Know all the features of Magento

Magento is highly popular for its endless features which offer online merchants flexibility and complete control over the functionality of their online store. The SEO, Catalog management, and powerful marketing tools of Magento allow the merchants to create sites with an unrivaled shopping experience for customers. Built for rapid and cost-effective innovation, both Magento Community and Magento commerce editions combine rich, out-of-the-box functionality, enterprise performance, and scale.

The highly intuitive Magento admin interface will let you tailor the site as per your business needs and industry niche. In this article, we will go through the extensive features set of Magento:

a) Magento General Features List

b) Feature Highlights

c) Core Magento Commerce Services

a) Magento General Features List:

Marketing Promotions and Conversion Tools:

Up-sell, cross-sell as well as related products
Catalog promotional pricing along with restrictions to stores or products or categories functionality
Pricing rules coupons which you can restrict to stores, customer groups, time frame, categories as well as products
Unique coupon codes generation for each promotion. Also export coupon codes for different campaigns including e-mail, newsletters, etc.
Monitor coupon usage with detailed reports
Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts
Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
Categories Landing Page
Bundles of products
Products comparison & recently viewed products
New items promotional tool
Persistent Shopping cart
Multiple Shipping Options
Polls
Managing Newsletters
Email wishlists

Search Engine Optimization:

Highly SEO friendly
Google Site Map
Complete control over URLs with URL rewrites
Meta-information of products, categories, and content pages
Auto-generated site map
Auto-generated popular search terms page
Google Content API

Site Management:

Manage multiple stores from admin panel and share the required amount of information
Manage permissions of admin panel access as per the roles
100% customizable design using templates
Multi-languages support, Multi-currency support
Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and third-party applications
Batch import & export of catalog and customer information
Easy to create CMS pages
Manage tax rates as per the location, type of product, and the customer group
CAPTCHA functionality for preventing fake logins

Catalogue Management:

Different types of products including simple, configurable, bundled, and grouped products
Create different price points for different sets of customers (wholesalers or retailers)
Virtual Products, Downloadable products
Unlimited product attributes
Attribute sets for quick product creation of different item types
Manage inventory with back ordered items
Batch updates to products
Image resizing with watermarking
Advanced Pricing Rules
Search results rewrites & redirects
Moderated Product tags and reviews
Personalize products by the customer (upload images, text, etc)
Customer Sorting

Catalogue Browsing:

Filter products on the basis of price, categories, and other attributes
Create category landing pages using the static block tool
Compare products with a history
Configurable search with auto-suggested terms
Breadcrumbs
Assign design within a category and products (unique design per category or product)
Recently viewed products
Manage the listing of products in grid or list format

Product Browsing:

Multiple images for a product
Zoom-in product images
Cross-sell, upsell, and related products
Availability in stock
Multi-tier pricing
Select product options
View grouped products
Wishlist add button
Share to friends through mail or social channels

Checkout, Payment and Shipping:

One-step checkout
Guest checkout plus checkout with account for address book
Add multiple addresses for shipping
Option of creating an account at checkout beginning
SSL security support for both frontend and backend
Save shopping cart
Customers can add gift messages
Tax and shipping estimates in shopping cart
Save payment details
Multiple PayPal gateways integration
Authorize.net integration
Accept checks/money orders
Accept purchase orders
Additional payment extensions are available through Magento connect
Shipping integration
Label printing
Real-time shipping rates from UPS, UPS XML, FedEx, USPS, and DHL
Manage destination countries
Flat rate shipping per order or item
Free Shipping
On-site order tracking from customer accounts

Order Management:

Create, view, or edit orders from the admin panel
Create single or multiple invoices, shipments, and credit memos per order
Print invoices, packing slips, and shipping labels
Customer representatives can change products configurations throughout the shopping process.
Assisted Shopping – customer service representatives and other admin users are able to manage products and coupons in customers’ shopping carts and wishlists through the admin panel
Customize status of the order with order status such as new, processing, payment review, and complete
Create re-orders for customers from the admin panel
E-mail notifications of orders

Customer Accounts:

Dashboard
Unlimited addresses in the Address book
Wishlists
Order history and current status
Re-ordering option
Recently ordered items
Default address of billing and shipping
Email or send RSS feed of wish list
Newsletter subscription management
Product reviews submitted
Product tags
Downloadable or digital products

Customer Service:

Contact Us form
Create and edit orders
Customer account which is feature-rich
Order history and tracking with the latest status
Password reset e-mail
Order and account update e-mails
Customizable transactional e-mails

Customer Loyalty:

Reward points on purchases, signup, reviews, and other actions
Configure reward point redemption rules, caps, and expiration dates
Enable customers to save products to multiple wishlists
Customers can create gift registries and send e-mails to shop the registry
Automatically update item counts and notify the registered owner as purchases are made
Customers can purchase physical or virtual gift cards
Private or flash sales for offering exclusive shopping experiences
Streamline re-ordering by enabling shoppers to add products to the cart by SKU

Performance and Scalability:

Varnish Page Caching for accelerating site performance
Multi-tier, multi-node varnish configuration for scaling high-traffic sites
Implement hole punching and Edge Side Includes (ESI) for handling page elements that can’t be cached
Faster indexing and incremental index updates for fresher site content and better performance
Minify JS, CSS, and HTML and compress images to reduce file size for faster loading
Cache all JS and CSS on the first page viewed to minimize content which should be downloaded for subsequent pages
Speed access to products, customers, and order management views with faster Admin rendering
Store media files on a separate database server or CDN for faster page load times
Archive orders after a time interval for better store performance
Use Magento Performance Toolkit to optimize its speed
Asynchronously process tasks for enhanced performance using a Rabbit MQ job queue framework
Manage configurations across environments and minimize production downtime for updates with pipeline deployment tooling
Scale database operations with support for MySQL Cluster
Use separate master databases to support checkout, order management, and product data
Every master database can also have slave databases to scale read operations

International Support:

Localization support, multi-currency, and tax rates support
Accented characters support and right to left text
List of countries for registering site, a shipping destination address, billing addresses, with ability to specify shipping & payment method
European Union VAT-ID validation facilitates the tax collection process
EU cookie notification simplifies the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive compliance
Support fixed product taxes, such as WEEE/DEEE in the EU
Automatically calculate tax for transactions in the EU with VAT-ID validation3
Use EU cookie notification to simplify EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive compliance

Analytics and Reporting:

Google Analytics Integration
Admin dashboard for report overview
Sales & Tax report
Abandoned Shopping cart report
Best Viewed Products & Purchased products report
Report of low stock, search terms, product reviews, tags, and coupon usage
Total sales invoiced and refunded

Application Architecture and Security:

Build on a modern tech stack utilizing popular frameworks and supports industry standards
High-level customizations and easily add or remove functionality with a modular codebase
Stable service interfaces for easy site upgrades and customizations
Integrate Magento with 3rd party applications using efficient web APIs with SOAP and REST support
Manage interactions between extensions using plug-ins and dependency injection software design patterns
Leverage sample code to quickly create an Apple iOS 8+ app using Magento 2.0 APIs
Update code with a standalone installer that checks for prerequisites before installation
Automate certain Magento development and production tasks using the command-line interface
Use strong data encryption based on AES-256 and hashing based on SHA-256
Limit password guessing with strong password requirements and a secure Admin login process
Feel confident with regular scanning, external penetration testing, and bug bounty programs that promote core platform security
Stay informed about security issues through the Magento Security Center and mailing list

Mobile Commerce:

With Magento, you can easily create a storefront optimized for mobile devices.

Utilize device capabilities of audio & video
User-friendly search and results display
Neat display of CMS pages
Pinch, multi-touch, and scaling images
Easy swipe between product images
Drag and drop products to the shopping cart

Managed Cloud:

Get enterprise-grade reliability and availability with 99.99% uptime and a high availability architecture
Benefit from Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) based production, staging, and development environments optimized for Magento
Build on a redundant AWS-based cloud hosting infrastructure
Accelerate your time to market with expert application and infrastructure support
Rapidly spin up, merge, clone and tear down environments (Production, Staging, and 6 Development environments)
Get continuous cloud integration tools with support for unlimited users
Manage performance with unrestricted versions of New Relic APM Pro (performance monitoring) and blackfire.io Enterprise (performance testing) tools
Accelerate site performance and defend against DDoS attacks with Fastly’s Content Delivery Network (CDN), which includes generous bandwidth allowances
Dedicated hardware to provide even higher levels of reliability and availability
Automatically back up your code and databases for easy restoration in case of any incident
Easily enable and configure services like Redis, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch to enhance capabilities and performance
Rest assured with 24/7 monitoring for your production environment

b) Feature Highlights:

1. Customer Segmentation and Personalization:

Delivered personalized buying experiences and boost conversion rates by dynamically displaying content, promotions, and pricing for particular customers on different attributes such as location, gender, order history, lifetime purchase value, etc. Target unknown visitors on the basis of products they have viewed or added to the cart.

2. Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations:

You can set up a rule to manage products for up-sell, cross-sell, and related products for each customer segment. There is a condition-based tool that allows you to administer rules. Thus, you can effortlessly target product suggestions to increase sales and average order values.

3. Instant Purchase:

The new Instant Purchase checkout option will help you boost conversion rates for returning customers. They can use their previously stored payment details and shipping details for faster checkout. This is very helpful for mobile shoppers.

4. Content Staging and Preview:

Your business teams can create, preview, and schedule a wide range of content updates without the need of a development team. You can also preview all the changes for delivering a flawless shopper experience and optimize the timing and impact of site updates by managing all changes through a dashboard. There is also an option to automatically deploy updates at scheduled times for greater efficiency.

5. Visual Merchandising:

You can optimize the category pages to achieve higher sales using a drag & drop interface for arranging products or sorting rules that order products by best seller, colour, the newest addition, etc. You can also set rules to automatically assign products to specific categories on the basis of attributes such as brand, price, etc.

6. ElasticSearch:

Search is the first medium by which a customer may interact with your Magento store. Elasticsearch is highly popular for handling large catalogues and easily scale search capacity along with the queries. It also offers suggestions for misspellings, stop words support, attribute weighting, managing synonyms, for better relevancy and conversions.

7. Responsive Design Themes:

Since a huge portion of the audience uses their smartphones to access e-commerce sites, the responsiveness of the site has become the first priority. The built-in design reference themes allow you to create a website optimised for any device. These responsive themes adapt and adjust automatically to a perfect fit in desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile device screens. Themes are touch-friendly, customizable and have SEO advantages as well.

8. B2B Functionality:

For B2B customers you can create company accounts, set up multiple buyers and define their roles with self-service tools. It will increase loyalty, reduces costs, and drive new growth. Create custom catalogues and price lists to ensure buyers receive contract terms when purchasing online and offer payments on account to increase sales.

9. Powerful Admin Panel:

The admin panel comes with a modern and intuitive user interface with a dashboard by which you can easily manage your business with quick access to sales, order, search term and best-selling product data. Improved navigation and search makes it easier to find information, and management screens can be customized for speeding up day-to-day tasks.

10. Support:

The Support is only available for Magento Commerce and not for Magento Community Edition. The support is available 24 x 7 to quickly resolve technical issues and questions. There are dedicated account managers who get to know your business so that they can quickly find out the issue and help you get the most out of your Magento platform.

11. Managed Cloud Solution:

You shouldn’t focus on technological aspects but instead on your business. The Magento Commerce Cloud comes with a reliable AWS-based environment designed to support any Magento store deployment.