We were hugely excited to attend Magento Live UK, in London on Tuesday 14th 0f July 2014. This is the 3rd time Magento have held the event in London. 2013 was a record year for attendance and this year had a lot to live up to. It did not disappoint. The event brought together nearly 700 retailers, partners and developers over the course of the two days. The atmosphere was literally electric, so much passion and excitement from an amazing community of Magento enthusiasts.
There were some outstanding keynote speakers and breakout sessions throughout the two days. Topics were equally interesting. Subject areas included, “Magento + Retail Order Management” by Aaron Krass and Charles Heal from eBay Enterprise, “Creating a Better Experience Through Responsive Design” by Tom Robertshaw of Meanbee, and “Transforming Retail into “Me-tail” Across Channels” by Jonny Dixon and Ben Staveley from dotMailer.
One of the most interesting talks was the opening General Session on Tuesday, an informative discussion from Paypal & Braintree’s Senior Global director John Lunn. John discussed V.Zero a newly released payment API from Braintree (a newly acquired PayPal Company)
John explained that the aim of V.Zero (pronounced Vee dot Zero) was to build and develop an invisible payment system, which makes purchasing less intensive and much more accessible across all devices. PayPal are really focused on new payment methods, as an example PayPal are currently working on wearable payment media (so this could be payment via an Apple iWatch or similar), which as we know is the next big frontier in E-Commerce.
John explained that users want the same purchase experience across all of the devices they are using; they want quick, secure and simple purchase journeys. V.Zero allows users to sign up with a merchant, with their credit card and from this point forward make payments using their account without the need to ever re-enter their credit card details.
This is literally the holy grail of shopping, but what makes this even more exciting is that the whole process is PCI DSS certified, Braintree hold and manage all credit card details, the merchant is completely free from this responsibility.
In essence, on submission a token is released back to the site and all further payments are validated via the token itself. The merchant will only need to store the clients account details, transaction history etc. and the unique token. Based on our understanding at this time, the client can purchase across multiple devices through their individual validated merchant accounts without ever needing to re-enter their credit card details.
This really is an exciting concept and it begs the question; how will this change online payment solutions from other suppliers like Sagepay? Is this the dawn of a new era of fully accessible multichannel payment?
One final takeaway of exciting news from Magento Live, surrounds the release of the Beta version of Magento 2.0, which is still on track for developer release in December 2014. Magento have completely rebuilt the platform, making it more modular, both on the front and backend, dramatically improving the indexing and caching. Magento Claim the new version could offer up to a 60% saving in development time. Magento 2.0 will also be fully responsive across desktop, mobile and tablet.
With around 42% of the E-Commerce Market share in the UK, it’s extremely evident that Magento are continuing to push hard and increase their dominance in the marketplace. Magento is an amazing platform and we just can’t wait to get our hands on Magento 2.0.
