Highlights from Magento Imagine 2017

BRIGHTON, U.K. - April 13, 2017 - PRLog -- Thousands of attendees from over 50 countries across the globe, gathered in Las Vegas from 3-5th April for Magento conference Imagine 2017. The theme "powering tomorrow" was explored by keynote, breakout and product sessions from speakers including Stella & Dot CEO Jessica Herrin, Magento's James Zetlen and keynote speech by Serena WIlliams.

Serena's keynote speech stressed the importance of constant innovation, rallying your community, recovering from adversity in style and a commitment to authenticity with a focus on audiences defined by psychographics rather than demographics.

As thousands of enterprise brands consider upgrading to Magento 2, Magento unveiled new performance enhancements including Magento Social, Bluefoot CMS and new features specifically targeting the B2B ecommerce built into Magento 2s core. Giving brands and marketers the power to easily create Facebook and Pinterest shops, create landing pages and merchandising ecommerce shops as well as a host of B2B features including bulk ordering and request a quote features.

Magento Social

Paul Boisvert, Head of Product Management at Magento believes that "By end of the year social commerce is expected to drive 10% of all sales". With this is mind, Shopial have designed a solution called Magento Social, to enable Magento brands to set up social commerce with ease. Magento Social gives retailers the ability to easily port their product catalogue and create a shop in Facebook or Pinterest in just a few clicks. This Facebook shop has a fully customisable look to stay on-brand and Facebook ads can then be created for that store in a matter of clicks.

BlueFoot CMS

One of the biggest barriers for ecommerce marketers can be updating their store, creating new landing pages and campaigns. These tasks used to be given to frontend developers, costing marketers time and money and not always getting the results they intended. Developed by Magento partner agency GENE Commerce (http://www.gene.co.uk/), BlueFoot CMS is a powerful drag and drop tool, that enables marketers to create and edit pages easily.

Manage B2B and B2C All In One Place

Historically, the B2B market has been thought of as a separate challenge with specific needs that can only be catered for on a specialist platform. Magento has now brought a host of B2B specific features into Magento 2 to enable brands to seamlessly manage both sides of the business at the same time. Through improving bulk ordering, corporate accounts with hierarchical buyer organisation modelling and requesting a quote processes, B2B brands can easily manage their Magento 2 shop with out of the box functionality.

What are the Implications?

These key announcements from Imagine 2017 brought home the "Powering Tomorrow" message as frontend developers will have more time to improve the user experience for Magento 2 stores and marketers are given more power and control over their site to achieve evermore agile strategies to reach a sophisticated omnichannel audience.