Magento Go is really going places

At Magento, we’re always looking towards the future of eCommerce. We’re constantly moving forward so quickly that we need to periodically pause and reflect on where we are today and remind ourselves just how much we owe our success to our customers, partners, community and the entire Magento ecosystem. With a few months under our belt since the launch of Magento Go, we thought this was the perfect time to look back on the unbelievable achievements you have realized thus far.

Store Design – Themes and Design Services

Many merchants have asked for help with Magento Go store design. We took your comments into consideration and have developed two new solutions to make it even easier to customize your Magento Go store. First, we are actively adding many new store themes into Magento Go so you will have a variety of options to choose from when setting up your stores. In addition, we’ve signed up some incredibly talented design partners who can help you create a custom look and feel for your Magento Go store. A preliminary list of partners is now featured on the site.

Payment Gateways

One of the most frequent requests we receive from merchants is to expand our portfolio of supported payment methods and gateways. This week we will announce the availability of SagePay for Magento Go. SAGE PAY is the UK’s largest independent payment service provider, processing millions of secure payments every month for over 33,000 businesses, from start-ups through to major online, consumer, and business brands.

Magento Go Platform

Soon we will be launching the Magento Go Platform which will allow developers to build, host and deploy custom applications for Magento Go. With the launch of this platform, you’ll be able to easily integrate a variety of apps including feature enhancements, marketing, analytic and accounting apps (among many others) from our partners and developers into your stores directly. Last week the Magento Go Platform entered beta and it has received amazing feedback from our beta testers.

Greetings Magento Community,

Do you develop on Magento? Do you want to contribute to Magento’s core?  Do you like collaborating with others on new features and enhancements? Then you should sign up to be a Magento Contributor.

Since our Imagine Conference, I’ve been getting many requests for information on how we can make this happen. We get requests in every day. Today alone, I am working on requests for over 10 developers who are interested in contributing, and you can too!

What does this mean to you?

When you become a Magento Contributor, we’ll provide you with access to our SVN repository where you can commit changes, and access to our ticketing system if you’d like to provide a patch. Our core team looks at these changes, prioritizes the contributions, and and makes implementations based on those suggestions.

How Do I Get Started?

Just send an email to Magento Contributors. As I receive these requests, I’ll respond with our basic guidelines. Click the link to fill out and sign the Magento Contributor Agreement and send it back to us. I’ll request access, and notify you with your access credentials. That’s all there is to it.

We’re very excited to kick-start this program and are looking forward to seeing what great contributions are going to be made to our fabulous products. We love the idea of collaborating with you, to make Magento a better and stronger product. Our community is what makes Magento so great!

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to email me directly.

Branded Native Storefront Applications on iPhone, iPad and Android

Last May Magento announced Magento Mobile for iPhone, a powerful application that enables merchants to create unique, branded experiences for their customers on their iPhones.  In that time companies such as The North Face and Easton Bell Sports have built custom-designed mobile experiences that extend the power of their Magento stores to the iPhone.

Now Magento is expanding Magento Mobile to the iPad and Android platforms.  Like the iPhone version, Magento Mobile for iPad and Android enable merchants to create branded, native storefront applications that are deeply integrated with Magento’s market-leading eCommerce platform.  Now merchants can provide the best shopping experience possible to customers based on the device they are using.  And of course, Magento provides an industry-leading mobile web shopping experience for any customer that does not have your native application installed.

Product Features & Benefits

• Seamless Storefront Integration
  With the new Magento-mobile admin, you’ll bring the functional powerhouse of Magento eCommerce to your mobile commerce channel, including full integration with your store’s catalog, checkout, inventory, reporting, and much more!
• Manage Multiple Devices
  Easily manage multiple devices with a single installation. Coming later this year, easily extend your mobile presence to the iPad and Android devices.
• Hassle Free Submissions
  Supporting a native app can be time consuming and tedious, so we manage the submission & support lifecycle for one low monthly fee. We manage the complexity of mobile apps so you can focus on running your business!
• Fully Customizable
  Deploy new device-specific features and branded themes with just a few clicks. Quickly update the colors and appearance of your app with the new Magento mobile admin, even after customers have downloaded your app.
• Engage Your Customers
  If you want to build deeper relationships with your most profitable customers, smartphones are the way to do it. From geo-targeted push notifications to immersive native experiences, mobile apps unlock new opportunities that will take your business to the next level!
• Low Cost of Ownership
  Magento’s cost-efficient approach allows you to bring best-in-class mobile experience to your customers without the high price tag. Pay only for the features and devices you want while Magento handles the ongoing maintenance of your app in the iTunes marketplace.

Pricing

Magento Mobile is available immediately for a one-time fee of $799 and a monthly fee $69 per platform.  Learn more at www.magento.com/product/mobile.

The Magento team is pleased to announce the launch of Magento mobile, a new product that will allow Magento merchants to easily create branded, native storefront applications that are deeply integrated with Magento’s market-leading eCommerce platform.  The product includes a new administrative manager (which we wrote about earlier this week), a native iPhone app that is fully customizable (colors, images, buttons, etc), and a service where Magento manages the submission and maintenance process for the iTunes App Store.

The Mobile Opportunity

We’re witnessing a large shift online, where consumers are becoming more comfortable with using mobile devices to access the internet and purchase products.  What we’re also seeing is that native apps are becoming the preferred way that consumers engage with brands and mobile storefronts.  This makes sense since mobile-browser apps (WAPs) are often very slow and don’t offer the rich, compelling experiences that native apps do.  What is also interesting is that Amazon and eBay have the largest share of total mobile-commerce revenues, and their native apps are just mobile versions of their web stores, with perhaps a couple native features sprinkled in.  How effective is this approach?  In 2009, eBay drove $500M in mobile revenues.  In 2010, they project $1.5B.  The era of mobile commerce has begun!

The Mobile Challenge for Merchants

As big an opportunity as mobile is, merchant have difficulty moving forward for several reasons.  First, creating tightly-integrated mobile + website experiences requires a tremendous amount of development, especially when you bring multiple mobile devices into the equation.  Second, there is the cost to develop the native applications (and even find the resources), as well as the time and money to submit and support this application in the iTunes marketplace (and/or other marketplaces).  If we estimate the costs of each of these items, the prices become so high that it is no wonder why so many brands are not yet taking advantage of this opportunity.  We’re glad to announce that there is now another way.

Introducing Magento Mobile

Magento mobile includes:
1. A new admin manager, which will be distributed as an extension that is available for Community edition 1.3+, Enterprise 1.6+, and Professional 1.8+.
2. A fully-customizable iPhone application, which includes several best of breed features that users will love
3. A submission process that Magento manages for a store owner so that they can focus on their core business while we manage the complexity in the background for a low annual fee.

Launch Partner:  The North Face (Europe)

The North Face, will be launching the very first iPhone app “shop” powered by Magento mobile.  The app will be available in early June in Sweden & the UK only.  Here is a quick demo of the app while we were in Paris for the annualBargento event.

Launch Partner:  PayPal Mobile

PayPal is investing heavily in mobile-payments technology, and we’re pleased to announce that we’ve worked closely with PayPal to integrate their new product into Magento mobile.  Merchants who already use PayPal will benefit by offering a native payment experience that drives higher conversations.

Product Features & Benefits

Seamless Storefront Integration
With the new Magento-mobile admin, you’ll bring the functional powerhouse of Magento eCommerce to your mobile commerce channel, including full integration with your store’s catalog, checkout, inventory, reporting, and much more!

Manage Multiple Devices
Easily manage multiple devices with a single installation. Coming later this year, easily extend your mobile presence to the iPad and Android devices.

Hassle Free Submissions
Supporting a native app can be time consuming and tedious, so we manage the submission & support lifecycle for one low monthly fee. We manage the complexity of mobile apps so you can focus on running your business!

Fully Customizable
Deploy new device-specific features and branded themes with just a few clicks. Quickly update the colors and appearance of your app with the new Magento mobile admin, even after customers have downloaded your app.

Engage Your Customers
If you want to build deeper relationships with your most profitable customers, smartphones are the way to do it. From geo-targeted push notifications to immersive native experiences, mobile apps unlock new opportunities that will take your business to the next level!

Low Cost of Ownership
Magento’s cost-efficient approach allows you to bring best-in-class mobile experience to your customers without the high price tag. Pay only for the features and devices you want while Magento handles the ongoing maintenance of your app in the iTunes marketplace.

Sign up and Pricing

There are limited number of spots available for the first release of this product, and anyone interested in joining the priority list can now sign up on the official Magento-mobile product page.  Pricing at this time will only be shared with those who are selected for the limited release, and we will announce the full price list to the community shortly.

What’s Next?

Moving forward, we plan to build a marketplace of extensions for each mobile device (e.g. digital coupons, augmented reality, etc.) using our successful eCommerce extension marketplace, Magneto Connect, which essentially makes this product the world’s first ever mobile-commerce platform!  We also plan to launch new apps for the iPad and Android devices later this year.

“Mobile is the next frontier for commerce.  We expect our new mCommerce product to bring the same level of scale and innovation to mobile as our eCommerce platform did for the web.” – Roy Rubin, CEO of Magento

Hello from Amsterdam!  As I write this post, I’ve just returned from the Meet Magento event here in the Netherlands, and getting ready for our next two community events in Paris and Leipzig.  There have been quite a few questions about the new mobile product that we’ll be announcing this Friday, and perhaps the best way to explain it would be to give you a quick tour of what we’ve been working on these last few months.  But first, some background…

The Rise of Native-Mobile Applications

To set the stage for what you’re about to see, it is important to share our observations on the two ways that users interact with storefronts on mobile devices:  mobile web (browser) apps and native mobile apps.  The first is nothing new to Magento.  When we launched our first iPhone-optimized theme back in 2008, we learned that while optimizing your online store for mobile browsers is important, consumers are engaging even more deeply with native mobile applications.  Retailers are responding to this fast-growing trend by building custom, native applications for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, etc.  Even more interesting are native apps that offer an integrated commerce experience with the web channel, the most notable being eBay, which drove $500M in mobile-channel sales last year and is projecting $1.5B this year.

But as we looked into this trend, and saw the rising demand for native applications, we found that they are becoming very costly to build, and increasingly complicated to manage and scale.  This difficultly only grows when we take into account the next logical step, which is to build fully-integrated experiences that allow consumers, for example, to begin a purchase on the web and later complete it on a mobile device.  There had to be a better way.

Introducing the Magento mobile admin

To help our merchants respond to these opportunities & challenges, we built a product that you’ll soon be able to use for Enterprise Edition 1.6+, Professional Edition 1.8+, and Community Edition 1.3+. It includes the ability to bring your store catalog into fully-featured commerce apps, beginning with the iPhone.  The theme of the app, including background images and button colors, can be customized to match your brand.  The apps will also be fully integrated with your existing eCommerce and merchandizing tools, allowing you to deploy cross-channel shopping experiences across multiple devices quickly and easily.

Here is an early wireframe of our product from a few months ago…

…and here is what the finished version looks like.  Notice the ability to add/edit templates, features, and themes.

Even after customers download your app, you’ll be able to continually update the visual appearance of buttons, text, etc.

Transforming Apps into Mobile-Commerce Platforms

In addition to managing the visual appearance, you’ll also be able to decide which features to make available to your users.  And coming soon, merchants will be able to extend their mobile-commerce feature sets in the way they do with their eCommerce offerings.  Through Magento Connect, store owners will be able to easily install and deploy new features for mobile device such as private sales, digital coupons, line-skipping programs for mobile + in-store purchases, augmented reality.  The possibilities will only continue to evolve as the amount of eligible devices increases.  This approach essentially turns each mobile app that is managed through this tool into its own open platform, which we hope will lead to a tremendous amount of new innovation at the intersection of commerce and mobile.

Of course, deploying new functionality to native apps such as the iPhone requires a resubmission of the code to the app store and ongoing management to ensure the application is stable and in compliance.  To make this process easier, Magento will manage this process for merchants at a low fee.  All you need to do is configure your mobile app and we take care of the rest, including security patches, stability upgrades, bug fixes, etc.  How great is that!