What does your company do and what is your USP?
The Magento Commerce product provides merchants the power to create unique and powerful ecommerce and omnichannel shopping experiences. Magento is now part of Adobe, with its solutions merged into Adobe’s Adobe Experience Cloud, offering an end-to-end platform to manage, personalise and optimise the commerce experience at every touchpoint.
The entire journey from content creation and analytics to marketing and commerce is integrated into one platform, making it the only commerce platform to integrate both B2B and B2C experiences.
How do you deliver on this USP?
Our Magento community of over 360,000 developers and 1100 partners and system integrators helps us to stay innovative. Magento’s advantage has been the ability to allow this community to collaborate, contribute and extend its core capabilities, in addition to this with Adobe’s scale we can innovate across the whole customer journey and this is recognised in numerous Gartner rankings, including the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce Platforms.
How would you describe your vision?
Consumers expectations are changing daily, they are using more devices to interact than every before. Our aim is to meet these expectations, deliver a world class digital experience to these consumers and make this experience as frictionless as possible. We deliver this to large global enterprises, mid-market and small organisations across the globe.
Which retailers do you work with?
We support established fashion brands such as Osprey, which uses Magento to refine its digital presence, or emerging ones like Ego Shoes, whose growth and success has always revolved around their pioneering use of our technology. Magento also provides commerce capabilities to retailers in the food and drinks sector such as Beer Hawk, which partnered with Magento to take its business to the next level and is now owned by AB-Inbev, the world’s largest brewer and craft beer retailer. We have also proved our worth within the construction field, driving B2B sales innovation for builders’ merchant Selco.
What have been the main points in your expansion?
Since being founded in 2008, one of Magento’s key turning points has undoubtedly been joining Adobe. Our position as the world’s most popular commerce platform has certainly been enhanced by Adobe’s leadership in designing great digital experiences, allowing us to empower our customers and enable every business to create and deliver compelling real-time experiences as well as enhance the depth of our product capabilities and cloud technology – thereby allowing us to take our commerce offering to the next level.
What challenges are you addressing for multichannel retailers who aim to meet peak season demands?
Sales season is the perfect opportunity for retailers to engage with their price-conscious and tech-savvy costumers. UK customers tend to shun chaotic high-streets and embrace the sales as a mainly online phenomenon so merchants can expect traffic peaks from both desktop and mobile devices. Customers aren’t likely to tolerate slow-loading pages, particularly when the best deals are awaiting them on a competitor’s website. This is why Magento’s robust eCommerce solutions are designed to support fast-loading sites and frictionless checkouts regardless of traffic spikes. Moreover, the increased volume of orders during peak times mean retailers’ omnichannel capabilities will be put to a test – with customers demanding fast and convenient shipping from different warehouses, click and collect services and cross-channel returns. Magento’s inventory, fulfilment and order management tools come in handy to streamline these operations as much as possible and navigate the logistical nightmare brought about by the sales season.
How are you using emerging technology to support growth?
Mobile is where some of the most interesting commerce-related innovations are taking place, likely due to the exponential growth of mobile devices being used to purchase from both B2B buyers and consumers. For example, Magento supports commerce through progressive web apps (PWAs), which have the ability to create incredibly fast-loading mobile sites and slick experiences by leveraging open web technologies; they are ideal for mobile commerce as they enable touch-based navigation, push notifications and an offline mode.
What do you see as challenges for the retailers and suppliers over the coming years?
Customers simply don’t perceive retailers to operate through different channels, they seek to experience the same brand, access the same offers and promotions, and purchase the same products when shopping in store and online – so, retailers must strive to deliver on this expectation. Magento’s technology enables streamlined communication between a merchant’s platform and its other sales outlets – for example, a unified inventory management system with stock visibility across all channels, able to fulfil orders from the most convenient warehouse, or the ability to integrate with marketplaces.
Thanks to the unique community model that Magento has, we can react very fast to these challenges and other that we and the merchants we can’t foresee.
What targets are you aiming to achieve in the next five years?
A year on from the acquisition, our objectives are to continue to drive more value for our customers, fast-track innovation and product development and continue to be a leader in the commerce industry. We are leveraging Adobe’s incredible scale to work with more and more merchants and make every experience shoppable. We are extremely excited for what we’ll be able to achieve over the next five years.
CASE STUDY: Beer Hawk
Beer Hawk launched in 2012, selling over 1000 beers from around the world online using a Magento 1 Open Source store.
With orders quickly rising, the company found that its existing store was unable to handle demand. Working with solution partner Pinpoint, the company decided to upgrade to Magento Commerce 2 with a three-month deadline.
The new version of the site offers optimised store views and categories to help customers find their ideal brew. The back end is simpler, with the ability to mine data and offer personalised marketing campaigns. Beer Hawk opened an experiential store in June 2018 and plans to add more in the future.
Since moving to Magento Commerce 2, revenue has risen 57.8% year-on-year, with its website conversion rate rising 29.4% and average order value rising 9.11%.
Magento in brief
Headquarters: Campbell, California
First release: 2008
Website: magento.com
This Company Spotlight was produced by InternetRetailing and sponsored by Magento. Funding articles in this way allows us to explore topics and present relevant services and information that we believe our readers will find of interest.
