Magento Expands Services in a Massive Way

It wasn’t that long ago when the Magento website only featured two products, community and enterprise edition.
Since 2016 they have since added five new products, Commerce Cloud edition, Commerce Order Management, Business Intelligence, Shipping, Social, and will soon be launching a new B2B enterprise module.

 
Magento had tried to launch another product, Magento Go, but struggled to make it work, resulting in shutting it down in 2015. Magento decided to focus its energy on its core products, the community and enterprise edition, and revamped the products with a major release of a new version Magento 2 in late 2016.
With the spinoff from Ebay and Ebay Enterprise, Magento’s sole focus on the Magento brand allows it to do what is best for simply Magento.
This has made them focus on becoming a true all encompassing Enterprise eCommerce software company. They have now launched many products that compliment their core eCommerce software product so that their customers can better compete in the eCommerce landscape.

So what are these products?

Enterprise Cloud Edition: The original community and enterprise editions were simply software products that you would have to download and host yourself wherever you saw best. This could be challenging for companies who now had to deal with a hosting company and developers to accomplish their goals.
The Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition is the enterprise edition hosted in the cloud via Amazon Web Services. This is great for merchants who simply just want to deal with the development and merchant side of Magento, and not have to worry about hosting and all the development operations hassles that come with it.
Commerce Order Management: The Commerce Order Management product comes from the Ebay Enterprise split off. It is an order management platform that works great with Magento, so businesses that need an OMS and use Magento, it is certainly an option to consider.
It seems to work best for omni channel businesses who leverage marketplaces, in store, online, and any other types of channels. The Commerce Order Management platform can help them manage all these orders from one place so that orders get properly fulfilled and the customers stay in the know about their order.
Business Intelligence: The business intelligence product comes from their acquisition of RJ Metrics. Magento now offers a Business Intelligence analytics platform leveraging the RJ Metrics acquisition that allows SMB companies to have the insight of a fortune 500 company.
This is a great step for customers who want to better understand their marketing channels and the lifetime value of the customers they are bringing in.
Shipping: Magento worked with Temando to offer a shipping product that improves the ability to tap into many shipping options via API’s. This product can help you lower your own shipping costs and thus the shipping costs that customers pay for, in turn increasing sales.
Social: The new social product Magento launched is a free extension that allows you to connect your Magento store to social channels like the Facebook store to sell more socially. This is a very new product that will hopefully help Magento merchants sell more on Facebook and other social channels.

The New B2B Product

There has been talk about a new B2B version of Magento for sometime now. Magento announced at Imagine that the product will be available for the Enterprise Cloud edition this summer and will help merchants optimize for B2B eCommerce.
It looks like it has several main features according to their press release:

• Corporate Account Management
• Quoting
• Quick Ordering
• Custom Catalogs and Pricing
• Real Time Inventory Intelligence
• Intelligent Routing & Order Delivery
• Backend Integration
• Multi-Channel Support

This is great because currently B2B eCommerce merchants rely on many extensions and custom features like Cart2Quote and other things that this may solve with just one software.
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What does this all mean? It sounds like Magento is putting in a lot of effort to offer a more unified set of enterprise eCommerce products rather than going down stream with a product like Magento Go. It will be interesting to see the success of these other lesser known products!