Magento® 2.2 Enterprise is here, and we certainly have a lot to talk about. The latest edition of Magento brings with it a brand new feature, a massive amount of fixes and changes, and certainly brings in a lot of improvement over former editions. Having read through the Magento 2.2 release notes, let’s take a look at all the features of this latest release.
Magento 2.2 Commerce Features
The functionality of the system is primarily designed for merchants who have companies as main customers, rather than a merchant who is aiming towards consumers. Magento 2.2 Enterprise is indeed not unique in that regard, but what it does it does very well.
Magento Cloud
Many improvements have been made to the deployment process of the Magento Commerce Cloud feature. There are new MCC replacements, ece-patches and ece-tools. It is not necessary to perform a full installation of the base code and patch. The fact this isn’t required makes things move a little faster, and a little more efficiently.
Magento has been optimized in this latest version, with its PaaS (platform as a service) production being tweaked. Its staging and development environments have also seen changes and are more efficient than they were before.
Useful for you:
Usual continuous cloud integration tools are available with unlimited users. You get DDoS protection and significant bandwidth allowances as well as the unrestricted versions of Blackfire.io Enterprise (Performance Testing) and New Relic APM Pro (Performance Monitoring).
Signifyd Fraud Protection
Since October 2016, Magento has had a strong partnership with Signifyd. Signifyd is an eCommerce fraud protection company that has a pretty strong reputation for being efficient and secure. Plans were made to improve the Magento core by integrating Signifyd’s machine learning abilities into Magento.
Better Technology Stack
The technology stack has been upgraded in this edition of Magento. Support for PHP 5.6 and Varnish 3 have been dropped and replaced by support for PHP 7.1 and Varnish 5. Also supported are Redis 3.2 and MySQL 5.7.
Magento Social Module
Magento Social is an extension that can act as a gateway between your website (where your products are featured and sold) and your social pages. It uses Shopial, an integrator, to create this gateway. Shopial is compatible with every major selling platform on the market, including the likes of Etsy, Wix, GoDaddy and of course eBay.
It is handy for directing more traffic to your site as it showcases your store across all the most popular social networks. Building this exposure and then getting people to view your site and your products is a great way to boost interest and sales.
Faster Deployment Process
The process has been refined to allow development stages to minimize downtime of the production system whenever there is a site update. In this case, downtime is the time it takes for the static files and compiled code to be transferred to the server. The pipeline deployment process makes for easy control of the configuration between the environments.
Quote Requests
The Quote Extension helps improve the quote request process and makes it a lot easier for both you and your customers. Some of the added Magento 2.2 features here are:
- Comments and documents can be added in an attempt to justify discounts that have been requested.
- Quote statuses can be tracked throughout the processing stage.
- You can directly correspond with the merchant so that you can complete the deal.
- All your quotes can be seen in as a summary in the “My Quotes” view.
Magento 2.2 features added directly from the Quote Extension include:
- Adding notes and comments for every product.
- The ability to automate request for the whole quote process.
- Making it a lot easier to check the quote request process.
- You can quickly enable (or disable) quotation search.
- Customizable Catalogs and Price Lists
- Magento 2.2 b2b Functionality has been increased. Now customizable catalogs and price lists are both available as features the merchant can take advantage of.
Businesses can make and maintain their special accounts, and they can specify a group of buyers with particular roles and differing levels of permission on each account. There is a flexible API included that allows you to integrate a variety of different ERP solutions.
Credit to Companies Extended
Useful for you:
Magento 2.2 b2b customers have the ability to complete the purchase with deferred payment who can choose Payment on Account, rather than going for the choices of paying via PayPal or another available payment method. The company account can be managed via Magento Admin.
As a merchant, you can configure credit (terms and conditions) and restrict credit for specific countries. For customers, there isn’t the opportunity to postpone payment as they must pay upon checkout. PayPal is integrated so that users can pay via PayPal without having to leave the merchant’s site. This is a positive for conversion rates.
Advanced Review of Commerce Features
Below we highlighted all main features updates that will be essential to know before upgrading your Magento store to the latest version or switch from another platform to Magento.
Pricing and Promotions Update. Work with coupons: create, track, and report coupon usage as well as control promotional pricing for specific stores, categories, customer segments, or products.
Admin Page Usage. Organize your content and a website page’s design for multiple stores and websites from one admin panel. Also, don’t forget to generate system reports to avoid technical issues.
Updated Checkout. Use Instant Purchase option as a progressive tool to simplify user shopping experience. As well as a that, your customers can quickly checkout with or without registration, save their orders for later, and be happy with the offer gift wrapping and gift messages per order.
Orders and Payments Management. Integrate with more payment gateways that were before, accept different payment options as checks, payments on account, bank transfer payments, and cash on delivery. As for order management, you can do multiple tasks with invoices and orders from the Admin Panel, customize orders and work with clients via newsletter and Contact Us form.
Useful for you:
Earn Customers Loyalty. Use reward system for different customer’s actions (purchase, registration, reviews, etc.). Set up various gift campaigns and offer exclusive shopping experiences with private or flash sale sites.
Customers Accounts Features. Simplify the account profile and add necessary functionality such as order status and history, re-order from the account, recently ordered items, tracking of the store credits, gift card totals, reward points and many more.
Theme and Layout Customization. Use customized store theme and inherited base theme to varying it for different countries, brands, and campaigns.
Store Performance and Scalability. Use integrated Varnish page caching to accelerate your store performance. Faster Admin rendering will speed access to product, customer, and order management views.
Additional Integrated B2B Functionality. This enables you to simplify the life of your business customers in managing their company’s accounts, clients orders, handling over 300 line items out-of-the-box, including insights of more than 25 B2B-focused reports in easy-to-use dashboards.