JH build and design ecommerce sites that achieve more. The team attended the Magento Imagine event in Las Vegas recently and here they report the key developments from this important event.
Early April, and we were off to the biggest Magento event on the calendar – with developers and merchants heading from all over the world to be a part of the community, and crucially to hear Magento’s big announcements.
The announcements there this year were huge, and we feel these developments will have significant benefits for our clients. We’ve outlined four of the biggest here for you:
Magento Shipping
With Magento Shipping, Magento promises to have built “an intelligent, multicarrier solution that automates shipping and fulfillment for brands across industries and geographies.” It’ll be available from this summer across all platforms including Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition and Magento Commerce Order Management.
This is an end-to-end solution that provides greater control over shipping and fulfillment, reducing cart abandonment and unlocking business growth opportunities. Seamless integration with Magento Digital Commerce and Magento Commerce Order Management simplifies operations – and most crucially, improves customer experience, making it streamlined and therefore driving sales.
In brief, it enables merchants to:
– Easily connect with global carriers
– Drive customer loyalty and uncover new revenue via competitively priced shipping options
– Automate fulfillment, seamlessly pack and dispatch parcels from any location with any carrier
– Reduce costs and improve convenience
– Accelerate time to market
Magento B2B
Arguably the biggest announcement of the entire conference was that focussed on B2B. It’s the hot topic for sure right now, and B2B customers want to experience their purchases in the same way they do their B2C transactions.
Magento is already a leader in B2B commerce, powering 41 merchants on the Internet Retailer B2B eCommerce Top 300 list, but the new features will only serve to soar this success.
Magento Digital Commerce Cloud for B2B features include:
– Corporate account management, with flexible payment options
– Quoting, allowing for maximum efficiency
– Quick ordering, uploading of lists ability, copy over previous orders
– Customisable pricing, customers will receive the right products and pricing information with personalized price lists
– Real-time inventory intelligence, expose distributors to available inventory
– Intelligent routing and order delivery, significant cost-savings for businesses that ship from multiple locations
– Backend integration, easily able to integrate and enable real-time communications with any ERP, CRM, or other backend system
– Multi-channel support
Magento Social
Social now plays a crucial role in eCommerce, typically featuring at several points throughout the customer journey. Put simply, successful eCommerce now has to spread onto social channels. Users tend to trust their social networks, and are increasingly coming to them to hunt for future purchasing, or at least be enticed onto sites via the channel of their choice. With this in mind, Shopial, a recent Magento acquisition, have designed Magento Social.
Features of Magento Social Include:
– Easy to sync: It’s easy for merchants to sync their full Magento product catalogue with their social networks.
– Drive brand awareness: A strong social commerce strategy will strengthen a brand while converting followers into customers
– Promote brand evangelicalism: Current customers are the best marketers and advocates, and social can make sure their message is heard
– Publish adverts: Magento Social allows you to create compelling image-led and optimized ads from your eCommerce site in real-time
– Retargeting: Social is one of the most important ways to reach more buyers. Utilizing embedded targeting tools within Magento Social will help you identify your audience and reach them precisely where they are
Magento Business Intelligence becomes more accessible
Having acquired RJMetrics last August, Magento’s now named Magento Business Intelligence, lets more merchants consolidate data sources into one cloud-based warehouse, allowing for more informed, data-driven, decision making. Although Business Intelligence has been around for a while now, this announcement focussed on it becoming more accessible for all.
Today you need more than just transaction records to build your brand. And where once merchants had to rely on Google Analytics, or similar, for their reporting, the now fully customizable Magento Business Intelligence lets them consolidate multiple data, gives much faster and more accurate access to information: so they can spend more of their time actually applying what they’ve learnt.
Its top features include that it’s:
– Customisable, you can access accurate information faster and gather the insights that matter
– Cloud-based, ability to access your information wherever you are
– User-friendly, it’s easy to get the hang of, whatever your technical abilities, so more staff can have full insight
– Supported, if merchants require any help working with and translating their data into meaningful objectives, Magento Business Intelligence provides additional Professional Services
You can read more about the Magento Imagine event on the JH blog here.
