Highlights from Magento Imagine 2019
In my previous blog post I announced that we’d be attending Magento Imagine 2019. More than 3,000 attendees from 60 countries gathered in Las Vegas for over 100 inspiring presentations and interactive sessions led by 150 leading speakers. At every Magento Imagine, Magento shares a number of announcements about what’s coming to the platform. This year, the Adobe influence on Magento was hard to miss, with some great additions to the Magento Commerce platform. One major development that kicked off this year is the focus on the ultimate shopping experience. The customer journey took center stage, and naturally, a number of Adobe products can help enrich it.
Among other things, Magento Commerce will focus on personalization, powered by Adobe Sensei. This AI and machine learning technology can make recommendations based on how shoppers behave. The self-learning system will continuously improve itself to create a personalized shopping experience. Several keynotes during the event explored this in more detail. Product recommendations are always based on your search results, whether that’s by color, image, or tag. Those results can then be tracked in Adobe Analytics. As soon as this is officially released, we’ll let you know on our blog.
Adobe has something else up its sleeve: stock photos. Plans are in place to let you quickly integrate and purchase Adobe Stock photos. Paired with Magento Page Builder, this will let you use beautiful images from the Adobe Stock library to enhance your online store, helping improve the user experience.
Google Shopping and Amazon shopping were part of the announcements too: a direct integration between Magento and both platforms, plus improved syncing to get your products onto them. You can set up and optimize your Google Ads right from the Magento back end. Tapping into multiple channels instead of relying on just one was a message we heard in several sessions. That’s why Magento is including this feature in the standard Magento Commerce package. Unfortunately, Open Source will have to wait, but there are already several modules that cover this. Magento also showed how you can launch an Amazon Branded shopping page directly from Magento.
The Adobe Sneaks got everyone excited as well. This session showcased innovations from across the community, and the developments in augmented reality stood out in particular. In one demo, you view a chair in an online store, then use your iPad to display it at full size in your living room. The visual part finder was another impressive extension. It lets you use hotspots to link the right parts to the right products.
And of course, there was a PWA announcement. PWA Studio now offers a standard template for Magento Commerce, so you can quickly run a store as a Progressive Web App. PayPal / Braintree payment options come integrated as standard. PWA is moving in the right direction.
Is this the end of Magento Imagine? Not at all. There’ll be another one next year, though this time it will run alongside Adobe’s big Summit conference. Oh, and if you’d like to stay up to date on all of Magento’s latest developments, head to Magento Live in Amsterdam on October 22 and 23. We’ll be there too!
