At the Imagine conference in Las Vegas Magento released the newest versions for both Community and Enterprise. The new releases are packed with great features, new technology and better security. As always we recommend that anyone who is using Magento Community 1.5 or earlier upgrade to version 1.7. If your website needs to be upgraded please give us a call at 888.772.0777 or 303.473.4400 for a quote.
Magento Community 1.7
There are tons of new features in Community 1.7 but I would say our favorite (and perhaps our client’s favorite) has been the Customer Group Pricing. This new feature allows you to easily create separate prices for products depending on the Customer Group. That means that you can set up pricing for your Wholesale, Retail and other Customer Groups right in the product page. Here’s a quick example:
In this image you can see that all my regular customers would purchase the T-shirt for $10. While my Wholesale customers can purchase the T-Shirt for $5.99. Another great feature is that you can import all your Wholesale or other Customer Group Prices directly into Magento. So if you intent to upgrade and use this new feature it’s fairly easy to set up.
Next we love the new support for Mobile HTML 5 which makes it much easier to create a mobile friendly store. It’s out of box features are enough to get any site on it’s feet in the Mobile arena and should open up the door for cheap development for Mobile stores. Here’s a list of all the great new features:
- Device-specific media capabilities for audio and video
- User-friendly search and results display
- Clean display of product detail pages
- Pinch, multi-touch and scaling images
- Easy swipe between product images
- Zoom capabilities
- Cross-sell and up-sell capabilities
- Drag-and-drop of products to the shopping cart
Perhaps one of the most frequently requested features we get from clients is the ability to create coupon codes automatically. We used to give clients a list of extensions to choose from for this functionality, however now it’s built in. With Magento’s new Auto-generation of Coupon Codes you can now set up thousands of single use coupon codes for customers! To use this feature add a new rule in Magento and under Coupon select Specific Coupon. Now you’ll see a check box to use Auto Generation and once you save this rule you’ll have the option to generate multiple coupon codes that all follow that same rule.
This is a life saver for anyone who wants to do promotional email campaigns.