What’s new in Magento Enterprise 1.14.1

Magento has released its new Enterprise Edition – 1.14.1 and announced the release of Community Edition 1.9.1 on Nov 13th. This Enterprise edition has brought some major enhancements in the field of visual merchandising and responsive design capabilities to create more personalized shopping experience for consumers. It seems the new edition is packed with a wealth of new features but the fashion and apparel industry are the ones who are going to be the most delighted ones. So if you are an existing user of Magento Enterprise platform there are ample reasons to upgrade to 1.14.1

So here’s a list of ways in which the new in Magento Enterprise 1.14.1 can increase your sales and productivity:

• Visual Merchandising:A properly merchandised category in an online store can improve conversion immensely. So along with the capability of proper merchandising it’s important that the platform allows easy and fast merchandising process.Merchandising with Magento had always been difficult and slow. But the new Visual Merchandiser tool of Magento Enterprise 1.14.1 has made things easier. Previously we had to change the position number of items to change the position of an item on a particular category page, but now you can see a preview of the category page and simply organize the items by drag-and-drop to create more visually appealing pages. The Visual preview even shows detailed information including stock, prices and other attributes for better visual merchandising choicesShowcasing special products that you always wish to show at the top of a category can now be easily done just by adding the product SKUs as Hero Products from the Back end. Pre-viewing different store fronts is also supported by the Visual Merchandising tool. You can even bulk-add or remove products under category in the drag-and-drop window by simply feeding in the SKUs.

  

  There is also an option to set up smart category rules to pull in products into a category based on attribute values. For a particular occasion for running sale you can have a category for “Sale” and you can set a rule to automatically add in products from other categories which have a special price.

  

  For more information on configuration refer to Magento knowledge base.

• Swatch Capabilities:There had been a lot of extensions that allow you to showcase your products allowing filtering or grouping based on colors, fabrics, sizes etc. But Magento Enterprise 1.14.1 has it as a default feature now. Swatches can now be used in product lists or in layered navigation to allow consumers check products of exact color or fabric they wish to see. This configurable swatch capability will allow you to give online shoppers a smoother option to view only items they wish to see and thus would raise your conversion rates. This feature has also been introduced with the recently announced Magento Community 1.9For more information on configuration refer to Magento knowledge base.
• Responsive Design Enhancement:Building mobile friendly shopping sites is now easier with Magento Enterprise 1.14.1. The default reference theme now includes gift registries, downloadable products, multiple wish lists, add-to-cart by SKU, private sales, and much more. Most importantly this edition has default email templates optimized for any screen size including mobiles and tablets, so your customers can read order confirmations and newsletters across devices now.For more information on the responsive email templates you can visit this Guide.
• Faster Issue resolving:Administrators can now generate detailed report about the Magento installation to assist support teams diagnose and resolve issues faster.These reports provide information about the Apache version, MySQL settings, PHP extensions, database corruption status, and much more, giving support teams information needed to start debugging, minimizing back-and-forth communications.For more information on configuration refer to Magento knowledge base.
• Other Updates:With Enterprise Edition performance and security will not be a concern as it now supports MySQL 5.6 and PHP 5.5. Site speeds will improve and memory usages will be reduced with MySQL 5.6 while PHP 5.5 will provide security improvements. Also Magento Enterprise 1.14.1 now supports Universal Analytics, the new standard for Google Analytics. A lot of fixes has also been provided with this release.For more details on the fixes and other enhancements please refer to the Release notes.