What Can Magento Commerce do for your Fashion Brand?

Your customers don’t want to shop anymore, they want to experience. Particularly for fashion, lifestyle and beauty brands, the digital offering needs inspire beyond the purchase. The right platform is essential and luxury brands like Harvey Nichols, Charlotte Tilbury and Rebecca Minkoff have all turned to Magento Commerce to power their eCommerce experiences. Why Magento? It’s flexible, it’s well respected. It’s appealing for premium brands because it’s a platform designed to be highly customised. A good place to start when it comes delivering unique digital journeys and branded experiences.

Flexibility was always one of the open-sourced Magento’s main selling points. Back in 2016, Magento rebranded the version of the platform with paid licensing costs, as Magento Commerce. Right now, the main difference between the two versions for users is more out-of-the-box functionality with Commerce. There are a lot of advanced features that would require extensions or custom coding with Open Source. And, with the upcoming launch of 2.2, we’re expecting to see Magento continue to push their customers towards the paid edition with new capabilities.

There’s a consideration here and it’s this: licensing Magento Commerce will set you back around 22K, plus additional costs if you’re using additional servers.  So, with all of this in the back of your mind, what exactly can the Commerce edition do for you that Open Source can’t?

Performance & Scalability

For inspired brands with big aspirations, an online store that can grow as they do is important. More “In the Box” functionality for Commerce means that you can avoid loading up on extensions and plugins, which can often slow things down. Improved scalability and performance are also a big deal if your business is focused around seasonal sale periods that see more customers visiting your site to purchase. Magento Commerce is better equipped to deal with spikes in traffic and offers full page caching, meaning a page load time of around 1-2 seconds in comparison 5-8 seconds without. These were both key considerations for Kurt Geiger, who recently re-platformed. The Magento Commerce 2 scalable order management system allows the team to easily add servers horizontally to adjust for spikes in traffic.

Content Management & Merchandising 

An easy to use back-end can be invaluable when it comes to streamlining processes and saving time for your teams. The latest release of the Commerce edition includes CMS version control and admin action log, so you can roll back content quickly if needed. There’s also a “drag and drop” visual merchandising tool, which allows users to reorganise entire categories in a single window, with the same view over products that the customer will have when they land on site. Your team will be able to see stock levels while they merchandise, instead of having to flick back and forth to find the information they need about availability. Better visual merchandising, done much more efficiently.

Other support for brands with a big focus on seasonal sale periods comes in the form of a tool which allows you to time homepage content changes and new catalogue pages. This means making sure you go live with sale at the optimum time in each of your channels, without needed to have all of your team in the office to support launch.

Increasing Conversions & Boosting AOV 

The faster and easier the checkout process, the more likely your customer is to complete it and improved performance with the paid edition means a smoother purchase journey. Commerce can also help you out with a number of conversion-focused features like automated reminder emails for abandoned shopping carts. Personalisation is the key to customer loyalty. Magento Commerce user segmentation capabilities mean that you can target your promotions based on location or specific customer attributes. You can also tailor product recommendations, upsells and cross sells based on established rules – making valuable steps towards boosting order value.

B2B Capabilities

Making their way into the B2B market, the latest Magento release will include more built-in features for manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers. Capabilities include corporate account management, with users organised by level of purchasing authority and spending limit. Plus, personalised price lists for individual companies and channels for negotiation requests. The new B2B features will not be available to Magento Open Source customers.

Want to know more about how Magento can make magic happen for your brand? We can help. Get in touch here to tell us about your project.