“Expand the experience” – This is the concept of Magento Imagine 2019 this year. Magento is on its way to prove to be second to none for experience-driven commerce. The event successfully attracted a record number of 3,500 attendees from over 65 countries.
Gary Specter, VP of Commerce Sales & Customer Success, set the tone in Monday night’s keynote: “We’re seeing changes in the way people shop and the way they interact with brands. Customer expectations are rising, and their expectations are that the experience will be personal, and you’ll meet people where they are and whenever they want.” He also proudly notes out that the biggest accomplishment of Magento over the years is a community that is “bigger, more global, more diverse and more engaged than any others in e-commerce”. Things like AI, VR, PWA… are pushing us to look ahead and think ahead, which requires us to “expand the experience”.
Another point to emphasize the rising importance of customer experience is made by John Stockton, Senior Director of Product. “Across every industry in both B2B and B2C, people aren’t just buying products. They are buying experiences. So to stay ahead we need to “make every moment personal and every experience shoppable”
Make every moment personal and every experience shoppable. https://t.co/uPWByHdZTv #MagentoImagine pic.twitter.com/U2F9NmUgcY
— Experience Cloud (@AdobeExpCloud) May 14, 2019
Overview
MAGENTO ROADMAP – UPCOMING FEATURES
Jason Woosley, VP of Commerce Product & Platform, Experience Business at Adobe, walks through Magento’s up and coming features that will help businesses “exceed customer and business expectations at every single turn.”
Adobe Sensei
As the relationship between Adobe and Magento strengthens, the announcements around their product lines grows and widens. During the first General Session, Jason Woosley announced the upcoming integration of Adobe’s Adobe Sensei AI with Magento Commerce. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, intelligent and robust recommendations based on customer behavior based can be played on different shop pages, in order to improve the shopping experience and lift conversions. The feature is expected to be made available to Magento Commerce customers later this year. And that’s not all. Other Adobe services like Adobe Stock and Adobe Analytics will also be integrated successively within Magento. The aim is to allow business owners to gain useful insights, while also providing their customers with a quick and enjoyable shopping experience.
Jennifer Small, Senior Solution Consultant at Adobe, demoed this new functionality with Zumiez. Without involving a developer, a marketer can easily make edits by simple drag-and-drop in a mobile app and the ecommerce site. Small showed the audience the power of experience fragments and smart layouts, which use AI to personalize the experience for each customer segment.
Adobe Sensei also powers visual search on the Zumiez site. Small used an image of a hat to search for a similar hat on Zumiez. The results showed the exact same hat, along with comparable options.
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Amazon Sales Channel and Google Shopping Ads Channel
With Amazon Sales Channel, merchants can easily synchronize inventory and orders between the Amazon marketplace and their Magento site. Meanwhile, Google Shopping Ads will make it easy for ecommerce professionals to determine their target markets and attract new customers. Sellers can start selling their products on Amazon and launching marketing campaigns on Google, all by simply utilizing their Magento Admin dashboard.
These powerful tools can help ecommerce professionals expand their reach and connect with a greater audience in the most streamlined way possible. Lastly, anyone using Magento platform can access and use Amazon Sales Channel and Google Shopping Ads, as both extensions are available for free within the Magento Marketplace.
Omnichannel Order Management
Shoppers today want instant fulfillment—the ability to buy something online and immediately pick it up in store. The omnichannel order management lets merchants provide their shoppers with this option, bringing together the digital and physical experiences. Additionally, the new tool comes with multi-tender payment workflows, more granular roles and permissions, and full API coverage.
The future of Progressive Web Apps (PWA) Studio
For the last year Magento has really recognized and focused on mobile – one of the most important avenues for commerce growth. A positive proof for this focus is the development of PWA Studio, which is considered by Magento to be the most prominent PWA tool on the market. PWA Studio allows merchants to get to market faster while lowering the total cost of ownership. The robust integration with PayPal’s Braintree makes it even easier than ever for partners to get started with debit and credit transactions.
We at ConnectPOS have recognized the relevance of the topic as one of the most prominent technological advances and are convinced that PWA is the key technology to decide on the success of dealers in the future. That is the reason why we develop ConnectPOS PWA Consumer App – a Magento awarded innovation that enables your customers to just walk into your stores, scan a QR code, and then they can have a seamless self-shopping experience till checkout. You can learn more about this amazing innovation and register a free trial HERE.
CONNECTPOS LIVE AT MAGENTO BOOTH
ConnectPOS has participated in a lot of activities at Magento Imagine this year. Apart from attending keynotes and interesting side events, we, as a winner of the Innovations Lab, have been kindly offered to demo live in Magento booth on May 13 and 14.
During the demo, ConnectPOS has presented our idea and vision about the future retail which focuses on building a seamless experience for customers across channels and on multiple touch points during their shopping journey. Thanks to Magento team, we also had chances to showcase to a lot of merchants and partners our latest innovations including: PWA Consumer App, wireless Customer Screen and ConnectPOS Facial Recognition, which help to improve different stages in the customer journey.
All in all, it has been a successful and memorable Imagine. If you miss any keynotes, don’t worry since Magento team already offered live stream video for you to watch on demand.