Magento CE 1.9 and Enterprise Edition 1.14 Released
Yesterday, Magento Community Edition (CE) 1.9 and Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.14 was released. Among the new features are a brand new responsive theme that makes it possible to quickly get a tablet and smart phone-friendly site, a new payment option and streamlined checkout to help increase sales, and cross-border price consistency. Merchants also benefit by being better able to support customers across geographies, and from improvements in product quality, search and security.
Some key benefits from the release notes:
- Merchants can get a tablet and smart phone friendly responsive site in about half the time as before, speeding time to market and freeing up resources for other projects.
- With a responsive site, merchants will be better able to participate in the fast growing mobile commerce space, and will have a site that is more easily adapted to new opportunities and less expensive to maintain. A responsive site also offers potential SEO benefits from using Google's preferred approach to mobile-optimizing sites.
- Merchants can capture up to 18% more sales by providing customers access to financing through the Bill Me Later service. And they can offer their customers a smoother, more streamlined PayPal Express Checkout experience, which tries alternative payment options when a customer's credit card is rejected.
- Updates available in Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14, give shoppers access to fresher search results because search indexing is performed automatically as the product catalog changes. Improved indexing also helps merchants work more efficiently, because incremental index updates no longer require manual intervention and admin performance is faster.
- Merchants operating across regions and geographies can show their customers a single price. Pricing is clean and uncluttered regardless of tax structures and rates that vary from country to country.
- Merchants benefit from greater security and ongoing support updates.