Magento 2 features that will amaze you

1. API

A significant flaw in the original Magento software was that there was no API. This issue was later on addressed by Magento’s developers who retroactively added the API to the system.

Magento 2 can support major API technologies like File Exchange, SOAP, REST, and GraphQL natively. This makes it capable of supporting powerful integrations with a host of third-party software and services. Using Magento 2, merchants can integrate their online stores with ERP systems and POS solutions to unify multichannel business operations.

Granted that these integrations usually require assistance from a Magento development company, some third-party solutions offer pre-configured Magento compatible POS systems for moderately tech-savvy store owners to implement themselves.

2. Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open-source search engine capable of powerful search and analytics functionality, and as of Magento 2.4, all Magento stores use Elasticsearch for their catalog search functionality.

Elasticsearch is extremely powerful and fast, making it an easy pick for global startups like Slack, Uber, and Udemy. It speeds up searches by parsing and processing raw data from a website before indexing it.

Once indexed, users can search and analyze vast amounts of data and receive near real-time results to search queries.

3. Varnish

Caching plays a significant role in boosting website performance as it reduces the load on the server and decreases page load times significantly.

Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed to sit between the client and the web server to cache and deliver static content. It eliminates the time and resources required for the server to process requests for static data by serving it to the client device even before the request has a chance to hit the server or application database.

An adequately configured Magento website running Varnish is lightning fast from an end user’s perspective and can achieve page load speeds as low as 1–1.5 seconds.

4. Progressive web application (PWA)

Considered by many as the future of mobile commerce, a PWA is an application that uses the latest web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to deliver fast, secure, and fully responsive websites. What makes PWAs unique is their ability to work offline and behave like a native mobile app.

The advantage of using PWA websites is that you no longer need to develop mobile applications for multiple operating systems like iOS and Android. A single PWA website is compatible across all platforms and devices.

Adobe has developed the Magento PWA studio project, a set of developer tools that enable the development and deployment of PWA websites with Magento versions 2.3 and above. Setting up a PWA website requires a significant degree of technical proficiency. However, seeking help from an agency offering Magento development services should make things a lot easier.

5. Two-factor authentication

A Magento store’s admin panel provides access to almost all its store, order, and customer information. Using secure passwords or a unique admin URL isn’t enough to safeguard it from unauthorized access.

Adobe introduced two-factor authentication with version 2.3 and enabled it by default for all stores using versions 2.4+. Their extension supports four authenticators:

Even with access to a store admin’s login credentials, a hacker would require physical access to their authentication device to access their store data.

6. Catalog management

Magento has one of the most powerful catalog management systems in an ecommerce platform, and it can support an unlimited number of products. It provides complete control over all products, product attributes, and categories, making it easier to create and manage products.

The product creation workflow for configurable products is exceptionally intuitive. It allows store admins to generate configurable products with hundreds and even thousands of associated simple products from within the configurable product itself.

Magento’s catalog system supports all common product types by default, including simple, configurable, grouped, virtual, bundle, and downloadable products.

7. Multisource inventory

Launched with Magento version 2.3, multisource inventory allows merchants to manage inventory from multiple sources from within the admin panel.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a multistore owner or a drop shipper; thanks to multisource inventory, Magento will fully support your business operations and allow you to handle shipments and fulfill orders quickly.

It also supports the creation of shipments using recommendations that are based on priority or distance and allows setting preferred product configurations that can be applied based on a product or its source.

8. Order management

Magento has an extraordinarily reliable and feature-rich order management system that allows store managers to control the order workflow and process orders efficiently. Magento’s order management system comprises the following components.

Order processing

The order processing grid enables store managers to list, edit, create, and process orders.

Invoicing

Magento includes default invoicing functionality that also allows store admins to customize invoices with the business’s logo to generate and issue print-ready PDF invoices.

Shipment creation

The shipment section contains details of shipments created for orders that have been processed. Besides creating and canceling shipments for orders, this allows order statuses to be tracked by customers using their order details on the frontend.

Credit memos

For orders that contain refunds and cancellations, Magento enables store admins to issue and print credit memos.

Billing agreements

Customers can enter into billing agreements with a store using PayPal as the payment service provider, simplifying the checkout process.

Transactions

This allows store admins to access all payment activity conducted between a store and its payment processor to provide detailed information of each transaction from within the admin panel.

9. Inbuilt sitemaps

Using a sitemap is crucial to maximizing the efficiency of your allotted crawl budget. It improves how a store is crawled and indexed by search engines and helps you nudge search engine bots in the right direction when they visit your website.

Magento generates a sitemap.xml file and saves it in a location specified by the store admin. Through its configuration settings, it allows establishing the frequency of updates and priority for each content type. It also lets the store admin choose how often the sitemap is updated and if it should be auto-generated daily, weekly, or monthly.

Magento also provides a handy link to the sitemap that can be copied from within the admin for manual submission to search engines.

10. SEO-friendly features

Magento is one of the most SEO-friendly ecommerce platforms in the market today. The number of features it offers straight out of the box is second to none.

As a store owner, it gives you complete control over all the metadata on your website. Magento’s default product template contains structured data markup based on schema.org standards that provides search engines with additional information to include in product listings as “rich snippets”.

It also supports canonical meta tags, which help avoid duplicate content from being indexed by search engines allowing you to point them towards preferred URLs to be indexed for content.

11. Promotions

Effective use of promotions is key to driving conversions and maximizing customer retention. Magento provides two easy ways for store owners to configure and create promotions.

The first is using catalog price rules. These are triggered automatically based on pre-set conditions before a product is added to the cart. You can define conditions to display special pricing to customers based on customer groups, product categories, or any product attribute in your Magento store.

The second method is using cart price rules, which can be triggered both automatically and manually. However, this is only possible after a product has been added to the cart by a customer. Like catalog price rules, these can also be configured using customer groups, product categories, and attributes. However, these allow the use of coupon codes and enable you to create free shipping promotions, ‘Buy X get Y free’, and minimum purchase discounts.