Magento Celebrates Commerce Innovation With Imagine Excellence Awards

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Apr 13, 2016) - Magento Commerce, the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation, today honored the winners of the 2016 Imagine Excellence Awards, recognizing the exceptional creativity, innovation and success of merchants across the global Magento ecosystem. Winners, including Nestle, recipient of the Inaugural Trailblazer Award, were selected and celebrated for driving commerce excellence through their extraordinary efforts to use technology to delight their customers across their shopping journey.

Magento announced the 2016 Excellence Award honorees from the keynote stage of the Imagine 2016 conference in Las Vegas, applauding achievements across nine award categories:

• Frankfurt Airport was awarded the Best Omnichannel Experience: Already one of Europe's largest travel hubs and the biggest shopping mall in Germany, Frankfurt Airport has created a first-of-its-kind omnichannel commerce experience for customers. Now, travelers easily shop on the aircraft or taxi, purchase, and quickly schedule home or gate-side delivery or pick up of dinner, gifts, etc as they speed thru the airport mall area.
  
  
• Rite Aid was awarded the Growth Award for demonstrating extraordinary year-over-year growth across all channels, powered by Magento Commerce. During the 2015 holiday season, Rite Aid experienced triple-digit growth in transactions and revenue. Factors driving this growth include Magento's open architecture that allows for rapid development cycles and iteration as well as site performance enhancements through enterprise features including full-page caching and sophisticated marketing facilities.
  
  
• Barbeques Galore was awarded the Commerce Marketer of the Year honor for maximizing its multi-channel marketing across its Magento Enterprise Edition site and 100+ stores, driving a 350 percent increase in conversion rate and a 360 percent uplift in year-over-year sales.
  
  
• Nestle BabyNes was recognized as the Most Innovative brand delivering an immersive omnichannel experience through Internet of Things connectivity. Nestle's smart baby nutrition system is integrated into a complete omnichannel experience (across Web, mobile app, point of sale and social channels) and serves multiple geographies including the US, Europe and China.
  
  
• Successfully launching new international business operations in Ireland and Germany, with additional delivery from its online business shipping to over 20 EU markets, Screwfix was given the honor of the Great Explorer Award for International Expansion.
  
  
• Setting an industry standard of excellence, Le Creuset won the Best Web Design award for its new website, which balances compelling content and crisp design with a user experience carefully tailored to reduce bounce rates while maximizing sales and average order value. Launched in the United States in October 2015, the new website exceeded expectations in the fourth quarter and continues to drive record revenue for the company in 2016. Le Creuset is now rolling out the website globally to more than 29 countries.
  
  
• For usability and design on a portable handheld, Sunspel earned the award for Best Mobile Experience. The new, flexible website provides a fast, usable, and attractive experience, regardless of device. This is vital to serving Sunspel's loyal customer base, around 50 percent of whom shop via tablet or smartphone. The results have been outstanding. A combination of improved conversion rates, increased sales, and higher order values, has almost doubled revenue year-over-year. The impact is even more pronounced for smartphone users, where the optimized design has achieved a 200 percent revenue increase.
  
  
• St. John Knits claimed the Best Commerce Launch award for seamlessly extending its consultative, in-store experience online. St. John connected customer interests and behaviors by deftly blending content and commerce. The result: 35 percent of ecommerce customers are new to the brand and 30 percent were once lapsed customers for a year or more.
  
  
• Gallagher Europe was awarded Best B2B User Experience for creating a best-in-class, self-serve user interface, including dynamic and bulk pricing and product content for syndication. As a global market leader for electric fencing in animal management, Gallagher services The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Sweden. The site offers several advanced features like an innovative product wizard, an advanced dealer locator and dynamic pricing based on visitors' choices, helping its customers find tailored solutions for electric fencing.
  
  
• In a conference first, Washington-based SaltWorks tied for Best B2B User Experience. SaltWorks developed their exclusive "Salt Portal" to extend the highly engaging experience of their consumer site to serve the exacting needs of its business customers. The company's new B2B portal features a responsive mobile-friendly design, convenient product discovery and offers instant access to customer-specific pricing.
  
  

"The winners of the 2016 Imagine Excellence Awards embody the relentless commitment of our clients and partners taking commerce to the next level," said Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce. "From the omnichannel and technology innovators to the explorers carving out new ways of doing business, it is because of the continued innovation of our community that Magento is at the forefront of global commerce. On behalf of everyone at Magento Commerce, congratulations to all the finalists and winners of the 2016 Excellence Awards."

The 2016 Imagine Excellence Award finalists and winners were showcased at the Wynn Las Vegas, April 11-13, during Imagine 2016.

About Magento Commerce

Trusted by more than 250,000 businesses worldwide, Magento Commerce is the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation to retailers, brands and branded manufacturers across retail B2C and B2B industries. In addition to its flagship open source digital commerce platform, Magento Commerce boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-based omnichannel solutions empowering merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping experiences. With over $50B in gross merchandise volume transacted on the platform annually, Magento Commerce is the foremost provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000 and the Internet Retailer B2B 300, counting more than double the clients to the next closest competitor. Magento Commerce is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology partners, a highly active global developer community and the largest eCommerce marketplace for extensions available for download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found at www.magento.com.