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.
Core Magento Commerce Services
- Service Consulting Teams provides end-to-end guidance, strategic counsel, and problem-solving services
- Technical Account Manager guides you with a roadmap, budget, and goal-setting decisions
- Business Analyst helps craft functional and system integration requirements
- Architectural Advisory assists with architecture planning and decision-making
- Health Check evaluates the code base, server configuration, and production environment to improve efficiency and performance
- Performance Review evaluates the production environment for ways to improve site speed, capacity, and response times
- Code Audit reviews your code and integrations to ensure optimal operation
- Technical Consulting advises and assists with executing a development plan
- Custom Extension and Module Development delivers custom code to enhance native or community developed functionality
- Upgrade Services provide comprehensive preparation for, or actual implementation of, an upgrade to Magento Commerce 2
- Client Strategy delivers deep insight on diverse commerce challenges to maximize the return on your Magento investment
- Analytics Audit reviews your data to ensure accuracy, locate gaps, and identify optimization opportunities
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