Announced originally at Magento Imagine 2016, I had the opportunity last week to review the new enhancements being release in Magento 2.1. A few of these enhancements should give merchandisers and PayPal users a reason to smile.
Staging and Preview – This enhanced capability provides the ability to create, preview, schedule and stage a wide range of content and promotions. Updates can be grouped into campaigns for easier management and tracking. A cool timeline dashboard provides an excellent visual of planned changes and campaigns over time.
Best of all, you and others can preview and verify the campaigns as well as the user checkout experience to confirm content, promotions and pricing are all working together. Won’t that be nice to do when the sun is up rather than at the stroke of midnight? This should help ease some of the stress on ensuring all aspects of campaign are working especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
PayPal in Context Checkout – For those using PayPal, leaving the site to make a payment is a thing of the past. In context checkout has been added to keep the user on your site enhancing the experience and increasing the opportunity for conversion. Users will also be able to save credit cards with PayPal allowing for faster checkout and another opportunity to increase conversion. Merchants get the added benefit of reduced PCI risk as PayPal handles the secure storage of all credit card information. This risk can be reduced further by taking advantage of hosted fields that capture credit card number, expiration date and CVV code.
Additional enhancements include:
- Replacement of Solr search with Elastic Search that provides scalability options as catalogs and search traffic grow in addition to supporting 33 languages.
- Improvements to the admin allowing site managers and business users that ability to get better search results within the admin as well as create and edit product, category and CMS pages more easily.
Magento Enterprise is continually evolving and improving upon it’s commerce offering. To learn more about this release or if you want to talk through your upgrade options, please reach out to me via this blog or by emailing sales@perficient.com.
