Orange is the New Black? Our take on Magento 2.0
Whether you have an existing eCommerce business, or are looking for a new one, it’s easy to be intimidated about picking the right platform.
Over the last 10 years we’ve watched the eCommerce landscape shift and evolve as new platforms have come onto the market – even here at Propeller we’ve developed eCommerce projects across a broad range of technical approaches. Including bespoke eCommerce builds, our own proprietary platform Propshop, WooCommerce, Shopify and of course Magento. With each approach, there is a unique set of challenges and opportunities – what you gain in flexibility of the Front End template, you often loose in adaptability to new 3rd party integrations. Likewise with a platform that offers larger scope for 3rd party integrations, sometimes you have to balance that against increased hosting and speed considerations for ongoing support. So when Magento released 2.0 towards the end of 2015 – the industry was ready and listening to see if some of the Magento specific challenges of v1 had been resolved.
Since the early days of eCommerce platforms, Magento has always been a popular option so the launch of 2.0 came as pretty exciting news. This excitement has clearly contributed to the success of the platform with it now leading the way across the UK & Europe as platform of choice. Here at Propeller we’ve seen a similar trend and with many Magento 2.0 projects currently in development, we’d love to share our initial assessment of Magento 2.0 so far…
Sorry but I had to… Magento 1 was often intimidating and confusing for many eCommerce Managers & Marketing Managers. Whilst the functionality was there to update most areas of the Product Catalogue & CMS it often involved several clicks through text-heavy pages with no indication of the imagery attached to it. The new CMS is intuitive and easy to use allowing brands to take back control of their online stores.
This one is pretty exciting – there was huge excitement around Apple Pay’s 1 touch checkout when it first launched, but many retailers have been slow to enable it on their websites, due to the substantial development time and complex payment gateway integrations involved. So when we heard that Magento 2.0 was releasing the Braintree & PayPal Payment with Apple Pay, we were super excited. Allowing Customers to bypass checkout and confirm purchase with a single finger print brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “Click, Click & Buy”!
Seriously though, this shouldn’t be underestimated! A happy Front Ender makes for a GORGEOUS and STUNNING digital flagship.
Here are the specifics from our team:
Magento 2 utilises RequireJS for modular script loading, improving the speed and quality of the code you write:
- Utilises the task runner ‘Grunt’ to streamline a developers workflow.
- A more modular approach has been taken to the frontend structure with assets now encapsulated per Magento module.
- Common layout customisation tasks are now easier with the likes of the <remove> and <move> layout instructions.
Shaking off its old reputation, the Magento 2.0 framework features improved performance and scalability (now that full-page caching is built in). This means that for our increasing mobile audiences, even dodgy 3G, can’t stop those potential impulse conversions on our online stores.