Magento released the newest version of Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 and announced Community Edition 1.9.1 today. Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 empowers merchants to create the most unique and captivating online experiences possible for consumers. Available for download today for existing customers, Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 helps merchants increase their sales and productivity in many ways:

Merchandise Like Never Before

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 enables merchants to organize products on category pages dramatically faster and easier. The new drag-and-drop visual merchandising tool lets merchants preview what a category page will look like to shoppers and adjust product positions with the click of a mouse. This lets them test and iterate to create more visually appealing pages and more easily make real-time updates in response to changes in consumer demand and inventory levels.

The visual merchandising tool also saves merchants time when establishing or updating categories. It gives them the ability to bulk-add or remove products, set up rules to automatically assign products to categories, and create dynamic categories (such as “new products” and “on sale items”) that pull in products from other categories based on product attributes.

Other new merchandising features, including the ability to consistently fix “hero” products at the top of a category and automatically sort products according to special rules, help to further optimize category sales. Plus, new access to critical information within the tool, like pricing, product images, and inventory levels, helps merchants make more informed merchandising choices.

The visual merchandiser tool was developed in partnership with On Tap Group (a leading UK-based Magento Gold Solution Partner) and is a testament to the unmatched power of the Magento global partner network to accelerate the inclusion of new best-of-breed capabilities in Magento products. You can learn more about the visual merchandising tool from the tutorial videos available at the end of this post.

Boost Conversion with Richer Product Information

Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 also helps merchants optimize the way products are presented on their sites. New “swatch” capabilities empower merchants to show off a broad range of product attributes to boost conversion rates. Richer at-a-glance product information, like available colors, fabrics, and sizes, improves consumer confidence to proceed with their purchase.

Optimize Sales on Any Device

Building on its most recent release, Magento has enhanced its responsive design reference theme to include gift registries, downloadable products, multiple wish lists, add-to-cart by SKU, private sales, and more. Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 even boasts responsive default email templates, so customers can read your order confirmation emails and newsletters on any device. This is critical when you consider that 42 percent of all emails are opened on mobile devices*.

Get a Faster and More Secure Site

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 boosts performance and security by adding support for MySQL 5.6 and PHP 5.5. With MySQL 5.6, merchants benefit from improved site speed and scalability, reduced memory usage on the database server, and enhanced debugging tools. PHP 5.5 provides security improvements and ensures merchants have continued access to code updates. Merchants upgrading from PHP 5.3 to 5.4 have reported performance gains of up to 25 percent so merchants moving to PHP 5.5 could see potentially significant performance improvements.

Resolve Technical Issues Faster

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 also offers a new support tool empowering merchants to generate detailed reports to help quickly diagnose and resolve potential technical issues. These reports provide system information such as your Apache version, MySQL settings, extensions, database corruption status, and much more, giving support teams essential information to resolve issues more quickly and efficiently.

Empower Larger Teams

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 significantly improves backend scalability, enabling many more administrators to make product updates at the same time. This empowers merchants to increase productivity with larger administrative teams without diminishing performance.

Access Deeper Shopper Insights

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 has been updated to support Universal Analytics, the new standard for Google Analytics. With this update, merchants can define more custom dimensions and metrics for tracking, incorporate offline and mobile app interactions, and gain access to ongoing feature updates that will only be available on Universal Analytics.

Benefit From Quality Enhancements

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 includes over 70 updates to related products, payments, security, and other features as part of our commitment to continually improve product quality.

Get It Now

Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 is now available to existing customers in My Account and detailed release notes are provided in the Magento Knowledge Base. Tutorial videos for Visual Merchandiser are provided below. Take a first step toward boosting sales and delighting your customers today!

Magento Community Edition 1.9.1 is Coming Soon!

Magento Community Edition 1.9.1 should be available to download in the next few weeks, after final testing is complete. It delivers many features to help increase merchant sales and productivity, including new product swatches, an enhanced responsive design reference theme, support for PHP 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, support for Google Universal Analytics, and many other product enhancements. Stay tuned for another blog post about this important release.

*Campaign Monitor, “Email Marketing Trends,” May 15, 2014.