Announcing the Release of Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.6

The Magento Team are excited to announce the new version 1.6 Release of our Magento Enterprise Edition. The new release includes many key improvements, enhancements and innovative new features which will empower your ability to continue to realize your eCommerce visions and goals. These new features include the new CMS+ Content Management Engine, the Rich Merchandizing Suite and the new BridgeConnect Module enabling integration with world class accounting suites and ERP packages.

CMS+, Enhanced Content Management

Content and Commerce often go hand in hand. It takes the right content in the right place and at the right time to ensure your customers get the most out of their online shopping experience and that you get the most out of each sale. Magento's CMS+ system provides comprehensive functionality and the flexibility needed to build complex content pages.

Creation of multiple versions of a static page before publishing and restrict publishing privileges for authorized users only.

• WYSIWYG editor with support for inserting images, URL's, product images/URL's, category URL's, and embedding videos.
• Create menus and page hierarchy for CMS pages.
• Magento Widgets for insertion to CMS pages. Widgets are configurable page blocks that allow you to display dynamic (or static) content on your store frontend. For example display all best sellers for a specific category on the top part of the category page. Click to read more about Magento Widgets.

Rich Merchandising Suite (RMS)

Targeted Customer Segmentation

The Magento Enterprise Edition Rich Merchandising Suite (RMS) provides great value to online retailers looking to enhance their marketing efforts by targeting and/or segmenting select groups of customers, by characteristics and/or behavior.

Create reports that segment customers into one or multiple groups based on customer characteristics (address, location, sex, etc.) and/or by behavior (purchase history, on-site browsing, etc.). For example, target all customers that purchased Sony products in the previous 12 months and spent over $500 last month, with a shipping addresses in CA.

• Export customer data for each segment/group to use with a CRM, Email Marketing and other 3rd party systems in CSV, Excel, and XML formats.
• Define catalog and shopping cart price rules based on customer attributes or customer segmentation groups. For example, give a 20% discount on all Sony products for all customers that purchased Sony products over the past year and that spent over $500 last month with a shipping address in CA.

Targeted Merchandising

Effective, targeted merchandising is proven to increase sales. Magento's Rich Merchandising Suite, will provide online merchants the tools required to ensure success by suggesting products for customers and equipping customers with the resources needed to increase the average order value (AOV).

Automated rule-based selection of products to be used for up-sell. For example, display items as up-sells in the same category as the current product viewed and have a price greater than 10% of the current item, and made by the same manufacturer.

• Create more appealing offers for customers by adding related items for each product. For example, display items that are from a sub-category of the existing category currently viewed as related items, and have the same manufacturer as the current item.
• Offer more buying options on the shopping cart page that increase average order value through cross-sell items. For example show top 5 items that are bought over 20% of the time together with the last item added to cart.
• Ability to override the automated rules above by manually selecting products to be used as cross-sell, up-sell or related-items for a specific product.

Targeted Marketing Personalization Zones

For online retail, personalization works. Personalize the customer experience and increase conversations, by providing targeted, rules driven promotional marketing banners tailored to each customer segment.

Serve targeted and personalized banners based on advanced rules per customer segmentation and/or customer behavior (e.g. past order history, past viewing history, items currently in shopping cart or wishlist etc.).

• Integrate banners to your custom theme via a special smart page block that will serve the banners based on the rules created for each promotion.
• Create call-to-action callouts, by associating promotional banners to catalog and shopping cart price rules and convert browsers to customers.

BridgeConnect Back-Office Accounting and ERP suite Integration

Magento Enterprise Edition's BridgeConnect module provides integration with the leading accounting and ERP packages on the market.

Uses Award-Winning web services technology developed by eBridge

• Support for most major accounting software packages, including Microsoft, Intuit, Sage, Epicor, SAP, etc.
• Sync information between Magento and your Financial Software, automatically, manually or on a set schedule
• Bilateral syncing of Customer InformationSync Sales Order, Product Information, Order Status and Shipping information with Magento so that yourself and your customers always have the most up-to-date information

With a busy schedule throughout the rest of 2009 and ambitious plans for 2010, the premium grade Magento Enterprise Edition is continuing to grow and offer online merchants a superior product when it comes to flexibility, value and the innovation you need to keep growing.