Here.
“Over the past year Magento and our diverse ecosystem have continued to
innovate on the Magento platform to support ever-larger brands, more
robust product catalogues and more complex implementations,” said Roy
Rubin, co-founder and chief operating officer at Magento. “We’re
committed to building upon the Magento platform enabling greater
flexibility, performance and scalability to empower merchant growth. The
latest product updates improve critical functions for the systems
integrators that work with Magento code directly and further ease
platform management for merchants as they continue to expand their
business – often featuring more than 1 million product SKUs.”
Updates to Magento Enterprise 1.13 enable:
-
Optimized indexing delivers full catalog re-indexing for 1
million products in just 4 minutes. Executing re-index operations can
now be performed in the background allowing isolation of the customer
experience from administrative store activities. Indexing performance
optimization streamlines operational efficiencies saving IT management
time and allowing merchants to focus on revenue-generation. -
Improved caching performance now supports even greater traffic
volumes, further facilitating the growth of their business while
delivering a consistent shopping experience. -
Streamlined checkout flow improves page load times across
all customer actions, enabling customers to potentially achieve an
additional 20-35 percent increase in overall flow speed. -
Improved tax recommendation engine provides greater accuracy when
calculating tax rates including promotional codes, fixed product
tax, as well as shipping and returns on buyer facing screens. Magento
Enterprise version 1.13 also now supports global merchants with more
than 3000 tax rate zones.
Feedback on Magento Enterprise 1.13 from Customers and Partners
Magento and Gemo reached out to partners Adfab and NBS to evaluate 1.13
for performance improvements. “We were able to significantly scale our
site operations with Magento Enterprise 1.13 allowing us to process more
than five times as many simultaneous orders without the need for
additional hardware,” said Gregory Besson, CEO of Adfab and Phillippe
Humeau, CEO of NBS systems. “Just as importantly, page load times
remained under 4 seconds even at peak periods of 500,000 visitors per
day.”
“We have over 90 bedding stores across Australia offering a wide range
of beds, bedding and bedroom furniture for every demographic. We were
seeing slow page load times, especially for browsing the site. With
Magento Enterprise 1.13 our page load times have nearly halved – without
having to add additional hardware,” said Danny Smulders, Operations
Magager at Forty Winks. “The optimized indexing also ensures that new
content appears online instantly giving customers immediate access to
our latest products.”
“With Magento Enterprise 1.13 we saw an eight-fold improvement in
indexing across our sizable catalogue of 30,000 SKUs,” said Lee Bingham,
Head of IT at Paul Smith. “This will empower us to take advantage of
pricing and promotional opportunities in near real-time as we ramp up
the frequency of site updates during business hours even at peak traffic
and shopping times.”
“We look forward to deploying Magento Enterprise 1.13 to many of our
customers based on the dramatic improvements we’ve seen in testing the
release with a very large client,” said Justin Finnegan, Chief Operating
Officer at Gorilla Group. “With 1.13, this client was able to slash the
re-indexing time of their full 380,000 product catalogue by 73 percent.”
“We are looking forward to working with Magento 1.13,” said Kevin
Eichelberger, founder and CEO of Blue Acorn, a Magento partner.
“Magento’s Enterprise Edition continues to operate faster and include
more useful product features for our clients. Such improvements allow
them to grow quickly and focus on their business, rather than worrying
about the technology supporting it.”
Magento Connect Quality Enhancements
Today Magento announced two new PayPal
extensions – “order ahead” and “in-aisle selling” – that are
immediately available on Magento Connect.
-
By adding the order ahead extension, merchants can allow their
customers to purchase products directly from the PayPal mobile
application and select an established time to pick up their purchase
without having to wait in line. -
With the new “in-aisle selling” extension, merchants can connect their
Magento store to PayPal Here to complete transactions anywhere in the
store. Once the transaction is completed, consumers have the
flexibility to take the item right then, pick it up at a special
counter later, or have it delivered.
“We’re excited to see the innovative solutions that Magento and PayPal
developers create as they integrate our order ahead and in-aisle selling
technologies with the Magento platform,” noted James Barrese, chief
technology officer at PayPal. “By solving real customer pain points like
waiting in line, merchants can improve service, attract more customers,
and drive more repeat purchases.”
As part of its commitment to build the world’s best eCommerce
marketplace and increase its value to both merchants and developers,
Magento is implementing new quality control requirements for extensions
and delisting those extensions that do not meet these requirements.
Magento has evaluated all extensions based on compatibility and
popularity and removed approximately 20 percent of extensions on Magento
Connect that did not meet product standards.
Magento
Connect now also features new editorial content sections on the
Magento Connect homepage allowing merchants to browse extensions based
on most recent and staff and customer recommendation views.
Additionally, Magento is introducing 16 new sub-categories for Magento
Themes to make it easier for merchants to find and download the right
theme for their business, and make it easier for developers to showcase
their Magento themes and appeal to retailers in specific industries.
These enhancements to Magento Connect deliver on Magento’s continued
drive to quality across its partner ecosystem.
To learn more about the merchant and developer capabilities now
available on Magento, please visit www.magentocommerce.com, Magento
blog, Facebook
or Twitter.
About Magento
The Magento eCommerce platform serves more than 150,000 merchants
worldwide and is supported by a global ecosystem of solution partners
and third-party developers. Magento is a feature-rich, open-source,
enterprise-class platform that offers merchants a high degree of
flexibility and control over the user experience, catalog, content and
functionality of their online store. In August 2011, Magento was
acquired by eBay Inc., and is now a division of X.commerce, Inc.
(NASDAQ: EBAY).
* Source: Tom Robertshaw eCommerce Survey, March 27, 2013: http://tomrobertshaw.net/2013/03/feb-2013-ecommerce-survey/
