Recognised as the number one open-source platform in the 2017 Internet Retailer Top 1000, B2B 300, and Europe 500 lists, Magento is a PHP based flexible and open source eCommerce platform first released back in 2008 and since experienced exponential growth with more than 250,000 businesses globally embracing the software for running their eCommerce operations and an ever-growing community of Magento developers.

In November 2015, Magento announced the release of its next-generation digital commerce platform 2.0 empowering B2B and B2C businesses. Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 and Magento Community Edition 2.0 are the two versions available as part of Magento 2.0.
Below is a comprehensive list of some of the top features that make this powerful platform an industry game changer.

Customisable architecture

Adopting HTML5 and utilising PHP 5.5.x and MySQL 5.6, Magento 2.0 is powered by a modular code base, which allows simpler customisation offering enhanced levels of flexibility to an eCommerce store owners to enjoy quicker time-to-market along with being deployable on private or public cloud environments more easily. Magento 2.0 also offers greater degrees of third-party integration options with more extensive API compatibility.

User Centric shopping experiences

Magento 2.0 has been developed with one objective; to create more responsive user-centric and positive engaging experiences across multiple devices. With a variety of turnkey extensions and responsive design reference theming capabilities available, eCommerce developers can make easy enhancements and undertake site variations more efficiently. To tackle the issue of cart abandonment and creating a more un-intrusive shopping cart experience, another significant change is the ability for customers to create accounts and profiles simply with one click.

A Robust Admin Panel for Merchants

A more robust and nimble Admin panel offers enhanced business productivity as this is set up and streamlined in a manner that gives the merchants a smooth interface much like that enjoyed by the customer on the other end. The Admin panel is now configured in a way that makes it more intuitive and being touch friendly means day-to-day tasks such as tracking sales and making changes can be carried out more effectively and efficiently. What this means is the merchants can now setup new products four times faster than before.

Advanced Scalability and Performance

The new Magento platform pre-integrates Varnish to cache page content resulting in over 50% faster page load times of images, catalogue and checkout pages. Better user-experience overall.

Easy Checkout and Secure payments

With integrated payment gateways like PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net as well as WorldPay and CyberSource as part of the Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0, merchants can enjoy an enhanced level of security. On the other end of the spectrum, customers can easily check-out as guests with the one-click account creation option and log out just as quickly without the worry of passwords.

Backup and Rollback system Tools

Magento 2.0 is packed with some powerful tools that come in very handy. For Instance, the backup system backs up the application code base and media database of Magento whereas the Rollback can allow the website to be placed in maintenance mode, restore files and re-enables the site.

Seamless video integrations

This is now possible more easily for product pages by simply adding the video’s link, title and a short description to bring it to the main page.

New File Structure

Magneto’s new structure would allow more customisation options for module developers without actually having to change the core site functionality because all the template, layout, JS, and CSS files of any specific module can be accessed in its own view directory.

Maintenance, upgrades and costs

Magento 2.0 offers simpler upgrade options for Magento software as well as installing and upgrading of extensions on a quarterly basis, thanks to its upgrade compatibility and updated information on versioning policies. Extensions in Magento 2 are also lightweight.