What s new in Magento?

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1 What s new in Magento? What s new for Magento Community edition By James Gurd

2 Postcode Anywhere has teamed up with ecommerce and Magento expert James Gurd to outline what s new and exciting in Magento over the last 12 months. We ve outlined some of the key features that have been released for the Magento ecommerce platform in the last 12 months (version 1.7 and 1.8), focussing on the Community edition as this is the version many SMEs use. The recent enhancements will help to provide you with a more personalised shopping experience for your customers. James Gurd is an experienced ecommerce consultant and owner of Digital Juggler, an ecommerce and digital marketing consultancy. He has more than ten years B2C & B2B experience Client and Agency side, providing ecommerce advice and support. James is the co-host of #ecomchat and can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

3 Performance & security Magento has long had its critics for out-the-box performance in terms of speed, especially for large product catalogues. Several developers have explained to me their travails in meeting Client page speed targets by customising the code. In 1.8 improvements were made to enable a faster checkout process and improved cache management. In the checkout, the main change is to load the progress information for the current checkout step only, not the entire checkout, removing some unnecessary server calls. Magento has also introduced a way of limiting how it performs large database lookups and protection against database deadlocks. Security is a permanent online challenge, just look at the impact of the recent Heartbleed Bug for OpenSSL. Magento is paying lots of attention in this area and released several security improvements, including stopping browsers from storing admin and web store usernames and passwords. The potential downside is a small inconvenience for everyday users but the benefit is increased security. Given the impact that security breaches can have on businesses, I think users will forgive a small inconvenience in return for peace of mind. The cryptographic method that is used to store passwords has also been improved for greater security.

4 Mobile HTML5 In 1.7 a mobile interface using HTML5 was introduced, enabling merchants to create mobile optimised storefronts. The interface comes with some handy out-the-box features that will help in your quest in a more dynamic and responsive offering, including: Use of mobile gestures like pinch, multi-touch and swipe between product images User-friendly site search Cross-sell and up-sell capabilities Device-specific media capabilities for video and audio With mobile accounting for more than 20% of all traffic, this was an important and timely addition from Magento.

5 EU Cookie Directive feature The EU e-privacy Directive came into effect at the end of 2011 but UK guidance was updated several times throughout 2012 due to uncertainty over how retailers should apply the new law. Magento added a new cookie notification feature last year that simplified the compliance process. Once enabled, a message at the top of the storefront informs site visitors about the cookie policy and prompts them to accept or decline. As of January 2013, however, this is no longer the recommended action, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) own website removed an Accept / Decline for cookie and replaced it with a simple message with a link to change the settings. Our recommendation to merchants is to include a link in the footer to your cookie policy with clear instructions on how to change the settings. Cookie pop-ups and messages are generally a hindrance to good usability and should be avoided Mark Slocock, MD, GPMD

6 New payment methods for international ecommerce One of the key challenges for cross-border commerce is making sure the platform and payment gateway support all the payment types required for each country. In release 1.7, Magento added two new payment methods: Cash On Delivery (CoD) and Bank Transfer. This is ideal for some European countries and also further afield where online card payment isn t the primary payment method. In some countries, ecommerce is such a new phenomenon that a significant proportion of customers are still first-time buyers. As a result, they have unresolved security concerns about online shopping. For example, CoD is popular in India where many people don t have a debit or credit card. CoD may have its problems but It has been credited with making online commerce possible in some countries that otherwise might not properly embrace ecommerce.

7 Improved taxation calculations The latest version of Magento provides more accurate and consistent VAT and Fixed Product Tax (FPT) calculations so that administrators can create invoices and credit memos to give businesses visibility of accurate tax calculations. It also improves tax calculations for international transactions and tax rounding issues when multiple taxes are applied. Another improvement is that it now supports the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) recycling tax in the EU. The tax improvements, in particular the resolution of tax rounding errors have by far the biggest impact for merchants Mark Slocock, MD, GPMD

8 Captcha The marmite of website spam protection. Love it or hate it, captcha can help reduce the infiltration of automated software from attempting fake log-ins or comments on your website. Magento admins can enable CAPTCHA functionality on their website to help reduce the likelihood of spam by ensuring that the login is being attempted by a person and not a bot. It s compatible with the account registration, log-in and password reset customer forms.

9 Coupon Codes This new feature enables you to generate sets of unique coupon codes for each promotion you run on your ecommerce store. This feature is ideal to track the customers that are using your coupon codes and to identify which campaigns are successful. You can also specify a prefix and suffix so you can completely customise the way the coupon looks. The codes can be sent by , included in a newsletter, catalog, or coupon design, or incorporated into a QR code that can be scanned with a smart phone. You can find the default configuration settings under System > Configuration > Customers > Promotions > Auto Generated Specific Coupon Codes.

10 Magento Postcode Anywhere is one of the world s leading providers of international address validation. We are used by some of the largest organisations in the world, we even provide our addressing technology back to the data owners including the likes of the Royal Mail and Canada Post. Our Magento Extension, Capture+ ensures address data for over 240 countries is accurate at the point of entry. Download from Magento connect now for a free trial. Call us: UK U.S Rest of the World theteam@postcodeanywhere.com

11 What s new in Magento?