Magento 2 – Next Generation eCommerce Ready for Your Business

Magento looks set to continue its dominance as the leading eCommerce solution with the recent release of Magento 2, a completely new platform rebuilt from the ground up to service eCommerce merchants now and into the future.

Magento 2 (general availability) was released on November 17, 2015 after several years in development. The company says:

The new platform empowers brands, retailers, and businesses across B2C and B2B industries to quickly and cost-effectively deliver engaging omnichannel shopping experiences. Magento 2.0 also offers enhanced performance and scalability,  new features to boost conversion rates, and business agility and productivity improvements.

Open and Flexible

The open source tradition on rolls on ensuring that business owners have the flexibility to build out custom website features as requirements change and grow.

Take Customer Engagement to a New Level

• Product pages now feature integrated video to provide customers with a more engaging shopping experience
• New and improved checkout – minimises checkout steps, reduce abandonment and increase conversion
• One click account creation

Improved Operations

The admin panel has also received an overhaul. It has been streamlined and a new modern UI employed. Not only will you enjoy working with it, but you should find yourself working through your daily tasks more efficiently. The new admin is also touted as being more user friendly and easy to learn (always a plus when rolling out new technology in the workplace!). Finally the interface is mobile optimised, making it easier for you to work on the go.

Product Creation Tool

• A new production creation tool is included to make adding new products a more intuitive experience.
• Faster product imports are also promised. 4 x faster in fact!

Performance and Scalability

For the geeks amongst us, a host of technical improvements are bundled into Magento 2. If you’re not technically inclined, all you need to know is that things works better to make your site faster. And we all know that customers love fast sites!

• 50% faster load times on key pages (category and product)
• Pre integrates Varnish caching
• Minimises and bundles JS
• Built in image compression – nice!

Magento 2.0 Adapt at Scale from Magento on Vimeo.

Easier Ongoing Maintenance

While Magento is powerful and flexible, unfortunately this came at a cost – and that cost was the ongoing maintenance required to keep Magento up to date, apply security patches, install extensions and build in new features. The nature of the old Magento architecture meant that performing these tasks often introduced bugs and unexpected issues than then took considerable additional time to fix. Magento promises that a new modular architecture of Magento 2 allows easier ongoing maintenance.

• Less extension conflicts
• Keep site up to date, including security patches
• Magento is committed to quarterly core updates

Magento throws around the term “future proof” to describe how Magento 2 is architected. While I’d be hesitant to describe any technology as truly future proof, we’re confident that the improvements made will definitely put merchants in a better position keep expanding and selling more into the future.

References and Additional Resources

A New Era Of Commerce Innovation

Magento 2.0 Architected For The New Era Commerce Innovation

Magento2_Architecture_Whitepaper_Final

Credit – Magento for the featured image.