Do you know about the features of the Magento 2 Open Source free edition? Just read on!
The Magento ecommerce store system’s popularity has always been centered around its capability of fully serving the needs of merchants or store operators either via its default features or custom developments. In the following, we’ll list the benefits and features of Magento 2 Open Source (formerly known as Community Edition) including some important integrations as well.
Let’s get started!
Marketing and Conversion Tools of Magento 2 Open Source
In order to achieve success with your marketing efforts, it is crucial what kind of tools you have at hand to provide your visitors and customers with a high quality service, optimize user experience and conversion rates and, finally, maximize your income.
It’s worth mentioning that the admin panel of Magento 2 has improved a great deal compared Magento 1’s and this enhances the system’s feature management experience considerably (you can manage your store using your tablet device as well).
Additionally, some new features have been introduced, further raising the quality standard of Magento.
Your marketing or sales expert can easily launch and manage different upsell and cross-sell offers. Based on recent shopper behavior, you can offer custom coupons, special deals, and pieces of content even with the help of automation.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s see what else is there:
- Group related products, upselling and cross-selling options
- Setting promotional prices for categories, customer groups, or products for separate stores or store sections
- Managing coupons for stores or store sections for different customer groups, time periods, products, or categories
- Exporting coupon codes for offline communication, email lists, newsletters, social media, etc.
- Tracking and reporting usage and redemption of coupons
- Multi tier pricing for discounts for product quantities
- Supporting Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
- Offering free shipping options
- Bundled products
- Customizing category landing pages
- Displaying products that were recently viewed and compared with other products by the user
- Displaying new items via dynamic and new product lists
- Saving the shopping cart if the visitor wishes to return to the website
- Creating, managing, and sending out newsletters
- Options (links) for sharing product pages on Facebook, Twitter, and by email
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Features
Nowadays, without the application of a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy, you have no chance to get considerable traffic from organic searches.
Therefore, your ecommerce system must have all the features needed for proper SEO both in terms of technical and content optimization. Such tasks include image optimization, creating a mobile friendly design, content management, or setting the meta tags.
Google “likes” Magento 2 stores because they can be finely optimized according to user experience (UX) and SEO standards.
SEO features:
- Creating Google sitemaps automatically
- Generating SEO friendly, dynamic URLs automatically
- Automatic URL rewrites as well as manual control for redirections
- Setting meta data for products, categories, and content pages (e.g. blog posts)
- Image optimization – intelligent image loading based on device
- Mobile friendly (responsive) design
Website Management Features
As we’ve already mentioned, site management and integration of external solutions has become much easier thanks to the new admin panel.
It’s a huge plus that you can customize page design not only for a store, but for each product page by adding and editing different content blocks with just a few clicks—so now there’s nothing that can stop you from enhancing conversions and optimizing your pages further.
List of website management features:
- Managing the website and store or multiple stores using a single admin panel
- Managing roles and permissions (controlling access to different levels of site management)
- Creating and editing content pages and content blocks via the content management
- Setting multiple languages and currencies
- Setting tax rates for different stores, product types, and customer groups (wholesale / retail prices)
- Web Services API for the sound integration of Magento or 3rd party applications
- Importing and exporting catalog and customer data
- Google CAPTCHA for safe logins
- Automated software for preventing fake logins
- Support for Varnish cache
- Support for Elasticsearch
- Custom design (by store or even by product page)
- Logging
- Displaying product videos with YouTube API
Catalog Management Features
The essence of your store is your product range, thus managing it properly is vital for the successful operation of your business. Catalog management is a critical process that Magento 2 is able to handle at an outstanding level with state-of-the-art solutions.
You can set a great number of parameters with the products, even in bulk, such as creating special categories (e.g. based on seasonal or functional aspects) and you can also customize every catalog page as you wish.
Check out the Magento 2 catalog management features:
- Displaying single, configurable (e.g. by size, color, etc.), bundled, or grouped products
- Displaying virtual, downloadable or digital products
- Adding unlimited product attributes
- Using predefined attributes for creating products fast and easy
- Backorders option (for ordering products when they are not in stock)
- Low stock notification for Admin users
- Setting and customizing out-of-stock messages
- Defining minimum and maximum quantities of products to be added to the cart
- Displaying quantities when products are added to the cart
- Resizing product images and adding watermarks automatically
- Applying advanced pricing rules, special prices (for specified time periods), setting prices for customer groups and tiered prices
- Redirection from search results page if the user doesn’t get a result
- Managing and moderating ratings and product reviews
- Offering personalized products – images and text can be uploaded by the users, e.g. for promotional products with a company logo
Catalog Browsing and Search
For your users it’s not a nice-to-have anymore that you provide smooth navigation and a convenient search solution. It’s a must-have.
They leave a site within seconds if they are not satisfied with the user experience, encounter problems, or have to wait too long for the page to load. They want to get everything in an instant and you need to understand and meet this expectation.
The developer team of Magento 2 has obviously taken this requirement into account and now it’s up to you how you utilize the built-in features and upload the appropriate pieces of information to the product and category databases so that your visitors are always provided with the latest data and most relevant content.
You have the following options:
- Filterable product attributes based on categories, brands, price categories, colors, and other attributes via layered navigation
- Displaying product category items in grid or list format
- Displaying recently viewed and compared products
- Displaying breadcrumbs
- Managing synonyms for search queries
- Setting popular search terms
Product Browsing and Search
The “vital elements” of your store are the product pages. Most of the time, it’s them that will turn a visitor into a buyer. Make them as great as possible!
Optimize your product pages and browsing options to maximize your conversion rates. Upload multiple images, give a detailed description, offer similar or related products, make it easy to share your product pages, etc.
Make use of the following options:
- Adding multiple images to a product (product image gallery)
- Zooming in on product images
- Including swatches to show colors, fabrics, etc.
- Showing related products, upsell and cross-sell offers
- Displaying in-stock or out-of-stock messages
- Displaying pricing tiers
- Displaying product option selection
- Adding grouped view of products
- Adding products to a wish list
- Facebook, Twitter, and email product sharing options (links)
Checkout, Payments, and Shipping Features
Product added to cart? Awesome! But it’s only one side of the coin. You need to make the purchase happen.
This hugely depends on the user experience during the checkout process. The simpler and more convenient, the better.
You’ve surely seen many times that there is a good number of people who abandon their carts during the checkout process because they probably have encountered something they didn’t like or seemed to be problematic for them.
To make sure that won’t happen, Magento 2 provides a number of solutions and options:
- Easy to use one-page checkout
- Guest and registered user checkout
- Shipping to multiple addresses
- Creating a customer account during the checkout process
- Customers can save their shopping carts
- Showing gift messages per order and per item
- Providing tax and shipping estimates in the shopping cart
- Authorize.net integration option
- Braintree integration option (PayPal, credit card)
- PayPal Credit payment option
- Accepting checks and money orders
- Accepting purchase orders and payments on account
- Real time sipping rates from UPS, UPS XML, FedEx, USPS, and DHL
- Identifying destination countries based on shipping method
- Setting flat rate shipping fees for separate orders or items
- Setting table rates for weight, price, destination, and number of items
- Option for free shipping
- Order tracking from customer accounts
Order Management Features
Your life becomes a lot easier if you don’t get lost in the administrative labyrinth of managing orders and invoices. Use these features to be able to reduce manual labor and serve better your customers:
- You can view, edit, create, and fulfill orders from the admin panel
- Creating multiple invoices, shipments, and credit memos
- Printing invoices, labels, and packing slips
- Sending email notifications about order status
- As an admin user or customer service representative, you can create orders and customer accounts as well as update products and coupons in the shopping carts and wishlists of shoppers
- Customizing order status for following order process
Customer Account Features
Your registered customers have the opportunity to have a customer account, which helps them with re-orders, purchasing digital products, and sharing their reviews and opinions.
A customer account is a great tool for building loyalty, therefore we suggest that you motivate your shoppers, by highlighting the benefits, to register and create their own account.
Features:
- Access to a highly developed customer dashboard for shoppers
- Setting default billing and shipping addresses
- Unlimited addresses in the address book
- Tracking orders and viewing order history
- Re-ordering from the customer account
- Viewing recently ordered items
- Sharing wishlists
- Managing newsletter subscriptions
- Viewing submitted product reviews
- Access to downloadable or digital products
Customer Service Features
There are immense changes taking place on the ecommerce scene concerning privacy issues. Acquiring 1st party data is becoming critical for merchants as 3rd party cookie data are getting blocked by more and more web browsers and applications.
A major purpose of the customer service features is that you can collect relevant, 1st party customer data legally in order to be able to create accurate reports and personalize your customers’ shopping experience as much as possible.
Comment: Magento 2 takes account of US and EU regulations, but we strongly recommend getting expert legal advice in terms of privacy regulations in different parts of the world (where you are doing business) since these regulations can vary from time to time and location to location.
Customer service functions:
- Creating contact forms
- Creating and editing orders from the admin panel
- Access to customer accounts
- Managing order history, status, and order updates
- Viewing order tracking from customer account
- Adding custom transactional emails to order status, account update, or password reset
- Global support
- Localization, setting multiple currencies and local tax rates
- Possibility to integrate language files
- Setting allowed countries for site registration, shipping, and billing
- Automatic calculation of taxes for transactions within the EU with VAT ID validation
- EU cookie notification in accordance with the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive (PECD)
Analytics, statistics, and reporting
Apart from integrating Google Analytics and using its robust analytical resource, you can get special reports for your Magento 2 store that can easily be created and viewed from the admin panel helping you make your data-driven decisions.
Features:
- Integration of Google Universal Analytics and GA4
- Available reports from the admin panel:
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- Sales report
- Tax report
- Abandoned cart report
- Most viewed products report
- Most purchased products report
- Low stock report
- Search terms report
- Product review report
- Coupon use report
- Report on all sales activities
We hope you’ve found our thorough list of Magento 2 Open Source features useful and will be able to use them with success for your online store.
Should you have and questions or need some help, please contact us.
