Magento

Magento welcomes WebShopApps as the newest Platinum Industry Partner. Established in 2008 and a Gold Industry Partner since 2011, WebShopApps has been a consistent, innovative leader in the development of eCommerce shipping solutions, with their products in use on a large number of sites worldwide. Because of their success in the Magento community, they have been hand selected to join as a Platinum Industry Partner.

“We’re truly honored to be a Platinum partner of Magento’s and feel this speaks to our years of dedicated work within the Magento community,” says WebShopApps owner Karen Baker. “But it’s also a direct reflection of the support and loyalty we’ve received from the many thousands of merchants who have utilized our products over the years. Our sincere thanks and appreciation goes out to each and every one of them.”

WebShopApps has marketed over 40 advanced shipping extensions to date, and they show no signs of slowing down in 2013. At this year's Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference, WebShopApps announced a partnership with the logistics company Cerasis on a new freight shipping extension, and also demonstrated an all-in-one, cloud-based shipping interface called ShipperHQ.

Visit WebShopApps at www.WebShopApps.com

Or learn more about ShipperHQ at http://www.ShipperHQ.com

The February 2013 edition of Tom Robertshaw’s quarterly eCommerce survey reports that Magento is the leading eCommerce platform among Alexa’s top one million sites for the third year in a row.

The survey analyzed the platform signatures of the Alexa top one-million websites and found that 26% of them are using Magento. Not only is this a 30% increase in market share since the February 2012 report, it is almost triple the number of sites using the second and third place platforms. This year, the survey also looked at the top 100,000 busiest sites and found that Magento powers 28% of the store sites on that list, which is more than double the number of stores using our closest competition.

“Our business keeps growing for one simple reason,” says Magento founder, Roy Rubin. “Our customers are succeeding.”

Thanks again to Tom Robertshaw for this survey, and to all of the merchants, developers, partners and community members who have found success on Magento platforms.

About Tom Robertshaw’s Survey:

The survey takes the list of the top 1 million sites as provided by Alexa (an Amazon-owned company). It then fetches the HTML document for the home page and analyses against a library of over 225 platform signatures that have been written. The accuracy of the survey is being improved with each edition as signature rules are added and reviewed.

Want to know more about how leading companies are succeeding with Magento? Read our Customer Success Stories.

At the conclusion of Magento’s 2013 Imagine eCommerce Conference, we gathered with Solution Partners for the Annual Solution Partner Leadership Summit. 110 Solution Partner companies from all over the world came together to review the past year, discuss forward-looking goals and plans, and recognize the valuable contribution of our Solution Partners.

During this meeting, we acknowledged the outstanding performance in 2012 achieved by the Solution Partner channel. We are honored to have so many partners committed to delivering creative, innovative and successful Magento Enterprise Edition-based sites.

Special “Partner Excellence Awards” were presented to nine partners for their outstanding performance based on Magento Enterprise Edition revenue, quality of implementations and customer satisfaction. An additional five awards were presented to companies who showed their potential as rising stars in the partner network, with accomplishments including remarkable year-over-year growth (2011 to 2012), and proven dedication to the development of their Magento Enterprise Edition practice.

We congratulate these Solution Partners, and thank the entire Solution Partner network, for their hard work and commitment to Magento and to our joint customers.

“Magento’s Solution Partner program continues to play a critical role in the growth of Magento in key verticals and markets. Our Solution Partners are leaders in the creative and technology communities, driving towards merchant success. We are honored to acknowledge their continued contributions to our thriving ecosystem, and express our appreciation for their relentless dedication and hard work.” – Roy Rubin, COO and co-founder of Magento.

Partner Excellence Award

These partners showed significant success in their markets selling Magento Enterprise Edition and in delivering quality implementations to customers.

Fast and Emerging Partner Award

These partners showed the greatest growth in their Magento Enterprise Edition business, or greatest expansion in new and emerging markets.

Magento Solution Partners are design and eCommerce experts, but more importantly, they are Magento specialists who can help you achieve excellence in eCommerce." that links to "find a solution partner

We are excited to announce the release of Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0- alpha1, available now for preview. This release focuses on major quality and stability improvements, performance enhancements and security

Key highlights include:

Performance Improvements

This release provides better performance in a number of ways, including improved performance of the checkout process, optimized cache adapters for single-server systems and speedier large database lookups. You can even load a large number of tax rates (3,000+) without any impact to performance.

Enhanced Tax Calculation Algorithms

This latest version of Magento Community Edition improves tax calculation algorithms, eliminating potential rounding offsets that can be displayed on buyer facing screens. This release also provides additional support for Canadian tax requirements.

Functional Improvements

We have made approximately 350 functional improvements in key areas, including the web store, shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components and payment methods.

Security Enhancements

Through a number of enhancements, we have also strengthened the security of Magento Community Edition. Check out the full list of enhancements in our release notes.

We encourage you to take this preview release for a test drive and experiment with it. Please note that we do not recommend that you use this release in a production environment. We will incorporate the feedback we get from the community along with any open issues, in an upcoming production-ready version. Learn more about alpha releases and the Magento Community Edition release process.

We’re excited to announce that the newest version of Magento Enterprise Edition– version 1.13 – is now available.

There are thousands of merchants doing many different and innovative things on Magento Enterprise - from revolutionizing how customers buy eyewear to building mobile salesforce automation applications for a global sales team. But there is one thing that Magento Enterprise merchants are ALL doing….GROWING!

As our merchants grow, we need to ensure that Magento continues to grow with them. That’s why we’re excited to announce Magento Enterprise 1.13, the most powerful and scalable version of Magento ever.

Key performance and scalability enhancements of Magento 1.13:

	Optimized Indexing We’ve optimized the Magento Enterprise indexing process to enable significantly faster indexing with limited to no impact to the customer’s shopping experience. This will make it easier for you to add and update products more frequently while ensuring your URLs, promotions, navigational menus and product search tools are always completely up to date, while never slowing down the performance of your online store. The introduction of incremental indexing reduces the need to perform a full re-index and most indexing operations are now automated - saving you and your staff time and energy to focus on revenue-generating activities.
	Improved Caching The full page caching capabilities in Magento Enterprise help ensure that high volume pages load quickly. We’ve improved our caching to enable even greater performance by invalidating only relevant pages making it easier to cache content without affecting site performance for your customers. Improved caching performance also drastically reduces server load enabling your to store to support even larger traffic volumes while conducting back end operations.
	Speedier Checkout Flow 1.13 showcases tremendous improvements in further speeding up the checkout process by reducing page load times for browsing and placing orders. Faster checkout can significantly improve your customers’ shopping experience and customer satisfaction.
	Enhanced Tax Calculations Algorithms This latest version of Magento Enterprise Edition improves tax calculation algorithms eliminating potential rounding offsets that can be displayed on buyer facing screens. This release also provides additional support for Canadian tax requirements.
	Functional Improvements We’ve also made approximately 350 functional improvements in key areas including in the web store and shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components and payment methods.

When it comes to Magento’s ability to scale, Enterprise Edition 1.13 is the most dramatic step forward in this history of our platform, and we’re confident 1.13 will support you through your next level of success in whatever innovative way you utilize Magento.

You can get all the details about Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13 here

Ready to take your business to the next level? Contact us and we’ll help you get started.

If you’re already a Magento Enterprise customer, you can immediately access the new 1.13 release in the My Account section of the Magento website.

We hope you enjoy these new capabilities and we look forward to helping you achieve even greater eCommerce success.

Magento is proud to announce AdRoll, one of the most widely-adopted retargeting platforms, as a Silver Industry Partner and a Silver sponsor of this year’s Imagine eCommerce conference.

AdRoll helps businesses of all sizes re-engage potential customers who’ve already expressed interest in a brand with precise display ads across the web and on Facebook with Facebook Exchange (FBX). With their LiquidAds dynamic ad product, AdRoll takes personalization to the next level - enabling advertisers to retarget visitors with ads featuring the exact products they were recently browsing and recommended products for that specific person. AdRoll makes sophisticated advertising technology that previously required extensive integration and large budgets easy-to-use and cost-effective.

AdRoll’s extension will allow Magento users to:

• Easily create an AdRoll account, place the necessary SmartPixel on their site and set up conversion tracking to measure advertising success in minutes
• Seamlessly import a site’s product information without the need for a feed or any integration work
• Produce stunning LiquidAds with the products users last viewed with no extra technical legwork or financial commitment.

In the ever-changing world of ad tech, it’s become clear that retargeting is a critical part of a marketer’s toolkit and will only continue to grow in importance over the next few years.

Check out AdRoll's Integration on Magento Connect Today!

Magento welcomes aheadWorks to the Industry Partner Program as a Platinum Partner. With over 100 high-grade extensions and themes used by more than 25,000 Magento merchants, and 40+ official partners in 100 countries, aheadWorks is one of our most active partners. aheadWorks is committed to serving Magento merchants with continued releases of easy-to-use modules for Magento Community, Enterprise and Go.

Artyom Rabzonov, the CEO at aheadWorks, states, ‘Platinum Partnership is much more than a shiny badge on the website. It acknowledges our expertise in Magento extensions and theme development.”

“We participate in many Magento events and are always ready to support the Magento ecosystem,” said Rabzonov.

Magento merchants are also welcome to take advantage of these aheadWorks services:

OnPulse (Magento mobile administration)

aheadCommerce (storefronts for tablets)

aheadMetrics (the ecommerce store analytics)

aheadWorks is a sponsor of 2013 Imagine eCommerce Conference. If you are going to be at Imagine you can meet the aheadWorks team in the Imagine Marketplace.

Magento knows that creating a seamless, end-to-end online shopping experience for your customers is critical to the success of your online store. It is important to think beyond set-up and marketing and consider what happens after your customer completes an online transaction.

Shipping, delivery and tracking are part of the operational logistics behind eCommerce that can help your business stand out from the competition. Magento has partnered with Canada Post, the only company to deliver to each of the 15 million Canadian business and residential addresses, to provide more choice and flexibility when it comes to shipping, delivery, tracking or returns for Canadian online shoppers. New extensions that connect with Canada Post are now available on Magento Connect.

By empowering online shoppers with greater transparency and control over decisions related to these key areas, you can help enhance long term customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Canada Post’s strategic integration with the Magento platform will better enhance the Canadian consumer’s online shopping experience. This means your customer never has to leave your online store, from first click to the last leg of item delivery.

So what can you expect from the new Magento Canada Post extensions?

• Set accurate customer expectations from the onset: discourage shopping cart abandonment with transparent total rates and expected delivery dates in the checkout process.
• Choose from various convenient, local delivery options: Canada Post delivers to over 15 million addresses across Canada, so customers can get their package right to their doorstep. Because your customers lead different lifestyles, they can also choose to have their item delivered to the closest Post Office of their choice. Integrated with Google Maps, Canadians can choose from one of the 6,500 postal outlets across the country.
• Keep customers up to date with tracking details throughout the process: We know there’s a lot of anticipation attached to receiving an item after purchase. Do you want to spend less time and money answering the question – where’s my item? Now, you can empower customers to get real-time tracking information about their parcel’s whereabouts. Customers don’t have to leave your online store to get the tracking information they want about their shipment.
• Simplify tasks through automation: Now you can print shipping labels directly within your Magento admin panel, helping to further simplify shipping logistics for your business.
• Keep customers satisfied: Provide your shoppers with simplicity and convenience with self-serve return labels within the online store. Making the return process easy will give shoppers a reason to come back to your online store another time.

You can choose from two Canada Post extensions from Magento Solution Partners. To learn more about the new features and functionalities, visit www.magentocommerce.com/magento-canadapost.

Register for the Canada Post webinar on March 20th at 9AM PST

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