Magento 2 Features
What’s good about Magento 2? What are the exclusive features of it? What’s new about it?
As a company offering Magento eCommerce development solutions exclusively, 67 Commerce has been accustomed to these question. So we thought of compiling an exhaustive list of Magento 2 Features and believe us, as you scroll along, you will start adoring it as much as we do!
No doubt Magento 1 offers a comprehensive set of functionality, however with the ever evolving tech world, Magento knew that they couldn’t rest on their laurels. Magento 2 offers a whole set of amazing features that offer enterprise grade scalability and performance for your eCommerce store. Magento 2 benefits not just developers (in terms of writing better code) and customers (offering a better shopping experience) but also the store owners (offering better management to improve efficiency and productivity). If you wish to upgrade/migrate from Magento 1 to 2 or want to build an eCommerce store from scratch, you will need to know the many features Magento 2 offers to make sure you take the right decision. Here are the salient features of Magento 2 that makes all the difference:
Magento 2 Features That Enhance Merchant’s Experience
Flexible Deployment Options
hosting or on premises. With Magento enterprise cloud edition, it is possible to deploy secure, scalable and fully customizable stores easily on AWS based hosting that is optimized for performance and resilience. Thus, there is no need
to worry about configurations, security, performance or anything like that.
The choice of deployment rests with the merchant and the same can be taken wisely depending upon the business goals and requirements.
Customized Admin Panel
glance presentation of orders, sales, search terms, best selling products, most viewed products, etc. Each panel can be personalized to each user with respect to customized data grids to help improve the productivity of managing
products, sales and customer data.
What this means for Merchants?
Personalized setting can be done for each admin to improve productivity of managing products, customers and orders. .
Touch-Friendly Admin Panel
ease of tap and use while on a tablet or mobile device. This means that updating products and monitoring orders is at the fingertips of the merchants. Moreover, Magento 2 offers an easy drag-and drop layout editing of the admin panel for
the convenience of those with limited or no coding skills making it more intuitive.
What this means for Merchants?
A touch friendly admin panel means updating products and monitoring orders is at the fingertips of the merchants even on the go.
Additional Admin Security
specifically good for companies that are prone to hacking and provides for a good security measure.
What this means for Merchants?
For companies prone to being hacked, this feature offers a great way to merchants to improve the security.
CSS Preprocessor
but also makes the store more search engine friendly.
CSS preprocessing helps in customizing theme faster and also makes the store SEO friendly.
Bulk Image Uploads
images and this also implies a more informed buying decision and thus a better user experience.
Uploading multiple images for each product was a tedious and time consuming task earlier. If you have done that earlier, you know what we are referring to! With Magento 2, this can be done at warp speed.
Easy Personalization
eCommerce store has its own specific customer groups, products and shipping methods. Therefore each admin would need a customized grid-view of their admin account. Magento 2 offers the admins an option to choose which columns they want to
see as well as the order in which you wish to see them. The merchants can create a personalized view of the filter and toggle between the default and personalized whenever needed. The columns can be easy dragged and dropped as per the
convenience of the admin.
A personalized view in various sections of the admin panel can be created with easy drag and drop options.
Database Scalability
Magento 2 offers better scalability to merchants by reducing the investments that they have to make in scaling the infrastructure as the business grows. The site can handle more traffic as the business gets larger, with the same infrastructure.
Varnish 4 and PhP 7 Support
What this means for Merchants?
With this feature, merchants can serve fast and efficient content to the customers which helps in reducing the bounce rates from the online store.
Full Page Caching
requested. Think of it like this. If a question is asked to you, you will take some time to look up for an answer. However, if the same question is asked to you again in sometime, the answer will come more promptly as it will be there in
your memory. This is exactly what Magento 2 does.
What this means for Merchants?
Full page caching optimizes the response time and also reduces the server load, allowing merchants to serve content faster.
Hassle-free Installation
upgraded version is also simple and smooth. All thanks to the built in composer.
What this means for Merchants?
Installation of Magento 2 is fuss-free! No more struggle in setting up things to create a store from scratch or while upgrading the version.
Content Staging and Preview
feature in enhancing productivity and thus sales as it lets the marketers preview changes they have made to the website without publishing them live. With Magento 2 Commerce, it is possible to optimize the timing and impact of site
updates by managing all changes through a timeline dashboard.
What this means for Merchants?
Merchant’s team can work with higher efficiency as their dependency on IT professional is reduced for publishing relevant and optimized content on the store with the introduction of this feature.
Technical and Account Support
technical issues and questions while the development work is going on or even post deployment of your online store. The support can be accessed by logging in the account at support.magento.com and raising a ticket. The Magento support
team will reach out to discuss further.
What this means for Merchants?
Having support from Magento directly means you have someone to fall back to if anything is not flowing smoothly.
Streamlined Product and Attribute Creation/Configuration
makes the workflow all the more efficient.
Adding a product earlier took admin to a different pages for setting attributes and product type earlier. However, with Magento 2, this is simplified and you get a drop down besides Add product tab to choose from adding a simple
Product, Configurable Product, Grouped Product, Virtual Product, Bundle Product or a Downloadable Product.
What this means for Merchants?
Streamlining product and attribute creation helps merchants simplifies the workflow and enhances the efficiency.
Magento Marketplace Improvements
What this means for Merchants?
Improper extensions can cause can cause conflicts with parts of the site, that requires developers to debug/update the purchased modules. The new marketplace, which is still evolving for Magento 2, takes care of this worry of the
merchants.
Lesser Javascript Errors
and Knockout.js(simplifies JavaScript UIs with the Model-View-View Model pattern). This means that there are lesser conflicts of javascript in Magento 2 as compared to Magento 1.
What this means for Merchants?
Less errors means a smooth functioning store that aids in scaling up the online business.
Advanced Reporting
What this means for Merchants?
Advanced reporting provides insights and help merchants take data driven decisions for the overall growth of the online store.
Integrated Marketing Automation
What this means for Merchants?
Dotmailer integration saves time and improves marketing efforts of merchants by offering email marketing right inside Magento admin.
Improved Performance
of handling high traffic loads during peak events.. Here’s how-
- Client side improvements:The page load speed can be reduced, if we reduce the amount of data (both visual design and the technologies used) that must be there to render the page. Magento 2 has done the following to
achieve that:- Minification: Magento 2 minifies or reduces the size of files that are served to the browser by removing the comments, white spaces and other unnecessary characters.
- Improved use of browser cache for static assets: All CSS and Javascript are loaded to the browser and cached on the initial web page visited by the user. This minimizes the amount of content needed to be
downloaded for rendering subsequent pages, thus enhancing the speed. - Asynchronous processing during checkout and cart operations: The response time is improved as the load on the checkout does not affect the responsiveness of the order management, as there is isolation order data
storage from the order management storage. The checkout orders asynchronously move to order management orders storage.
- Server Side improvements: Apart from the page load speed, another important element in delivering a fast page is the response time from the server. Here is how Magento 2 achieves it:
- Full page caching: With support from Varnish at the backend, Optimized indexing of page is available in Magento 2. This helps improve the response time for the pages. This feature was a luxury limited to Magento
Commerce (Formerly Enterprise) edition in Magento 1.x. - Other changes: Support for the latest versions of Redis and MemCache, job ques to remove blocking operations, etc. further adds to the improvement in performance.
- Full page caching: With support from Varnish at the backend, Optimized indexing of page is available in Magento 2. This helps improve the response time for the pages. This feature was a luxury limited to Magento
What this means?
For Merchants: Merchants get amazing Improvement in page load speed with Magento 2, impacting the sales graph positively.
PSR Compliance
Back up/Roll Back System
Data Migration Tool
Magento 2 Features That Enhance Customer’s Experience
Integrated Product Videos
store. All that needs to be done is to add the link to the video (youtube or vimeo), a description of fields on the product page and the video populates.
For Customers: They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. If that’s the case, how much is a video worth? …..Priceless! With videos, customers undoubtedly get a visually enhanced shopping experience.
For Merchants: A video of the products can be integrated easily without the need to worry about the hosting and its impact on performance of the store.
Customer Segmentation and Marketing Personalization
displaying content, pricing and promotions to specific segments of customers based on properties like location, past orders, gender, wish list, etc. Even the unknown visitors to the site can be targeted based on what they have viewed in the
past or the items in their cart. This is a vital feature as it helps enhance conversion rates and thus the revenues. The features that can be personalized on the eCommerce store include related products, cross sells, up sells, banner and
cart
price rules.
What this means?
For Customers: Just like a physical shopping experience in a local store, customers feel their online shopping experience is more personalized as per their requirements.
For Merchants: It is easy to do personalized marketing for each visitor on the site by dividing customers into segments on the basis of location, past orders, wish lists, etc. This has a direct impact on enhancing the
average order values.
Elasticsearch
will get relevant results for their search queries faster. This technology even offers suggestions for customer misspellings, supports synonyms and stop words, and uses attribute weighting. Moreover, the set-up is fast and global deployment is very convenient with support for 33 languages out of the box.
For Customers: Often customers get pissed off when they are not able to find the best match for what we are looking for- wouldn’t we all be? This feature makes sure the customers stay happy with the search results.
For Merchants: It is easy to set-up functionality to offer better search and easily scale search capacity as queries grow. This in turn implies better and quick results for customer searches and thus an improved sales
graph.
Responsive Design Themes
menus,
checkout, etc. to fit any device including a laptop, tablet, mobile & desktop. Moreover, these themes are touch friendly, easily customizable and come with SEO advantages.
For Customers: This feature eliminates the frustration of the customer for not being able to see all of the content appropriately on their device. A smooth flowing shopping experience is what the customer gets irrespective
of the device being used.
For Merchants: A responsive theme ensures that the customer’s choice of technology does not stop them from reaching checkout. The merchant’s can rest assured that their store will be accessible from any device.
Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations
Magento 2 commerce offers a special feature to set automated rules to determine which products to offer as up-sells, cross-sells and related products to different customer segments. These rules can be easily administered through a condition
based tool. This helps in dynamically targeting customer segments to show them relevant suggestions and thus enhance the sales and average order values. The customer segments can be targeted by showing specific product suggestions, shipping
cart price rules and banners for encouraging sales.
The process is simple, you need to first define the conditions to match. Next, choose the products you want to display. At a given time, there might be a number of active rules that can be triggered to display related products, up-sells and
cross-sells. The priority order of each rule will determine which set of products appear on the customer screen. Simple examples of rule based product relations could be- showing other products from the same brand that the customer is
looking
out, suggest clearance sale products before checkout, recommend purchasing an extended warranty before checkout, upsell to larger quantity pack, etc. Basically anything that would enhance the sales.
What this means?
For Customers: Customers get relevant product suggestions while browsing and this helps in buying a better suited product or an additional product alongside.
For Merchants: Merchants can effortlessly target product suggestions to increase sales and average order values.
Visual Merchandising
set to dynamically present products as the multi-dimensional presentation of products.
Magento 2 Commerce offers this special feature of visual merchandising that assists in time saving and driving higher sales. The merchants can optimize product category pages by arranging products with a simple drag and drop interface or
sorting rules that order products by best seller, color, latest addition or highest margins. It is possible to set rules to automatically assign products to specific categories based on their attributes like price, date of addition, brand,
etc.
Appropriate categories and dynamic presentation of products can save several hours of merchandising your online store otherwise, to help concentrate on other revenue generation verticals.
For Customers: Dynamic presentation of product based on thoughtful criteria enhances the customer shopping experience.
For Merchants: Merchants can save time in merchandising their stores by using sorting rules and simple drag and drop options to arrange products.
One-click Account Creation
abandonment rates as the customers feel more convenient. Moreover, since the customer profiles are saved, further buying becomes easy for them too and this enhances the sales of the online store.
For Customers: Customers feel more convenience as their data from the checkout is used for account creation after the purchase is made.
For Merchants: One click account creation option for customers after checkout enhances the number of new customers for the store and also reduces the cart abandonment rates.
Quicker Checkout
into
more revenues.
For Customers: We all like quick processing, don’t we? Customers feel delighted if they go through a quicker process to complete a purchase.
For Merchants: A quicker checkout in place of a long process has a direct impact on enhancing the sales.
Secure Payments
does
these integrations mean to the customer? The customers no longer have to re-enter payment information such as billing address, etc. as it is handled by the payment gateways, which makes the checkout process quicker and convenient. Magento 2
offers improved security and the ability to pursue easiest level of PCI compliance, depending on the selected payment methods. Moreover, Magento 2 also has the ability to pass the credit card information of the customer to the payment
gateway
directly from the browser, which adds to the overall security.
What this means?
For Customers: With Magento 2, customers can rest assured that their payments are safe and secure.
For Merchants: Magento 2 has left no stone unturned to tighten up the payment protection and the merchants are the ones who benefit the most.
Magento Shipping
What this means?
For Customers: Customers get competitively priced shipping options when it comes to order delivery.
For Merchants: This feature provides ease of shipping operations and enhance profitability for the merchants.
Magento 2.2.4 Upgrade Features (Released: May 2, 2018)
Magento remains focussed to improve the platform with every release to make shopping experience as smooth as possible. Newly released Magento 2.2.4 on May 2, 2018, focuses mainly on reducing cart abandonment and enhancing the average order value with a whole set of additional features and enhancements. Here are a few to note:
Quicker Checkouts and Flexible payment Options
comfortable way to checkout for customers. Using Amazon pay allows customers to leverage the payment and shipping information already stored in their Amazon account and proceed to a faster checkout. With Klarna payments, customers can get
flexible payment options to pay now, pay later (offering a try before you buy experience) or slice it (pay in installments option).
Fast and Accurate Tax calculations
accounts for the latest tax rules and product taxability status. Vertex can also handle coupons, credit memos, etc. and also assists in simplifying operations with tools to generate and file signature-ready PDF returns.
Expansion of Magento Shipping Capabilities
view to offer competitive shipping options to customers. Merchants can easily access multiple carriers and rates right within their Magento admin to provide a range of shipping options to customers.
Image Loading and Search Performance Enhancements
Magento 2.2.5 Upgrade Features (Released: June 27, 2018)
Magento is on a roll and came up with a new release after version 2.2.4 within a short span. Magento Version 2.2.5 released on June 27th, 2018 further enhances the customer and admin experience, along with improved security offerings. Here are a few important points to note:
Improvements in Magento Shipping
the customers now have the ability to designate a drop point rather than a residence for delivery by carrier.
Catalog Search Improvement
with multiple store views and shared catalogs. Moreover, refactoring of the catalog full text indexer has amazingly improved the indexing performance for large product catalogs with several configurable options.
Improved Security
exploited to access customer information or taking over admin access has been fixed.
Ease in Creation of account by customers
confirmation page and displayed an error.
Betterment in bundled products
Enhancement in Tax Calculation extension-Vertex
incorrect order total. Also, the checkout page correctly calculates the including and excluding tax prices, which wa not happening earlier. With the upgraded version, the customers no longer receive a negative tax amount notice after a
merchant creates the refund on Vertex.
Quick View- Magento Open Source vs Commerce Features
Here is a quick view of Magento 2 Salient Features for both Magento Open Source (formerly Community) Edition and Magento Commerce (formerly Enterprise) Edition
Magento 2 Open Source Edition
- Bulk Image Upload
- Integrated Product Videos
- Flexible Deployment Options
- Customised Admin Panel
- Touch-Friendly Admin Panel
- Additional Admin Security
- Varnish 4 and PhP 7 Support
- Full Page Caching
- Easy Personalisation
- Hassle-free Installation
- One-click Account Creation
- Quicker Checkout
- Secure Payments
- Technical and Account Support
- Improved Performance
- Streamlined product and attribute creation/configuration
- Lesser Javascript Errors
- CSS Preprocessor
- PSR Compliance
- Advanced Reporting
- Integrated Email Marketing Automation
- Magento Shipping
- Image Loading and Search Performance Enhancements
- Fast and Accurate Tax calculations
- Flexible Payment Options
Magento 2 Commerce Edition
- all features of Magento 2 Open Source Edition +
- Customer Segmentation and Marketing Personalisation
- Elasticsearch
- Database Scalability
- Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations
- Visual Merchandising
- Content Staging and Preview
Looking to hire Magento 2 Developers that bring with them an all round understanding of eCommerce?
67 Commerce, a certified Magento 2 Agency will leave no stone unturned for your eCommerce success.
Quick Comparison (Magento 1 Vs 2)
Features | Magento 1
Is the feature offered by Magento 1? |
M2 Open Source Edition
Is the feature offered by Magento 2 Open Source (formerly community) Edition? |
M2 Commerce Edition
Is the feature offered by Magento 2 Commerce (formerly enterprise) Edition? |
---|---|---|---|
Bulk Image uploads |
No | Yes | Yes |
Integrated Product Videos |
No | Yes | Yes |
Customer Segmentation and Marketing Personalization |
No | No | Yes |
Elasticsearch |
No | No | Yes |
Responsive Design Theme |
Yes (Higher versions offered a responsive design theme.) | Yes | Yes |
Flexible Deployment Options |
No | Yes | Yes(Magento 2 Commerce Cloud Edition is magento 2 Commerce hosted on Magento cloud solution) |
Customized Admin Panel |
No | Yes | Yes |
Touch-Friendly Admin Panel |
No | Yes | Yes |
Database Scalability |
No | No | Yes |
Varnish 4 Support |
No only offered on Magento 1 Commerce Edition | Yes | Yes |
PhP 7 Compatibility |
YesIn higher versions | Yes | Yes |
Full Page Caching |
No | Yes | Yes |
Easy Personalization |
No | Yes | Yes |
Hassle-free Installation |
No | Yes | Yes |
Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations |
No | No | Yes |
Visual Merchandising |
No | No | Yes |
One-click Account Creation |
No | Yes | Yes |
Quicker Checkout |
No | Yes | Yes |
Content Staging and Preview |
No | No | Yes |
Lesser Javascript Errors |
No | Yes | Yes |
CSS Preprocessor |
No | Yes | Yes |
PSR Compliance |
No | Yes | Yes |
Advanced Reporting |
No | Yes | Yes |
Integrated Email Marketing Automation |
No | Yes | Yes |
Magento Shipping |
No | Yes | Yes |
Streamlined product and attribute creation/configuration |
No | Yes | Yes |
Still not sure on the answer for Magento 1 vs 2, request a call back to us.
As a recognized Magento Ecommerce Development Company, based in India, our team of expert Magento 2 Developers will make sure that you take the right decision for your eCommerce success!
Get in Touch
Catering to every user, from admin to developers to customers, Magento 2 has a raft of great improvements when it comes to features offered. For those who are using Magento 1 for their eCommerce store, migrating to Magento 2 might seem like a
daunting task. However we sincerely believe that version 2 has updates to benefit all.
You can access a full list of features of Magento here. (View)
You can also access full list of Magento 2 Features here. (View)
As a trusted Magento 2 Agency in India, 67 Commerce has a strong portfolio of Magento 2 websites. Have a look at a selection of our company’s Magento 2 projects.
If you are already sold on Magento 2 and would like more information about migrating, you can fill this quick form and one of the certified Magento expert from our company’s office based in Mohali, Punjab, India will get back to you with a
Magento 2 demo. Contact Us