LAS VEGAS--()--At the Magento Imagine eCommerce 2012 conference today Magento, a leading eCommerce platform provider and a division of X.commerce, Inc., an eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) company, announced several important technology updates, giving merchants and developers more tools to deliver a more customized and seamless shopping experiences. New capabilities, which include the integration of HTML5 for Magento Mobile and PayPal Payments, are implemented on the latest versions of both Magento Community (version 1.7) and Magento Enterprise (version 1.12) software.
“From research to checkout and beyond, merchants can now drive conversions more effectively, increase order size and build customer loyalty”
“From research to checkout and beyond, merchants can now drive conversions more effectively, increase order size and build customer loyalty,” said Roy Rubin, general manager of Magento and chief product and customer officer of X.commerce.
Magento sustains its product leadership with the HTML5 mobilerelease, Magento Enterprise 1.12 and Magento Community 1.7 releases. Mobile phones today are virtually a “shopping mall in your pocket,” and Magento has built upon the great mobile experience it already delivers to merchants through native apps to now offer an easier way to create compelling and elegant mobile shopping experiences.
New mobile offerings available on Magento Enterprise version 1.12 and Magento Community version 1.7 include: gesture-based controls, multi touch and image scaling, and the utilization of device specific audio and video capabilities. Additional features include user-friendly search and results display, drag and drop of products to the shopping cart, easy swiping between product images, zooming capabilities, a clean display of the product detail page, and cross-sell and up-sell capabilities. This highly customizable HTML5 theme supports iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers.
The PayPal small-business product suite is being integrated into Magento to help merchants compete in the new multi-channel retail environment where the lines between online and offline commerce are blurred. PayPal Payments offer merchants one solution that makes it easy to accept payments whether online, from mobile devices or in-person. Eight in 10 (83 percent) PayPal Payment businesses say sales have increased since offering PayPal.*
PayPal Payments is available in three tiers. Every tier provides a full suite of payment solutions: checkout that’s automatically optimized for mobile transactions, easy to use invoicing, the ability to accept credit cards from a mobile device in-person, and a debit card to deliver immediate access to cash with one percent cash back on purchases. The standard tier offers no set-up or monthly costs and rates as low as 2.9 percent plus $0.30 per transaction. Magento Community and Enterprise customers can now simply and easily select PayPal Standard, Advanced or Pro, as well as PayPal Express Checkout direct from Magento to match the solution that best meets their needs. In addition to both PayPal Payments and Google Checkout, Magento offers more than 700 third party payment extensions.
Headlined by HTML5 capabilities, additional Magento platform updates include:
- Advanced VisitorSegmentation enables businesses using Magento Enterprise to drive higher conversions among new site visitors who are not yet customers. Now merchants can apply powerful segmentation statistics (based on behavioral information such as cart contents and recently viewed and compared products) to target new visitors and convert them with compelling offers to join, purchase or complete a transaction.
- Expanded Rule Based Relations give Magento Enterprise merchantspowerful tools to segment their customer base, delivering unprecedented flexibility to apply cross-selling and up-selling rules for more unique experiences and product offerings that are tailored to subsets of their diverse customer populations. Merchants can now easily apply statistics around viewed products or items in cart to define cross-sells, up-sells and related products to target specific segments with customized offerings.
- Auto Generation of Coupon Codes expands on the coupon code functionality available to Magento Enterprise and Magento Community merchants, to deliver greater flexibility to create and generate coupon codes using myriad configurable parameters. Businesses can generate customizable and unique coupon codes, monitor coupon usage, and export codes for offline distribution. This flexibility provides businesses not only the tools to design and customize their promotional campaigns in any manner but to also export and integrate promotions offline into other systems, expanding their reach across multiple channels.
- Multiple Wishlists enable customers using Magento Enterprise to create and manage multiple wishlists within their account. Customers can save products to any of their wishlists from within the product page or cart and choose to publicly share their wishlists with friends or keep them private. Merchants can control the front-end placement of the wishlist widget and gain greater insight into desired products and overall user behavior.
- ImprovedContent Management System (CMS) functionality speeds the creation and editing of pages on merchant sites. Thanks to the new CMS hierarchy enhancements, those working with Magento Enterprise 1.12 can code once then quickly duplicate and organize content thereby cutting development costs and time.
- Backup & Rollback enables merchants to manage a variety of backup and rollback operations directly from the administration panel. In addition to backing up sensitive live data, developers can make a backup of a system to test new enhancements, all while in a safe and low-risk development environment. This feature is particularly useful when testing out new modules or customizations. Once the desired feature has been vetted out developers can take comfort in adding their creation successfully to the live code. This allows a foolproof way for developers to continue to innovate without the risk of breaking existing functionality.
Additional advances such as customer-group level pricing, add to cart by SKU, expanded international currency support and price layered navigation are also available in the latest Magento releases.
Magento and its highly dedicated developer network are committed to continuous innovation with the goal of staying at the forefront of commerce evolution. The X.commerce open ecosystem, which Magento plays a key role, empowers all participants to take advantage of an unprecedented choice of technologies needed for end-to-end commerce – shopping carts, payment services, inventory management, marketplace integration, SEO, tax guidance and more - all in one location.
X.commerce and Magento complete their eCommerce platform with a full suite of world-class consulting, training and certification offerings. Developed and delivered by experts who know the product from a development and deployment standpoint, these experts can ensure merchants and developers efficiently and effectively leverage the platform for their business needs.
To learn more about the merchant and developer capabilities now available on Magento, please visit www.magento.com, Magento blog, Facebook or Twitter. News about the breadth of product, partner and customer advances can also be found on the Imagine eCommerce 2012 news page.
About Magento
The Magento e-commerce platform serves more than 100,000 merchants and is supported by a global ecosystem of solution partners and third-party developers. Magento is a feature-rich, open-ecosystem, 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. (an eBay Inc. company)
About X.commerce, Inc.
X.commerce brings together the technology assets and developer communities of eBay, PayPal, GSI Commerce and Magento to support eBay Inc.'s mission of enabling commerce. Through its ecosystem of developers, partners and tools, merchants now have a single point of access to the end-to-end commerce technology they need to engage connected consumers, and scale and grow their businesses.
* Ipsos Public Affairs Survey conducted on behalf of PayPal, March 9, 2011