Magento e-commerce, the top ranked e-commerce CMS has now launched more advanced and revolutionary Magento version 2.0. Magento 2.0 empowers brands, retailers, and businesses across B2C and B2B industries to quickly and cost-effectively deliver engaging Omni channel shopping experiences. Magento 2.0 offers enhanced performance and scalability, new features to boost conversion rates, and business agility and productivity improvements. The new platform offers unmatched flexibility and innovation opportunities to its developers. Like its previous versions, this powerful platform is available for download in two forms: Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 and Magento Community Edition 2.0.
The advanced features of Magento 2.0 are as follows:
- Open, Flexible Architecture
Magento 2.0 features a modular code base that enables easier customization, faster time-to-market, and greater deployment flexibility to public or private cloud environments. More extensive and efficient APIs allow its users to connect and operate at scale with any third party solution. And theming capabilities of Magento 2.0 make building site variations for new product lines or geographies easier than ever. To enable fast and affordable enhancements to the Magento stores, a wide range of turnkey extensions are available for use.
- Engaging Shopping Experiences
Magento 2.0 platform focuses on creating engaging, seamless and personalized customer experience across any and every device. The new responsive design reference themes help you quickly create sites that support sales anytime and anywhere. Integrated video feature is also available now. An all-new checkout is easier to customize and further improves conversion rates by minimizing steps and required information.
- Enhanced Business Agility and Productivity
The merchant experience has also revolutionized with the launch of Magento 2.0. Magento 2.0 enables its merchants to operate more efficiently and handle rapid growth, without scaling up the man power. The new Admin panel design offers a streamlined, consumer-like interface that saves time when managing day-to-day tasks and is intuitive for new team members to learn. It is also touch-friendly so you can make updates or track sales while on-the-go. Improved business tools empower you to continuously optimize your operations to drive growth. You can now effortlessly customize and save views in the Admin panel to enable quick access to information critical to your business. Setting up new products is also faster, with a step-by-step product creation tool and product import capabilities that are 4x faster than before.
- Enterprise-grade Scalability and Performance
The Magento platform has been supercharged to offer over 50% faster page load times across many catalog and checkout pages to help its users delight your customers and improve conversion rates. It pre-integrates Apache Varnish to cache page content for faster performance and optimizes code and images for fast loading. Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also delivers enterprise-grade scalability and high availability with standalone master databases for key subsystems along with multiple slave databases.
- Secure Payments
The Magento platform comes with tight out-of-the-box integrations with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net payment gateways. Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also integrates with WorldPay and CyberSource. All versions provide improved security and the ability to pursue the easiest level of PCI compliance, depending on the selected payment method.
- Easier Maintenance and Upgrades
And finally, this modern, modular architecture reduces the complexity and cost of maintaining site and it future proofs the investment of its users by simplifying upgrades. This means one can easily incorporate innovative functionality as it is released by Magento Commerce on a quarterly basis to drive higher sales and greater efficiency.
- When to upgrade to Magento 2.0?
If your site is performing really well in terms of business and also if the version that you are using is not really outdated, then, there is no rush for upgrade to Magento 2.0. But if you are using an outdated version and/or are facing performance issues then it is advisable to migrate to Magento 2.0.
- Migration to Magento 2.0- Smooth or painful?
There is a migration tool ready that will help its merchant users and developers to migrate the data (store setup, products, customers, orders, promo rules…) between the platforms. But there are few limitations for using the tool. Theme and code customizations (which includes 3rd party extensions) will not be transferable, meaning they would need to be redone on Magento 2.So, extra investments would need to be made in the visual and functional revamp. This should, in my book, be treated as a good thing because:
- it will provide you some new ideas and make you re-think your business as a whole
- you will be able to get rid of some of the legacy code i.e., optimized code of your site will help you achieve more.
- you can improve overall usability of your site
- Is the upgrade going to be beneficial?
It is and will be. Magento will be supporting the older versions for years and this is why there is no compulsion. So if you are making active plans not to get left behind, even if you are staying put with Magento 1.x for the time being, consider these action items:
- Think and decide what all things do you want to improve in your site.
- Make a list of unused extensions.
- Choose the right solution partner for Magento 2 migration or development.
For all the Magento store owners, 2016 will be the year to make some good decisions for their business. Magento 2 brings a whole new playing field for merchants and solution partners.
Interested in upgrading to Magento 2.0? Send us a note at solutions at stackarmor.com or contact us to speak with a Magento specialist today.
