It’s only been a few months since Adobe launched its Commerce Cloud , based on its $1.6 billion acquisition of Magento . Today, at its Imagine 2019 conference, the company announced a number of updates to Magento that focus on expanding the platform’s reach for the small- and mid-size businesses that use the service.
When Adobe acquired Magento, many of these smaller companies that use the service worried that Adobe would mostly focus on its existing base of large enterprise customers — the kind of companies that already use its Experience Cloud . Today’s set of the announcements is, in many ways, meant to alleviate these fears.
The two most important pieces of news for Magento users are its new integrations with Amazon and Google.
On the Amazon side, merchants can now automatically manage and maintain their inventory on Amazon right from the Magento backend. They can set pricing rules for the Amazon Sales Channel, manage multiple Amazon brands with multiple Amazon accounts and, in return, get access to Amazon’s product data, too.
Access to this new feature is now available to all Magento users through a free extension that’s now available in the Magento Marketplace.
“For many brands and merchants, creating an Amazon storefront is not simple,” Jason Woosley, Vice President, Commerce Product & Platform at Adobe, told me. “It requires you to manage a whole host of new operational challenges. You introduce a new platform that your team has to learn how to use, how to manage and maintain. And if your teams are already maxed out, it’s going to require you to hire additional staff or make tradeoffs against your roadmap that don’t deliver against your business.”
As for Google, Magento today launched a native integration with Google Shopping (also through a free extension) that will allow Magento admins to manage their Google ads from their Magento dashboard and manage their Google Merchant Center accounts. This will allow them to manage their Google marketing campaigns right from Magento. Here, too, the idea is to allow merchants to use the tools they are already familiar with to expand their reach into other platforms, which typically involved switching back and forth between services and trying to keep them in sync.
Adobe also today announced that the Progressive Web Application (PWA) Studio , which allows more advanced Magento users to build more app-like online stores, now supports PayPal’s Braintree as a payment option. Woosley expects that PWA’s are the way forward for many Magento customers, especially in emerging markets.
