LIFT OFF! ChannelUnity Customer Testing with Magento 2 is under way. In the ChannelUnity office, someone who thinks that they are a comedy genius sets the music to Iron Maiden’s ‘Run to the Hills’ – funny…

Let’s face it, the launch of Magento 2 has been a little bit weird. There’s no doubt that in terms of user friendliness it’s vastly superior to the previous iteration but some of the people we talked to about creating extensions had been ‘less than complimentary’ about the experience that they’ve had. Ours experience has been flawless (it’s ok to lie in blogs, right?)

We talked to Chief Test Pilot Seb Mather at beautifulgame.co.uk about their move from Magento 1 to Magento 2:

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the all round advantages of upgrading Beautiful Game from 1.7 to Magento 2.  The back end UX has massively improved and now works seamlessly on tablets and mobile, it’s full of handy time saving improvements, making the whole experience easier and less time consuming. We rebuilt our website almost from scratch on Magento 2 which although was a challenge did mean we could take advantage of the many greatly improved features, such as the new streamlined checkout and tight integration of payment methods.”

At ChannelUnity, we started developing our Magento 2 multichannel integration relatively early on, only to shelve the project for 6 months. The early Magento 2 take up seemed to be relatively slow, we had consistent feedback from many existing Magento 1 customers that they saw no real positive benefit to moving and the APIs as they existed at that time didn’t seem meet all of our requirements for a seamless integration.

More recently there seems to have been a real step change with many of our agency partners feeling unable to consider delivering Magento 1 projects to new customers given the impending end of Magento 1 support. We think that it’s a really good thing that there’s some gentle pressure ensuring growing adoption of the platform – well, nothing is ever exactly as you’d like it to be from day one and the more people using it, the quicker any remaining bugs will be solved.

So what’s different with ChannelUnity and Magento 2? Well, not a huge amount. We still provide a standard integration between Magento, Amazon, Cleverboxes, eBay, Etsy, Fruugo, NewEgg, Tesco Direct and Wayfair. We still treat your Magento instance as the absolute hub of all online selling and product data, extending Magento functionality to Multichannel Behemoth whilst keeping as much of the processing as possible away from your precious Magento server. We still keep stock level and product data synchronised between Magento and your marketplace listings. Basically, we still provide a service that leads to customer quotes like this…

“From a performance perspective, ChannelUnity has provided us with a more sophisticated solution to selling on marketplaces… with the introduction of ChannelUnity, we’ve been able to quickly integrate Magento with Amazon, eBay, Fruugo and we’ve created incremental sales growth of £1,000,000+ with a team of two people”

Read our latest case study HERE for more on that one…..

Magento is dead. Long live Magento.