Magento Imagine Day 2 Keynote Recap: Commerce is Limitless

During the Day 1 keynote session, Jason Woosley, VP of Commerce Product & Platform, Experience Business at Adobe, teased a few product announcements. John Stockton, Sr. Director of Product at Adobe, dove into each product update in the Day 2 keynote.

“People aren’t just buying products, they’re buying experiences,” says Stockton. The latest product announcements aim to help merchants create personalized shopping journeys across all touchpoints and make every experience shoppable.

Latest Magento Product Capabilities

Page Builder

Page Builder is a premier example of how the Magento community comes together to transform an idea into a reality. The new feature, available to merchants on Magento 2.3, enables users to create and deliver content ten times faster. Offering fresh content helps you engage and excite shoppers every time they visit your site—improving retention and lifetime value. Page Builder works seamlessly with Media Gallery, so you can easily reuse content across channels and sites.

Marketers can easily create rich shopping experiences without a frontend developer with features such as drag and drop capabilities, preview pages, promotional banners, and the ability to schedule updates in advance to go live automatically—ideal for the busy holiday season.

Amazon Sales Channel & Google Shopping ads Channel

With the Amazon Sales Channel, you can manage your direct channels and Amazon sales within the Magento admin. Google Shopping ads Channel syncs with the Google Shopping Center and smart campaigns, resulting in a superior ROI.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Magento’s PWA Studio eliminates the need for your brand or retailer to create a separate app for a seamless mobile experience. Using Rural King as a demo, the demonstrator showed how PWA improves the mobile conversion rate and can act as an endless aisle in-store. Building an ecommerce site with PWA is substantially less work—it’s one build for experiences across devices, and the payment integration with Braintree is out-of-the-box.

Magento Commerce 2019 and Beyond

Steve Krebsbach, Sr. Director of Global Cloud Operations at Adobe, announced a two-tier architecture that’s launching later this year. “You can get as big as you want and we won’t get in the way,” he says. The two-tier architecture (one tier being the frontend, the other the backend) solves the problem for businesses that want to grow without hosting on-premise. In other words, your business could take on more traffic on the frontend while scaling vertically on the backend. “This allows you to take in more and more web traffic, and perform more and more transactions and queries. That means you can deliver more and more experiences to your shoppers,” says Krebsbach.

In 2020, Magento will launch Cloud Native Services which will enable true on-demand autoscaling for when you need to scale your business during the holiday season, or anytime you have a lift in traffic. But the crowd doesn’t haven’t to wait until 2020 for something exciting. In Oprah fashion, Krebsbach announced that in the next 90 days, all Imagine attendees receive free Magento Commerce Cloud training for developers, including the test for certification. “You get free training! You get free training! Everybody gets free training!”

“Helping you realize the power of commerce without limits.”

Woosley came back on stage to recognize the Magento Masters, a program that elevates its most active community members. Since starting the program two years ago, they’ve orchestrated a global community, experienced triple-digit growth in pull requests (how you tell other members what you’ve pushed to the GitHub repository), and doubled the number of community moderators.

The combination of these thought leaders and commerce has provided a “fertile ground” for innovation across all industries around the globe. They’re “helping you realize the power of commerce without limits,” states Woosley.

Magento Partners & Merchants

Jenny Cheng, VP of Global Professional Services at PayPal, notes that we’re in the fourth industrial revolution. She reflects on the evolution of grocery shopping. Her mother would spend hours driving to various stores, comparing prices. Now, she can grocery shop from her couch and have it delivered the same day. In ten years, this will likely be fully automated. Your fridge will know when you’re about to run out of milk or eggs and automatically reorder in advance.

“We’re seeing payments move from point of sale to point of engagement,” says Cheng. Commerce is anywhere a customer is engaged, be it social media, in-store, or the ecommerce site. Through partnerships, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, PayPal is building resiliency for its technology platform. Out of these partnerships emerged Checkout on Instagram and smart payment buttons. “This journey is just beginning, the fourth industrial revolution has just started,” notes Cheng.

Gillian Campbell, VP of Omnichannel Strategy at HP, discusses their global direction and digital disruption over the next few years. Their goal: “Globally consistent, regionally relevant,” says Campbell. In eight months, they upgraded their ecommerce sites in Asia to Magento, allowing them to offer a Click and Collect option, test new features throughout the site, and scale seamlessly. “We decided to go with Magento two years ago because we could see a partner that’s very flexible,” says Campbell.

In Asia, HP has seen a 25% increase quarter-over-quarter this year—stating Magento as a key contributing factor. Next, they’re be launching Magento in Latin America, Canada, and finally US and Japan.

Last to join the stage was Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director at the California Symphony, to talk about how they doubled their audience and quadrupled their contributions in the past five years. Initially, they misidentified the problem as the product and tried solving the issue by adjusting the programming. Bergauer quickly realized, “the product is not the problem.”

California Symphony adjusted their strategy and found a way to improve retention and contributions through UX research, customer loyalty, and diversity. When users enter the California Symphony site, they don’t want to see a bunch of jargon they don’t understand. They want to know how they should dress, when should they applaud, or whether or not they can bring their drink to their seat. To generate loyalty, Bergauer recreated the patron journey, so there is one clear next step at a time rather than bombarding the person with direct mail, emails, and phone calls. To drive diversity, California Symphony became the first orchestra to publicly commit to diversity, from staff and board members to composers and performers.

If you’d like to chat with someone from the Blue Acorn iCi team about Magento’s latest capabilities or you’re looking to replatform to Magento, feel free to contact us here.

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