Magento Commerce Demonstrates Magento 2 Momentum, Announces Plans for Next Release

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Apr 13, 2016) - Magento Commerce, the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation, today announced robust growth and continued momentum for the company's ground-breaking Magento 2 commerce platform. The company also announced that it will release new versions, Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1 and Community Edition 2.1, during the second quarter which will feature new functionality and capabilities. Both will include new payments functionality and user interface improvements, while Enterprise Edition will also offer enhanced staging and preview and Elasticsearch.

Magento is the worldwide leader in eCommerce, powering more than 250,000 sites globally and supporting over $50 billion in gross merchandise volume annually. Since its launch as an independent company in November of last year, Magento has continued to be the commerce platform of choice, adding 300 new enterprise customers.

"We're seeing incredible market interest in our next generation Magento 2 platform," said Steve Yankovich," chief product officer of Magento Commerce. "In the few months since its release, we've already seen nearly 230,000 downloads of the software and over 800 sites live on the new platform. That is greater traction than most of our competitors see in five years."

"Magento 2 is a modern architecture that will allow us to go further and faster. Our in-house developers can leverage the open, modular code and off-the-shelf extensions to create the unique shopping experiences we want for our brands and we can easily take advantage of powerful out-of-box features to accelerate time to market," said Steven King, Head of Information Systems, Kurt Geiger, with responsibility for the Magento 2 project.

Magento continues to evolve its platform to further empower brands, retailers and branded manufacturers to quickly and cost-effectively deliver engaging omnichannel shopping experiences. With an architecture that enables easier upgrades and with multiple platform releases planned per year, Magento is dedicated to enabling its users to adapt and transform with the rapid pace of modern commerce.

"Magento has always been the platform of choice for the trailblazers of commerce: Those who have a vision for the customer experience they want to create and who don't accept limitations," said Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce. "Our continued commitment to adding new features and functionality ensures their businesses remain ahead of the innovation curve and outpace their competitors."

The Magento 2 platform is designed to meet the needs of large and growing sellers through an enhanced, open architecture, performance and scalability advances, improved business user tools, and powerful shopper experience upgrades. New Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1 features will include:

• Enhanced business productivity with staging and preview functionality - A new and enhanced staging process makes it faster, easier and less expensive to create, schedule and preview future site updates and campaigns without involving IT. Merchants gain peace of mind that all updates occur at the right time and provide the optimum customer experience. The new feature also provides greater visibility into all planned updates with a user-friendly dashboard.
• New Elasticsearch - A shift to the leading open source search technology, Elasticsearch, gives merchants the ability to easily handle large catalogs and scale up search functionality as traffic increases, is easy to configure and delivers high quality results.
• PayPal enhancements - A more seamless checkout experience that allows PayPal users to complete the purchase process without leaving a merchant's site. In addition, merchants can now enable faster checkouts for repeat purchases by securely saving credit card information for customers with PayPal.
• Braintree updates - Hosted Fields enable merchants to qualify for easier PCI compliance while still retaining complete control over their checkout design and layout.
• Better business tools - A number of Admin user interface improvements also help business users to more efficiently manage site operations.

Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1 includes performance optimizations and is positioned to perform and scale seamlessly for merchants across industries throughout the business growth cycle. Recent benchmark tests available at Magento.com/Magento2Performance show that Magento 2 outperforms the Magento 1.x platform across core site activities.

For the ecosystem of Magento Solution Partners, Magento is providing comprehensive upgrade training, best practices, and data and code migration tools to ensure existing Magento merchants have the support and confidence they need to migrate to the next generation platform starting now.

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.