If you’re contemplating an upgrade to Magento 2, you’re not alone. Moving to a major commerce platform release can be seen as a business growth strategy rather than risk-avoidance.
It’s no secret that the competitive stakes are high when it comes to digital commerce. More than 11% of retail shopping happens online.1 While in B2B, 68% of buyers prefer to research purchases online, and expect a seamless, compelling digital-first buying experience across all channels.2
Improved performance, increased security, and new features are among the many benefits to upgrading your eCommerce platform. Making the move provides the ability to adapt your digital strategy for your growing business.
The latest version of Magento Enterprise (version 2.1) makes it possible to elevate the shopping experience and take your commerce site to the next level. Let’s take a closer look at the key benefits to upgrading.
Improve Performance for a Frictionless Experience
Page load times matter to the overall customer experience because they seek convenience and ease when shopping online. The latest Magento enhancements will boost your site’s performance:
- Pre-integrated page caching (Varnish) for faster out-of-the box performance with minimal tuning
- Extensive backend improvements for faster admin performance and support for more concurrent product and order updates
- Master databases for key subsystems – including order management, product management, and checkout – so they can scale independently to meet different load requirements
Boost Conversion Rates and Sales
Mobility, transparency, and an endless supply of choices allow customers to be more informed when they’re ready to buy. Shopping experiences that support this journey are key, and Magento has added several features to enhance your site’s experience:
- Responsive design reference themes to create seamless shopping across any mobile device
- Content staging and preview to efficiently create, schedule, and preview site changes, such as testing promotions before they go live (new feature)
- Elasticsearch enables high-quality search results, supports 33 languages out of the box, and is easier to set up, scale, and manage (new feature)
- Enriched product merchandising with the ability to add high-quality video from YouTube and Vimeo
- Faster checkouts with PayPal in-context checkout and saved credit cards as well as easier PCI compliance with PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.net, WorldPay, and CyberSource integrations
Improve Efficiency and Agility for Business Users
Improvements in customer and product administration put more power into the hands of business users. Take advantage of new and enhance business tools that include:
- Intuitive Magento Admin experience that saves time when managing daily tasks and is easy for new team members to learn
- Drag-and-drop tools to customize and save admin panel views to important product, customer, and order data
- Step-by-step product creation tool makes it easier to manage new and existing product information
- Improved product importing and exporting to support upsell and cross-products
Faster and Easier Customization with Open, Flexible Development
By capitalizing on the advanced architecture of Magento 2.1, you will be able to deliver more customized experiences to the market faster with enhancements that include:
- Enhanced theming and layout framework to quickly create and maintain site variations for seasonal campaigns, new product lines, and market expansions
- Automated testing to improve code quality and speed up the QA process
- Easier upgrades so you can quickly add new functionality as it becomes available in future releases
Check out our guide, The Ultimate Magento 2 Upgrade Checklist: Four Steps to a Successful Move, and learn about how to prepare for the upgrade.
The guide includes a comprehensive, actionable checklist to help you through the process. From start to finish, this checklist will keep your project on track and allow you to reap the benefits of out-of-the-box features – with minimal customization – at a budget-friendly cost.
Or, if you’re ready to make the move to Magento 2, contact us for a personalized assessment. You’ll receive:
- An understanding of how Magento 2 will help your business
- An evaluation of your existing Magento site, including site performance, high-severity issues, and missing Magento patches
- Diagnostic tools to estimate time and resources needed to upgrade
Sources:
1 Internet Retailer, 2017
2 “Death of a (B2B) Salesman: Two Years Later,” Forrester, 2017
