Reevaluate your eCommerce sites with Magento 2.2!

Magento 2 has become one of the most successful eCommerce platforms for merchants.

With an increase in the eCommerce business’s growth, Magento also has to upgrade to be in line with the transition. Magento has once again proved itself by adding various features, cutting down the issues that persisted in Magento’s previous versions. 

Magento 2.2 was released in the year 2017. The newer version contains many significant features related to business-to-business (B2B). More focus on B2B is justified when you consider constant reevaluation in the B2B industry. 

According to some experts, B2B eCommerce market sales will cross $12 trillion by 2020.

That is indeed a vast number, which shows how rapidly this is increasing!

This version of Magento has taken the whole idea of shopping to another level. With its splendid features, the customer’s shopping experience has become more flexible and has forced merchants to think outside the box and plan strategies to see an increasing trend in their business growth. 

Below is the list of the features that have made a significant change:

1. Advanced Reporting:

Reporting is the primary feature that is must in any business. It is easier to make decisions while looking at the statistics of your business. 

Torture the data, and you will get answers to a lot of your questions! It is often the case that the data will surprise you and might change your perception. Although just looking at the metrics, you might have a perception that is not true.

A deep-dive analysis of data might turn the tables and guide you in the right direction. This feature is generally a paid one, but Magento 2.2 has added this feature, and subsequently, the merchants don’t have to buy this feature.

The reports produced are dynamic based on the products, orders, returns, and the number of registered accounts. This can ascend your sales leading your business to grow.

Many questions such as how many products were sold in a specific interval of time, the best product, the least bought product, and how many returns can provide information such as which area needs to be focused on, which is the area you are doing good.

Information about the number of unique customers, the number of newly registered accounts during specific intervals of time, the number of products people have added to their wishlist, and the number of returned products can be obtained.

Focusing on the lagging areas will let you stay ahead of this competition and make your mark in the industry. Admin panel -> Admins -> Settings -> Store -> Configurations -> General -> Advanced Reporting.

2. Quick Purchase:

It allows customers to speed up the purchase process with the help of information stored in their account. According to the research, Magento is the first eCommerce platform to provide one step checkout process as a feature in Magento’s latest release.

Gone are the days when customers had to enter payment details and shipping information during the checkout process. With this Instant purchase feature, Magento will take care of that, and the customers will be redirected to the confirmation page where they can place an order, thereby saving a lot of their time.

This feature provides returning customers with a faster and flexible checkout experience using previously-stored payment and shipping information to skip the checkout page. 

Customers can skip the registration page and directly add details at the time of the checkout process. This feature is an example of the power of the Magento Community.

After the journey of surfing and adding items to cart, customers can not wait to look at their products, and so they will try to rush the checkout process as fast as can, and the Instant Purchase button will help with that.

3. Advanced Account Management Tools:

There are few features which are added considering both customers and merchants. This feature is one of them!

A tool called customer-self service that assists customers to request and manage their own specific accounts. They can modify all the details according to their requirements, making it easier for the merchants.

This way, the merchant can know more about the customers and can suggest them the right products based on their information. Merchants can organize and categorize customer’s information in a better way.

They have the power to Import/export customer lists and can designate sales executives to particular accounts.

The merchant’s involvement is reduced. It is possible to manage the customer’s account from the front store and save their time, which they can efficiently use to provide the customer with a better shopping experience.

This feature has significantly improved the relationship between the merchant and their customers.

4. Quote Requests:

Sometimes, buyers buy a product in bulk, and hence, they expect an additional discount from the merchants. This is one of the coolest features of Magento 2.2 that can improve the connection between a merchant and a customer.

A customer can request merchants by sending a quote message that includes supportive comments and documentation to convince merchants. They can also track the status of requests once it is issued. 

Unlike previous versions where quotes can only be sent by customers using some third party extension, with Magento 2.2, this will come with the platform by default.

It allows the merchants to keep track of all requests through a quote management panel, which contains all information related to quotes that can assist with customer negations.

This feature will undoubtedly lead to more conversions, and repeated purchases in bulk as customers can negotiate with them.

5. Improvement in Payment Methods:

Traditionally, Magento provides credit card payments and PayPal as payment modes. For the other payment methods, you have to install third-party extensions.

But now, with Magento 2.2, payment of credit options will be available, thereby eliminating the need for an extension. Merchants can configure credit options to manage the purchasing conditions for their customers.

It also can specify the minimum and maximum order amount and can restrict credit options for chosen countries. Customers can also keep track of their personal credit information. 

Merchants can look at the credit information such as the current credit amount, limit credit, and available credit on each order and a specific customer and specify a limit between those accounts.

6. Improved Shipping Options:

Shipping methods have been continuously updated because of the merchant’s requirements to provide them the flexibility of using a plethora of different shipment services available.

Magento 2.2 features will help automate the shipping process, which will reduce the overall costs and ease the merchant’s job. Earlier, the shipment options were significantly less, and so customers could not complete the purchase. 

Merchants can not afford to lose the customers because of the shipment process, and hence, the newer version of Magento 2 focused on that area to enhance the shipment process and increase the sales.

Customers no longer have to go to different websites to check their order status, which is also troublesome. They will get to know about all the tracking information on the same page through which order was placed, saving a lot of time.

7. Customized Catalogs:

This feature provides the flexibility to create customized catalogs, price lists to control the products, and prices merchants see on their websites. Also, they can decide which products to include in a single catalog.

The process of creating customized catalogs is divided into steps:

• Select the products you want to be displayed in the new catalog.
• Filters can be used to search and include/exclude specific products.
• Define custom pricing. It is also possible to specify discounts per product or can apply to products in bulk. 
• Merchants can set prices for single products or can set prices for multiple products at one go.
• They can use dynamic pricing or fixed pricing to decide the discount amount.
• Click on save the catalog!

One thing to note is that the catalog process runs as a background operation allowing the customers to continue with their other activities. Once the catalog is ready, a notification message will pop up.

After the catalog is ready, merchants can assign them to multiple customers and easily duplicate the new onboard customer’s existing catalogs.

8. Magento Functional Testing Framework:

It is a framework that is used to perform automated end-to-end testing. One of the main goals is to facilitate functional testing, minimizing its efforts to perform regression testing.

While incorporating new changes to websites, the merchant’s responsibility is to ensure that customers will have a seamless shopping experience after upgrading the website.

This framework enables developers to provide functional testing for their extensions. It eliminates duplicates in automated test cases.

The architecture of Magento 2 is a bit complex, and hence it is difficult for humans to test everything manually. Automatic functional testing of newly developed features is more reliable since we already know to err is human.

Magento functional testing framework primarily focuses on five features:

• Flexibility because of modularity support.
• Customizability for existing tests.
• Improved traceability.
• Informative, because of the reporting tools.
• Easy to maintain because of simple overall structure and test cases.

Tests usually cover the business entity’s functionality. The primary goal is to find the discrepancies between the expected results and the actual results.

9. Shared Buyer Accounts:

Previously, merchants had to use third-party extensions to use this feature of having shared buyer’s accounts. But with Magento 2.2, from the start, account roles and buyers permissions are incorporated in the platform.

Buyers can easily manage their accounts without any involvement from the merchant’s side. 

This feature allows merchants to support company accounts with multiple buyers.  

10. Performance Gains:

Magento 2.2 version has focused on improving the store’s overall performance as it is directly correlated with success’s stability. This newer version of Magento has significantly enhanced the indexing, caching operations, and cart. Customers can have a flawless shopping experience despite indexers running.

Also, long-running indexers operate in batches to avoid memory leak problems and increase memory usage. The technology stack has also been updated by supporting PHP 7.1, Varnish 5, Redis 3.2, and MySQL 5.7.

Magento 2.2 valuable features, enhancements, and bug fixes empower merchants with smarter features and operational efficiencies.

11. Dotmailer Automation Marketing:

This kind of feature is being introduced on the Magento platform for the first time. It is a cloud-based automation tool that can generate emails automatically by fetching the data from your Magento store, thereby terminating the manual process of rolling out emails.

These auto-generated emails are personalized and allow you to communicate with your customers without much effort. This will help you to boost your sales without any human intervention. 

This feature improves communication and engagement with new customers. It can help recover the lost revenue by creating highly personalized, targeted, and attractive emails leading to more conversions. 

It helps to synchronize all the customers and order data with the data of your campaigns. Ideally, in this automated world, people would like to decrease their involvement by making the processes automatic and were astonished by the results.

Wrapping up!!

Many new features have been added to the bundle of already existing features and further enhancing the existing features, which was released as Magento 2.2! It has not only focused on improving the websites but have also adapted the cutting edge technologies and have tried to automate the features. 

It has significantly improved in almost all the areas that can drive the merchant’s attention, attract more customers, decrease abandoned shopping cart rates, and raise revenue.

Now you know about all the splendid features of Magento 2.2! Why not try it practically and see how it will satisfy all your requirements.