Magento Releases Platform Upgrades to Magento Enterprise Edition

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Magento Releases Platform Upgrades to Magento Enterprise Edition

Enhancements Deliver Performance and Scalability For Large and Growing Merchants

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- At the Magento Imagine eCommerce 2013 conference today Magento, the leading eCommerce platform*, released the newest edition of Magento Enterprise to enable large and growing merchants to scale more effectively and support ever greater numbers of visitors and buyers to their core ecommerce sites while streamlining their back-end operations. Optimized catalogue indexing, improved content caching, streamlined checkout flow, and improved tax recommendations enable Magento Enterprise (version 1.13) customers to extract ever-greater value, including faster load times and lower overall costs, from their Magento platform. Magento is also introducing new quality control requirements and themes categorization to the Magento Connect ecommerce marketplace, making it easier for merchants to find the extensions they need to tailor their engagement with customers. Magento and PayPal also revealed two new developer extensions - "order ahead' and "in-aisle selling" -available to merchants. The order ahead extension allows consumers to order and pay for products through the PayPal mobile app and pick up their orders in store. The in-aisle selling extension allows merchants to complete the transaction anywhere in their stores by connecting their Magento store to PayPal Here.


"Over the past year Magento and our diverse ecosystem have continued to innovate on the Magento platform to support ever-larger brands, more robust product catalogues and more complex implementations," said Roy Rubin, co-founder and chief operating officer at Magento. "We're committed to building upon the Magento platform enabling greater flexibility, performance and scalability to empower merchant growth. The latest product updates improve critical functions for the systems integrators that work with Magento code directly and further ease platform management for merchants as they continue to expand their business - often featuring more than 1 million product SKUs."

Updates to Magento Enterprise 1.13 enable:

  • Optimized indexing delivers full catalog re-indexing for 1 million products in just 4 minutes. Executing re-index operations can now be performed in the background allowing isolation of the customer experience from administrative store activities. Indexing performance optimization streamlines operational efficiencies saving IT management time and allowing merchants to focus on revenue-generation.

  • Improved caching performance now supports even greater traffic volumes, further facilitating the growth of their business while delivering a consistent shopping experience.

  • Streamlined checkout flow improves page load timesacross all customer actions, enabling customers to potentially achieve an additional 20-35 percent increase in overall flow speed.

  • Improved tax recommendation engine provides greater accuracy when calculating tax rates including promotional codes, fixed product tax, as well as shipping and returns on buyer facing screens. Magento Enterprise version 1.13 also now supports global merchants with more than 3000 tax rate zones.

Feedback on Magento Enterprise 1.13 from Customers and Partners

Magento and Gemo reached out to partners Adfab and NBS to evaluate 1.13 for performance improvements. "We were able to significantly scale our site operations with Magento Enterprise 1.13 allowing us to process more than five times as many simultaneous orders without the need for additional hardware," said Gregory Besson, CEO of Adfab and Phillippe Humeau, CEO of NBS systems. "Just as importantly, page load times remained under 4 seconds even at peak periods of 500,000 visitors per day."

"We have over 90 bedding stores across Australia offering a wide range of beds, bedding and bedroom furniture for every demographic. We were seeing slow page load times, especially for browsing the site. With Magento Enterprise 1.13 our page load times have nearly halved - without having to add additional hardware," said Danny Smulders, Operations Magager at Forty Winks. "The optimized indexing also ensures that new content appears online instantly giving customers immediate access to our latest products."

"With Magento Enterprise 1.13 we saw an eight-fold improvement in indexing across our sizable catalogue of 30,000 SKUs," said Lee Bingham, Head of IT at Paul Smith. "This will empower us to take advantage of pricing and promotional opportunities in near real-time as we ramp up the frequency of site updates during business hours even at peak traffic and shopping times."

"We look forward to deploying Magento Enterprise 1.13 to many of our customers based on the dramatic improvements we've seen in testing the release with a very large client," said Justin Finnegan, Chief Operating Officer at Gorilla Group. "With 1.13, this client was able to slash the re-indexing time of their full 380,000 product catalogue by 73 percent."

"We are looking forward to working with Magento 1.13," said Kevin Eichelberger, founder and CEO of Blue Acorn, a Magento partner. "Magento's Enterprise Edition continues to operate faster and include more useful product features for our clients. Such improvements allow them to grow quickly and focus on their business, rather than worrying about the technology supporting it."

Magento Connect Quality Enhancements

Today Magento announced two new PayPal extensions - "order ahead" and "in-aisle selling" - that are immediately available on Magento Connect.

  • By adding the order ahead extension, merchants can allow their customers to purchase products directly from the PayPal mobile application and select an established time to pick up their purchase without having to wait in line.

  • With the new "in-aisle selling" extension, merchants can connect their Magento store to PayPal Here to complete transactions anywhere in the store. Once the transaction is completed, consumers have the flexibility to take the item right then, pick it up at a special counter later, or have it delivered.

"We're excited to see the innovative solutions that Magento and PayPal developers create as they integrate our order ahead and in-aisle selling technologies with the Magento platform," noted James Barrese, chief technology officer at PayPal. "By solving real customer pain points like waiting in line, merchants can improve service, attract more customers, and drive more repeat purchases."

As part of its commitment to build the world's best eCommerce marketplace and increase its value to both merchants and developers, Magento is implementing new quality control requirements for extensions and delisting those extensions that do not meet these requirements. Magento has evaluated all extensions based on compatibility and popularity and removed approximately 20 percent of extensions on Magento Connect that did not meet product standards.

Magento Connect now also features new editorial content sections on the Magento Connect homepage allowing merchants to browse extensions based on most recent and staff and customer recommendation views. Additionally, Magento is introducing 16 new sub-categories for Magento Themes to make it easier for merchants to find and download the right theme for their business, and make it easier for developers to showcase their Magento themes and appeal to retailers in specific industries. These enhancements to Magento Connect deliver on Magento's continued drive to quality across its partner ecosystem.

To learn more about the merchant and developer capabilities now available on Magento, please visit www.magentocommerce.com, Magento blog, Facebook or Twitter.

About Magento

The Magento eCommerce platform serves more than 150,000 merchants worldwide and is supported by a global ecosystem of solution partners and third-party developers. Magento is a feature-rich, open-source, enterprise-class platform that offers merchants a high degree of flexibility and control over the user experience, catalog, content and functionality of their online store. In August 2011, Magento was acquired by eBay Inc., and is now a division of X.commerce, Inc. (NAS: EBAY) .

* Source: Tom Robertshaw eCommerce Survey, March 27, 2013: http://tomrobertshaw.net/2013/03/feb-2013-ecommerce-survey/



for Magento
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