News Byte: Magento Update Has Global Accent

Magento becomes more worldly.

E-commerce platform provider Magento released a new version of its Enterprise Edition software aimed at a globally expanding community of online retailers.

Edition 1.13.1.0 debuted this week with features for doing VAT tax calculations, tax rounding for countries where multiple levies are applied, and support for the Waste Electrical And Electronic Equipment tax in European Union countries. Many of the updates emanate from Magento users.

“In the past few months, we’ve realized that almost every one of our users is growing internationally. We decided to take user conferences abroad this year and went to Australia and Germany,” says Jimmy Duvall, head of product at Magento, who noted that the experience pointed out how different things can be outside U.S. borders.

“We were a little bit shocked at how engaged the market in Australia was in adopting new technologies. They are moving much more rapidly than North America and Europe,” Duvall says. “Australia was behind the curve for a long time, but because of it they don’t have the back-office legacy to overcome and can launch more quickly.”

On the other side of the modernization spectrum, he notes, is Germany, where most online retailers still do a sizeable COD business.