Why Migrate to Magento 2 Today?
(Including Quick Note on Magento 2.2.6)

Magento’s market share is growing in many key markets. – Magento is long sought after as a leading eCommerce platform across the world. Many large eCommerce players leveraged on it take off their business. There are two reasons for this level of influence Magento enjoys, its community and technical expertise. While the community is a topic for another day, let us discuss technical expertise and why budding eCommerce players must choose to upgrade / migrate to Magento 2 today.

The technical aspects are important to discuss in the light of the recent development i.e. Adobe’s takeover. When Adobe paid $1.68 Billion for Magento, it paid for fore mentioned points, community and code base. Hence, it is interesting to see how Adobe will steer the company in the upcoming months. However, let us look at the key technical reasons to choose Magento 2 or migrate to the latest Magento 2 version.

• Improved caching

Magento 2 has built-in full caching enabled and the page load has substantially improved. All the key pages i.e. home page, product page and checkout page load in less than 1.5 sec. This can further reduce when caching is enabled. Varnish Cache and Redis Cache support is provided out of box in Magento 2.

• Improved customization

The location of the code related to a module is located in a single directory now. This allows the developer to find a module related code and customize it easily. Magento 2 also uses the PHP package manager and composer to manage the installations of individual modules.

• Support of multiple databases

Magento 2 today supports multiple databases for orders, products, checkout, etc. This paves way for faster loading websites and allows concurrent admins to update the data without conflict. It further translates into added benefits in flexibility of customizations and productivity of the team who use them.

• Improved integration capability

The new API method in Magento 2 is more efficient. The new API allows for retrieving all the data in one call. This provides huge advantage to store owners, as it makes the integration with ERPs less cumbersome.

Read our blog on the Top 5 features for B2B in Magento 2.

What does Adobe takeover mean?

Adobe already has a strong set of marketing cloud tools. The company has been building and buying companies to strengthen this product portfolio. It is imperative that Adobe will integrate the Magento platform with the rest of its portfolio. However, below are some of the integrations that are eventuality or the ball has started to roll on some of them.

• Integration with Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager or AEM (formerly DAY Software’s Communiqué) is a rather popular CMS platform in the marketing circles. Priced on the costlier side, it is a vital piece in the Adobe’s stable of products. Magento and AEM users might soon be able to integrate their two platforms seamlessly. This will be vital for Adobe due to the co-dependent functionalities of a CMS and eCommerce platform. Customers who use both the systems might soon be able to experience seamless interoperability between the systems for aspects like uploading content, designing front-end experience, extending shopping experience across multiple marketing assets, etc.

• Adobe Analytics Cloud

Analytics is another front where Adobe successfully took long strides. Many Adobe users buy the marketing cloud for the analytics capability. Given that Magento is a leading eCommerce platform with a mediocre analytics platform (only in comparison with Adobe Analytics Cloud), it is highly likely that Adobe’s next move will be to create an interoperability between Magento and its analytics cloud. This will give the Magento users an edge over most competition who has been eating into the market share.

• Third-party Marketplaces and Ad Platforms

Magento has long been compatible with marketplaces like Amazon marketplace and ebay. However, customers had to leverage on third-party apps for this integration. This meant the scope of the supported features is limited and customers had to limit themselves to the customizations possible by these vendors. However, this might soon change. If Magento seamlessly integrates with Magento, Adobe might leverage on this functionality to promote the advertising capabilities of the respective platforms. This gives much better control to the Magento users to promote and sell their products on marketplaces.

• New payment methods

Magento already allows seamless integration with Amazon Pay. Given that numerous Magento users leverage on Amazon to sell their products, it is set to benefit many merchants using Magento. Additionally, other payment methods are set to enter the Magento platform as default options. This is in line with Adobe’s plan to turn every experience shoppable.

Why Migrate to Magento Right Now?

Many industry stakeholders today question the need to migrate to Magento 2. They are rather inclined to play the wait and watch game with the whole developments around the Adobe acquisition. However, we think this is the perfect time to migrate to Magento. History taught us that Adobe integrates all the products it acquires with the rest of it product portfolio. This is an eventuality. Similarly, in the process of adopting to Adobe’s portfolio, Magento will seamlessly work with the other Adobe products like AEM, Analytics Cloud, along with other cloud products. This strategy is a pivotal point to Adobe’s strategy.

Read our blog on how to migrate to Magento,
The Magento users, who migrate now, are set to have first mover advantage due to upcoming product integration. Magento’s recent upgrades also tend to develop the product in the direction towards its eventual integration. Below are the notes from the latest Magento 2.2.6 update

Improvement in code and performance

• Improvement in code performance – Re-indexing time of products was brought down by 98% due to optimization of indexing logic
• Loading time for category and product pages has significantly reduced

Improvement in ease of checkout process

• Shopping cart content remains intact in spite of repeated reloads. This is set to improve the end user experience.
• Refreshing checkout page does not delete the information entered into the forms.

Payment related updates

• Support to Amazon Pay, dotmailer and Klarna were extended

Changes to shipping and batch processing

• Improvement in handling shipping process
• Batch goods handling process improved

Other changes include

• Improvements in terms of B2B
• Improvement in product bundling
• Better Catalog management
• Captcha changes
• Improvement in cart management and checkout
• Enhanced product configurations
• Improvements customer accounts

For complete list of updates in Magento 2.2.6, refer to the link.

Conclusion

With the recent development in the background, it is important to appreciate the timing. Moving to Magento 2 right away will give the users the benefit of leveraging on Adobe’s suit of products. However, make sure to identify the right partner to help you migrate to Magento 2 to take full advantage of the migration. For more info, contact us at info@i95dev.com.