Imagine This: Major Moves for Magento Merchants

Allison Howen — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:00:00 GMT

It looks like e-commerce platform Magento is running at full-speed ahead.

Magento, which is a division of eBay’s X.commerce initiative, was the recipient of a bundle of new updates this week at the Imagine eCommerce Conference that took place in Las Vegas.

The new updates offer merchants and developers the ability to create more customized and easier shopping experiences for consumers, and are available in the latest versions of the Magento Community and Magento Enterprise software. The biggest updates include the integration of HTML5 for Magento Mobile and PayPal Payments.

Since smartphones are becoming one of the most popular channels for consumers, Magento is now offering its merchants a simple way to create a more compelling mobile shopping experience.

Magento’s new mobile offerings include gesture-based controls, multi-touch and image scaling, device-specific audio and video capabilities. Other new features aim at creating a user-friendly experience for consumers, including an easy-to-use search and results display, the ability to drag and drop products to the shopping cart, the capability to zoom and easily swipe between product images, as well as the inclusion of cross- and up-sell features.

The customizable HTML5 theme also supports iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers.

“From research to checkout and beyond, merchants can now drive conversions more effectively, increase order size and build customer loyalty,” says Roy Rubin, general manager of Magento and chief product and customer officer of X.commerce.

The other major Magento announcement is the integration of the PayPal small-business product suite, which helps merchants compete in multi-channel retail environments. PayPal Payments offers merchants one solution that makes it simple to accept payments online, from a mobile device or in-person.

PayPal Payments is available in three tiers, with every tier offering a full suite of payment solutions. Magento users can select PayPal Standard, Advanced, Pro or Express Checkout directly from the Magento platform -- based on which solution best meets their business' needs.

Additional updates to the Magento platform include advanced visitor segmentation capabilities, the ability to enable consumers to create multiple wish lists and an improved content management system for Magento Enterprise users, as well as the automatic generation of coupon codes for both Magento Enterprise and Community merchants.

Magento has been gaining a lot of momentum recently. Prior to the Imagine Conference, the company announced partnerships with VisiStat, Bronto Software and 500friends. The X.commerce open ecosystem that Magento is a part of provides users with a large selection of end-to-end commerce technologies, including shopping carts, payment services, inventory management, marketplace integration, SEO and more.

A Clear Case for the Commerce Cloud

Linc Wonham — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Consumer demands continue to drive technology innovation while e-commerce managers and Internet professionals try to keep pace with their evolving behavior and growing number of touch points.

Whether accessed through a tablet, a mobile application or a computer, the website must ultimately deliver a unified experience and maintain a consistent look and feel of the brand. Combining this challenge with the need to anticipate the “next big thing” in technology to enhance the cross-channel shopping experience, and keeping your digital backbone in optimum shape, might seem downright daunting.

So, how can retailers deliver a digital experience that attracts and retains consumers?

Simply stated, consider a scalable and flexible cloud-based commerce platform that enables innovation. If your commerce site is frozen in time, bound to on-premise infrastructure that limits growth and necessitates the involvement of outside IT teams for major overhauls, you cannot continually enhance brand interactions. The accelerated pace of consumer control, access and knowledge requires that retailers ready themselves for frequent change.

This cannot be done easily or quickly on an on-premise platform.

Having a digital commerce management (DCM) strategy in place can help retailers better manage all digital interactions with consumers across devices, applications and channels. There are several important facets to DCM, but success is predicated on a cloud delivery model.

Here is why is a commerce cloud is essential?

Innovation is seamless: Commerce in the cloud enables brands and retailers to continuously develop new and innovative digital experiences. New enhancements are frequently and quietly introduced to the commerce environment. Unlike on-premise software, capabilities are automatically delivered without a potential laborious and costly upgrade cycle.

Site is open: Openness is key to a successful digital strategy. The commerce cloud enables organizations to invite partners and developers to complement core functionality. Because of the common code base, integration and developer customization is not point-in-time that must be maintained over time.

Merchandising control: Cloud platforms also encourage user empowerment that allow experts to drive all aspects of the user experience – from cross-channel merchandising, to unique innovation and quick reaction to market opportunities. Merchants and marketers have complete control of the consumer shopping experience.

So, while competitors’ requests are waiting in a queue or hampered by an older version of software, the commerce cloud delivers capabilities to drive brand loyalty and advocacy.

Enjoy the "Ah Ha" moment: Every retailer dreams of that magic moment when their business changes forever and consumers bust down their virtual doors, but most cringe when they contemplate how their infrastructure will react to a deluge of traffic. Those occurrences can be overwhelmingly exciting and incredibly stressful at the same time, but cloud platforms should provide peace of mind.

A scalable, secure, and stable foundation ensures an efficient response to heightened traffic and effective allocation of additional capacity when required. An on-premise or merely hosted commerce product might need weeks – and costly hardware – to manage this possible surge in traffic. The commerce cloud is already built and ready to plug into.

Retailers often find themselves in reactive modes, working furiously to respond to new customer demands. Commerce that leverages proven cloud environments allows retailers to streamline operations providing more time for merchandising, innovation and the creation of new brand experiences.

This model offers more control of the customer experience and enables faster response to new consumer trends like multichannel, mobile and social commerce. In this digital world in which we live, why invest in anything other than a digital backbone in the cloud?

About the Author: As vice president of product and solutions marketing for Demandware, Rob Garf taps into his more than 20 years of retail industry experience. Prior to Demandware, Garf served as the global retail strategy leader of IBM Global Business Services and was vice president of Retail Strategies Service at AMR Research, where he led coverage of customer intelligence and multichannel operations.

'Net Features : week172012, ecommerce

Imagine This: Major Moves for Magento Merchants

A Clear Case for the Commerce Cloud