Top 5 Magento Enterprise Edition Features – 2018 - Sigma Infosolutions

A good number of small scale and medium scale businesses prefer the Magento Community Edition for being budget friendly but the Magento Enterprise Edition is built for the development of a rapid and cost-effective innovation in the long run. The platform uses a combination of rich, out-of-the-box functionality, enterprise performance and powerful business tools to get ahead of increasingly complex commerce operations and growing customer demands.

Let us take a look at some of the Magento Enterprise features—

1. Advanced Search –Magento Enterprise Edition includes Elastic Search for the most powerful customer search experience, with advanced search rules that deliver the results your customers expect. Magento 2 EEs Elastic search comes with powerful features such as

1. Automatic suggestion for better user experience (aka “Did you mean?” feature)
2. Very fast autocomplete
3. Smart correction when text query is misspelled
4. Search for product attribute options

And much more.

2. Advanced Targeting and Segmentation tools – Magento 2 Enterprise Edition has an interesting feature that allows you to dynamically display content and promotions to specific customers, based on properties such as customer address, order history, shopping cart contents and so on.You can also optimize marketing initiatives based on targeted segments by using shopping cart price rules and banners. Because customer segment information is dynamic and is constantly refreshed, customers can become associated and disassociated from a segment as they continue shopping from the online store.

This boosts the conversion rate for the business and creates a unique shopping experience for their customers, promising more potential ones.

3. Advanced Merchandising and Promotion –Grabbing a customer’s attention is an expensive task. Once you have got it, the next challenge is how do you show your customers the right products and promotions to increase your chances of making a sale? Merchandising and promotion are great tools to increase conversion rates. Drag and drop merchandising, flexible pricing and promotions, rules-based cross-sales and up-sales, and customer segmentation tools are all features of Magento Enterprise Edition that help you automate creative strategies for maximizing customer sales.

4. Advanced Content Management –Integrating third-party CMS solutions to your Magento build adds cost and complexity. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition includes drag-and-drop content management capability with staging and preview features that allow your content creators to build content and get it approved without involving a developer.

5. B2B Support –Business-to-business eCommerce is growing. Companies are working on their B2B eCommerce strategy, increasing the competition. Many companies are using an obsolete custom-built eCommerce platform, or don’t have one at all. A proper eCommerce platform for B2B allows your business to grow by giving smaller customers an opportunity to self-service, allowing you to focus on higher-value customers. Magento’s B2B functionality includes requisition lists, quotes, negotiated pricing, product exclusivity, and corporate accounts. These built-in features allow you to focus on customizing the features that are unique to your business operation.

While Magento 2 has an affordable Community plan perfect for small businesses, companies who are serious about e-Commerce or drive high revenue are encouraged to invest in Magento 2 Enterprise.

It offers different payment methods for you and your customers. You can download these as extensions to your Magento account for different Magento Enterprise pricing options. These include:

Amazon Pay: You can integrate Amazon Pay into your Magento account.

Apple Pay: Your customers can easily purchase your products through their iOS device or on their Apple ID.

Google Wallet: You can accept payments from your customer’s Google accounts and from the card they have saved in their Google Wallet.

Bitcoin and Altcoins: Because of its security and effectiveness, more digital consumers are choosing bitcoins and altcoins as payment methods. Accepting bitcoins and altcoins can help your store attract these consumers.

PayPal: This payment service is by far the most widely used because of its efficiency and safety. PayPal is also great for international shoppers.

These extension options and add-ons will help you appeal to a wider audience while also benefitting you in terms of gaining revenue. It is important to identify the right platform based on your business needs. Magento Enterprise Edition allows the businesses to build a well-designed, responsive and secure website, enabling the owner to control the web store efficiently in order to scale up their online marketing game.

Advantages of Using Magento Enterprise Edition - Sigma Infosolutions

Magento Enterprise Edition blurs the lines between what is possible; giving the business owner the power to create bold and unique shopping experiences that will transform the customer’s experience on the website. Although many small to medium businesses prefer the Magento Community edition for being budget-friendly, the Magento Enterprise edition is built for rapid and cost-effective innovation in the long run. The platform combines rich, out-of-the-box functionality, enterprise performance and scale, and powerful business tools to get ahead of increasingly complex commerce operations and growing customer demands. Let us take a look at some of the Magento Enterprise features which make it stand out from the Magento Community edition:

1. Enhanced Enterprise Efficiency & Flexibility

Magento Enterprise Edition comes with a powerful Admin experience. The modern and intuitive user interface allows the owners to effectively manage and maintain online stores. The Admin dashboard comes with a quick access to the sales, orders, product data and other features saving the time during administrative tasks. It comes with features that allow the users to save and customize the views in the Admin Panel. Magento Enterprise Edition’s step-by-step product creation tool guide has made it very simple and 4 times faster to add new products to the store.

2. Customer Segmentation and Personalization

Magento Enterprise Edition has an interesting feature that allows the segmentation of the users based on gender, location, history, purchasing value, wish-list and other factors and provides more marketing options. It also allows creating personalized shopping experiences by dynamically displaying promotions and content based on the demographic and geographic behavior of the target audience. This boosts the conversion rate and creates a unique shopping experience.

3. Elasticsearch

Magento Enterprise Edition has an integrated Elastic search technology which makes it very easy to set up and handle large catalogs efficiently. It manages global search-results in 33 languages which gives the Magento Enterprise Edition extra brownie points. Elasticsearch offers suggestions for misspellings, synonym management and support for stop words helping in increasing the conversion rate.

4. Better Payment Security

Magento  Enterprise edition provides a secure payment gateway for the payments. It comes with integrated payment gateways like Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net, CyberSource and WorldPay securing the payments. Although the Magento Community Edition users can get payment extensions through Magento Marketplace, the problem with using a lot of third-party extensions is that sometimes they can conflict with each other, causing problems and instability in the system.Magento 2 Enterprise Edition comes with secure payment gateway and PCI complaint standards to make the whole process of purchasing super-fast and equally secure.

5. Full Page Caching

When it comes to your website’s performance, EE makes it possible for your site to grow without limits. Whenever a user visits or re-visits the website, the updated version of Magento displays the HTML cached data stored in the buffer area rather than fetching the information from the database. The benefit of full-page caching is that it reduces the load-time on the server, improving the response time and boosting the performance. In times of high traffic, full page caching helps in avoiding the downtime as the load on the server is reduced.

6. Easy Checkout Process

Magento EE has been successfully enhanced with the highly customizable interface to place orders and complete the checkout process. The platform is now 50% faster, requires a very few steps and customer related information while making the purchases. This has made the checkout process easier, quicker and secure as compared to the previous version.

It is vital to select the right platform based on the business needs. A smaller company that doesn’t need the upgraded performance capabilities or advanced features that Magento Enterprise offers, is advised to go with the Community Edition. However, for chasing a larger audience, Enterprise Edition enables you to reach specific segments and grant much more flexible options.  Magento enterprise edition allows the businesses to build a well-designed, responsive and secure website, enabling the owner to control the web store efficiently in order to scale up their online marketing game.

Magento’s eCommerce Edge Over Opencart

Picking the right eCommerce platform for your business’s online existence is not so easy given that there are quite a variety of options available in the market with varying degree of features. Picking the best platform is important to ensure that both the business and its customers have the basic ease of use. Two eCommerce platforms that serve as open source PHP based content management systems (CMS) are Magento and Opencart. Since both these systems have no user fee for basic platform building, the difference markers between these sources are the customization and additional features. To narrow things and help your business make the right decision, here are five basic factors that reveal the pros and cons of both Magento and Opencart.

• Access: The major line of difference between Magento and Opencart is its user interface, wherein the former eCommerce platform needs professionals to develop and customize features for businesses. On the contrary, Opencart allows businesses to equip the platform and get it running easily with its simple UI and inbuilt interface. Despite Magento’s complicated PHP interface, it offers the best options for building on a platform at any given point in time for the business.

• Customization: Every business needs its unique signature to be imprinted on the eCommerce platform to build the brand. Magento stands miles apart from Opencart due to its extensive customization features that can help the business to experiment as well as build a user-catchy platform according to themes, seasons, special events, etc.

• Content marketing: Magento’s other great advantage over Opencart lies in its smoothly integrated SEO tools. While the basic SEO tools are well structured in both Magento and Opencart, the major edge is that Magento’s tools are well-rooted and easier to master due to the incorporation of schema markup and canonical tags.

• Market presence: Opencart is fairly new to the arena and has fewer adopters as compared to Magento that has more than 20% market share with more than 14,000 stores in Alexa’s top 1 million platforms. This existent presence of Magento gives its users the ability to connect and be backed easily on the web than any other eCommerce platform source on the market.

• Costs: At the end of the day, the primary criteria for choosing between Magento and Opencart lies in its cost incurrences over time. While Opencart is fairly cheaper due to its simpler structure hosting, Magento needs businesses to spend based on the services being sought. However, the pricing of the features after hosting are heavy, Magento’s services match up to the costs.

One last criterion that could possibly help in making the final decision between Magento and Opencart lies in the scalability of the platforms over time. For a smaller company that just needs a website entry, Opencart can serve the easy route. For a business that is focused on growing over time and having the best user-interface would benefit from Magento as these eCommerce platforms are built for customization perfection with the best capabilities to monitor user behavior, etc. Magento offers the most up-to-date features for those businesses that are driven solely based on the internet presence. For a business that has specific needs that vary periodically, Magento would be a best-suited eCommerce platform, provided it is ready to invest in dedicated resources to get the platform up and functional from day one. 

What Magento 2 Enterprise can offer over Community

For an online-shop looking to scale its operations or looking at improving conversion rate, this is one of the key questions. Magento 2 EE comes with an exciting feature list such as multiple wish lists, automated e-mail marketing scheduling (multi-level re-targeting), customer segmentation, easy and hassle-free payments and much more to engage customers with an easy and safe shopping experience. These features make the customer’s shopping experience really smooth, making them like your brand and increasing the chances of their coming back to you.

While the cost is the main concern, there are many other reasons behind this dilemma.

Every e-commerce business is unique with a unique set of needs but we can detail some key differences between Community Edition and Enterprise Edition so that the merchants have a better understanding of where to start. Let’s take a look at them:

CostWhen comparing Magento 2 Community Edition and Magento 2 Enterprise Edition, the first visible difference, and cause of concern is the cost. While Magento 2 Community Version is Free; the license for Magento 2 Enterprise Edition comes at a cost. This can be justified by the advanced features and capabilities that come with it and if it is meeting your goals.

Targeted Promotions, Persistent Shopping and Private SalesSuccessful e-commerce businesses know the art of the upsell and cross-sell. It is all about appealing to the buyer on the way out and during the customer to buy more. Keeping this in mind Magento 2 Enterprise Edition comes with a feature of Targeted Promotions whereas Community Version does not have this feature. Again, the Enterprise Edition comes with a feature of persistent shopping and private sales for the merchants whereas the community version does not give you this feature.

Automated E-mail Marketing Reminder
With Enterprise Editions automated e-mail marketing reminder feature the retailer can understand how each customer acts. This provides the ability to retarget the customers with relevant offers based on real actions. By understanding which store’s products interest the customers, the length of their decision-making process and what they care about provides a boost to their marketing activities.

24*7 Technical SupportThe merchants who go for Magento 2 Enterprise Edition enjoy a 24*7 technical support but in community edition, you need to rely on the community support which is not always reliable.

Gifting option and Reward PointsMagento 2 Enterprise Edition adds the reward points to the customer’s account which can be redeemed whenever they want. The Community Version does not give you this great option. The EE also comes with a gifting option for customers which the CE does not have. The customers can present those gifts to their family and friends, increasing your Brand’s credibility and customers.

Multiple Wish-Lists and Configurable Order Tracking WidgetMagento 2 EE comes with a feature for customers to make their own wish-lists. These wish-lists can then be viewed by other customers to get an idea of what people are buying and even allow choosing from other person’s wish-list. Magento 2 EE also allows the customers to track their placed order’s status by just filling in some basic order details. The CE of Magento 2 does not have both the above-mentioned features.

PA-DSS Certification/ Payment ProcessMagento 2 EE complies with Payment Application Data Security Standards to provide a smooth and secure mode of payment to the customers. This enhances the overall shopping experience for the customers with your company. Whereas, the CE does not comply with PA-DSS certification for payments.

These are some of the main features to highlight the difference between Magento 2 EE and CE.

But are these features enough to use Magento 2 Enterprise Edition instead of Community Edition? It depends on the business objectives and growth. If one has the ability to implement most of the EE features with the help of third-party solutions in CE then you need to keep in mind that the cost will vary depending on the add-on functionality. One needs to also bear in mind that overloading the application with extensions, performance and security can go down south. In conclusion, Magento 2 Enterprise Edition is definitely a better option for larger merchants who want to scale up their online store and don’t want to deal with customizations and enhancements.