Magento Releases Upgrades to Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 and Announces Magento Community Edition 1.9.1

Today eBay Enterprise, an eBay Inc. company, released Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 and announced Magento Community Edition 1.9.1. The latest updates offer expanded responsive design capabilities, add new product swatch features and improve overall performance and security, enabling merchants to create more captivating online shopping experiences for consumers.

Magento Enterprise Edition also includes powerful visual merchandising capabilities and enhanced administrative and support features that dramatically improve merchant productivity, allow for the quick resolution of technical issues through detailed diagnostics and provide the ability to optimize product displays to drive increased sales.

“We’re excited to announce the latest updates to our Magento Enterprise and Community Editions, which empower merchants, including our large community of fashion retailers, to create unique shopping experiences across devices, driving sales growth,” said Mark Lavelle, senior vice president of global product and strategy, eBay Enterprise. “Magento Enterprise Edition reduces the time and effort required to manage product categories and enables faster technical issue resolutions. Both versions offer merchants deeper insights and performance improvements allowing them to scale and succeed online.”

Enhanced visual merchandising

Magento Enterprise Edition includes a new drag-and-drop visual merchandising tool, giving merchants the ability to preview and make adjustments to products displayed on category pages with the click of a mouse. Merchants can easily create new categories by cloning existing ones or by setting up rules to pull in products from other categories. They can also anchor “hero products” at the top of each page or automatically sort products so that those with special pricing are displayed first.

“The volume of products across Bed Bath N’ Table’s larger categories is significant, and with Visual Merchandiser, we’re able to quickly and easily merchandise our range of products to optimize conversion,” said Louise Bradtke, Website Manager, Bed Bath N’ Table. “Using Visual Merchandiser also ensures we are presenting our latest and most relevant merchandise to our customers.”

Visual Merchandiser was developed in partnership with On Tap Group, a leading UK-based ecommerce solutions firm and valued Magento Gold Solution Partner. This new functionality is a reflection of Magento’s commitment to supporting merchants with innovative, conversion-driving solutions and demonstrates the unmatched power of the company’s global partner network to quickly bring best-of-breed capabilities to market.

Within the new tool, merchants also have access to critical information such as pricing and inventory levels, allowing for smarter and more streamlined merchandising decisions.

“Merchants with large numbers of frequently rotating SKUs are constantly looking for ways to reduce the time required for merchandising products. With the new visual merchandising tool, they are now able to easily make adjustments and test new ways to optimize the display of their products,” said Paul Boisvert, director of product management, Magento. “Merchants can effortlessly access critical information needed to make the best merchandising decisions to drive incremental sales.”

Boosts merchant productivity, improves support and enhances insights

Magento Enterprise Edition significantly improves backend scalability and increases productivity by enabling many concurrent users to update product catalogs. It also offers a new support tool letting merchants generate detailed reports to quickly understand, diagnose and resolve potential technical issues. The reports provide information on merchant systems, settings, extensions and other vital intelligence, giving support teams the knowledge required to quickly resolve issues.

Both editions have been updated to support Universal Analytics, the new standard for Google Analytics, enabling merchants to define more custom dimensions and metrics for tracking, incorporate offline and mobile app interactions, and gain access to ongoing feature updates that will only be available on Universal Analytics.

Optimizes product appeal

Both Magento Enterprise and Community Editions include new “swatch” capabilities, optimizing the presentation of products on merchant sites. The new feature allows merchants to display product information such as color, size and fabric as “swatches” on product detail pages, category pages, in layered navigation and search results. Product images are automatically updated as “swatches” are clicked, allowing consumers to view immediate and accurate product depictions, giving them confidence to purchase, resulting in increased sales.

Expanded responsive design capabilities

Magento Enterprise and Community Editions offer a responsive design reference theme with an expanded feature set, including new responsive emails, which enable merchants to go-to-market with a mobile-friendly site in half the time. By utilizing responsive design, merchants are empowered to focus their time and money on a single site that works across devices, which reduces maintenance costs, increases site quality and offers SEO benefits, while ensuring brand consistency.

Faster and more secure

Both Magento Enterprise and Community Editions have also added support for MySQL 5.6 and PHP 5.5. With MySQL 5.6, merchants benefit from better performance and scalability, reduced memory usage on database servers and enhanced debugging tools. The added support for PHP 5.5 provides security improvements and ensures merchants have continued access to code updates.

Magento serves more than 240,000 merchants worldwide and was recognized as the leading ecommerce platform for fast growing retailers in the 2014 Internet Retailer 5001. Magento also powers 26 percent of all ecommerce sites in the Alexa one million sites list; more than any other ecommerce platform.

To learn more about merchant and developer capabilities, please visit the Magento blog.

About On Tap

On Tap are the UK’s longest serving official Magento Gold Solution Partner and have amassed a huge portfolio of knowledge and experience of what makes a great ecommerce site. On Tap works alongside its clients to build, innovate and deliver some of the most challenging projects on the Magento platform. Founded in 2006, On Tap has offices in the UK - London, Brighton and Rye, Estonia, India and Denmark. For more information please visit: www.ontapgroup.com

About eBay Enterprise

eBay Enterprise is a leading global provider of retail-optimized commerce solutions, including the Magento platform, order management, fulfillment, customer care, and marketing solutions. We enable brands and retailers of all sizes to deliver consistent omnichannel experiences across all retail touch points to attract and engage new customers, convert browsers into loyal buyers, and deliver products with speed and quality. With unrivaled flexibility and control, our clients are armed to accelerate sales growth and win with today’s digitally connected consumer. eBay Enterprise is headquartered in King of Prussia, Pa. and has offices in Austin, Barcelona, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Shanghai. eBay Enterprise is an eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) company. More information can be found at www.ebayenterprise.com and www.magento.com.

1. Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, 2014