What’s new for Magento Community edition
By James Gurd
What’s new
in Magento?
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+.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 email, 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.
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 | 0800 047 0495 U.S. | 1-866-838-9075
Rest of the World | +44 1905 888 550
Email:
theteam@postcodeanywhere.com
www.postcodeanywhere.com
@pca_plus
