New Release of Magento Announced for June 2016

In keeping with the promise for more functionality and a rapid development cycle, Magento announced version 2.1 today (4-13-16) in the opening session at Magento Imagine. This release is going to focus on 5 areas of improvement:

• Staging and preview enhancements for admins– the new and enhanced staging process makes it faster, easier and less expensive to create, schedule and preview future site updates and campaigns without involving IT. It also provides greater visibility into all planned updates because you can see them in one place, on one dashboard, giving peace of mind to merchants that updates will occur at the right time and provides an optimum customer experience.
• Support for Elasticsearch –Elasticsearch, an open source tool, provides the ability to easily handle large catalogs and scale up search functionality as traffic increases, providing a better search experience for customers by providing timely and accurate results.
• Check out experience update – the PayPal enhancements announced today suggest that users will be able to complete the purchase process with leaving a merchants site, offering a seamless experience. Additional enhancements will enable faster checkouts for repeat purchases by saving credit card information for customers with PayPal in a secure manner. Magneto indicated a 50% faster guest check out and 36% faster check out for registered users.
• PCI Compliance – hosted Fields enable merchants to qualify for easier PCI compliance while still retaining complete control over their checkout design and layout. Magento has seen a 27% increase in conversion rates with this new feature.
• Better business tools – A number of admin user interface improvements will help business users to more efficiently manage site operations.

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Other enhancements include:

• New B2B module – includes account management with permissions, custom catalogs, custom pricing, quoting engine, repeat ordering

• New Innovation module – includes enhanced content management, new promotion types and expanded reporting and analytics

• We also learned that Magento is enhancing their upgrade training, providing best practices and updating code migration tools to ensure existing Magento merchants have the support and confidence they need to migrate to the next generation platform starting now.