With Magento Imagine 2017 under our belts, we came home exhausted, full of knowledge, and toting one very awesome (very heavy) award.

The highlight of our trip would undoubtedly be getting named Magento’s Commercial Partner of the Year for North America, but the team may be just as excited about what we learned while out in Las Vegas.

A breakout session around mobile design changed the way we think of building responsive websites. We’ve long thought that a responsive site was the complete answer to the needs of the mobile consumer. But those who shop on mobile aren’t browsing, they’re doing it out of necessity, and we need to eliminate as many distractions and hurdles in the sales funnel as possible.

For instance, reviews are very important to desktop shoppers, but not nearly as important to mobile shoppers. But the biggest area we need to shift our focus to is the checkout. How can we reduce the number of fields a customer needs to fill out? What can we do to streamline payments? How can we store information for when a customer logs in?

All of these questions gave us a lot to consider in terms of how we handle designing the mobile checkout experience going forward and what tools we use to help us get there.

Perhaps the most exciting thing we learned about at Imagine was the release of Magento EE 2.2 (set for late summer 2017), which promises to be one of the most robust and beneficial versions to date.

Version 2.2 is largely B2B focused and providing the for the B2B client’s unique set of needs, such as:

  • Providing information that’s both easily accessible and easily digestible. B2B customers will do most of their research online; they do not want to talk to sales people.
  • Personalizing the shopping experience for each customer’s unique set of needs.

Key B2B Features of 2.2 will include:

  • Corporate Accounts – This will allow multiple users under the same company umbrella. Different roles can have different permissions, and even different access to catalogs for ordering purposes.
  • Payment on Account – Companies will be able to set credit limits, and if they have a good payment history, exceed that credit limit if need be.
  • Quick Order Functionality on the Front End – Currently customers have to login to access quick order tools for B2B sites, but 2.2 will have them available on the front end, and they’ll even audit against live inventory quantities before a customer can order.
  • Requisition List – This can be described as a “wish list that lasts forever” where customers can come back time and time again and access a list of regularly ordered items, even down to quantities.
  • Request a Quote Functionality – This features allows customers to request a quote on items that they need, and even go back and forth with the merchant until they settle on a price.

Other Key Features of 2.2 will include:

    • Magento Social – allows merchants to directly sync their products to Facebook from the Magento admin.
      • Magento Shippingthrough a partnership with Temando, Magento will now be offering a multi-carrier shipping solution.

As always, time with the Magento Community has left us energized and excited to bring best in class eCommerce business solutions to our customers.

For more about our trip to Imagine, check out the EY Access Podcast

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