Magento 2.1 Release – What’s New?

To help businesses stand out in the field of e-commerce, Magento ensures high security with SSL certificates and offers international support to its customers. This platform is used by small, medium, and large e-commerce companies some of which include Samsung, Men’s Health, Nike, Nicole Miller, Rosetta Stone and Mothercare.

With the recent Magento 2.1 release, companies using the platform will not only get payment enhancements but also improved search and staging functionalities by leveraging Magento’s Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. There are some updates, which are common in both the editions. Let us take a look at these features:

• PayPal Enhancements – Shoppers can now pay for their purchase using PayPal, without having to leave the merchant’s website. Also, by securely storing their credit card details, shoppers do not need to re-enter their credit card information for any future purchase.
• Braintree enhancements – This feature helps merchants qualify for PCI compliance requirements by leveraging Braintree hosted fields. Instead of using individual payment fields, it prefers small and transparent iframes to gather payment information in a safe way and assists merchants with an efficient control over their checkout style.
• Improved Management Interface – The latest release has an improved interface that aims at intensifying backend operations. The new interface makes it easier to set up global search synonyms along with creating product, category, and CMS content. Also, performing searches in the admin has been simplified and made faster.

Despite the common new features in both the editions, there are some additional components that exclusively exist in the Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) 2.1.0:

• Content Staging & Previewing – With this enhancement, merchandisers can deliver awesome shopping experience to their customers by creating, previewing, and scheduling a huge range of updates without seeking help from IT. Moreover, marketers can update their products, CMS content, categories, pricing etc. and can even preview the variations by date or store view. Also, merchants can optimize campaigns via user-friendly dashboards which involve automatic updates at scheduled times.
• Elasticsearch – It is a forefront search technology that has replaced Solr in Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1. With the ability to manage large catalogs, Elasticsearch offers rapid and relevant searches on products, supports multiple languages, allows merchants to set stop-words, search synonyms, along with real-time data and analysis.

Magento 2.1 release holds various enrichments that aim at improving the security of your Magento application. So, it is advised that you upgrade your Magento software to the latest version at the earliest.

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