Magento Commerce has added some new functionality to the Magento Commerce Cloud. That includes new business intelligence, content management, payments, shipping, and social commerce features.

New drag-and-drop capabilities simplify the process of building websites. The company’s Magento Social solution allows for ease of integration and delivers detailed analytics to drive improved traffic. And customizable business intelligence tools are now available through Magento Commerce Cloud.

“In today’s fast-paced, noisy economy, brands need to anticipate and deliver exceptional experiences ahead of consumer demand. Commerce must come to customers, whenever and wherever they want it,” said Jason Woosley, senior vice president of product and technology at Magento. “These additions to Magento Commerce Cloud demonstrate our commitment to providing leading capabilities to merchants as they compete in this new era of commerce.”

Worldwide spending on digital commerce platforms is forecast to grow more than 14 percent annually, reaching $8.544 billion by 2020, according to Gartner (News - Alert). And several companies in this product category have been purchased by larger players in recent years.

Forrester says SAP Hybris and Salesforce lead the pack of B2C Commerce Suites. Digital River (News - Alert), IBM, Intershop, Magento, and Oracle Commerce Cloud are other key options, according to Forrester. It also notes commercetools, Elastic Path, Episerver, Kibo, Oracle NetSuite (News - Alert), and Sitecore in the Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Suites, Q1 2017 study.

Magento says it handles more than $50 billion in gross merchandise volume annually. Businesses use the Magento platform to run their digital commerce operations. It acts as a CRM solution, it does order management, and it can be used for checkout via mobile or Web browsers. The company also has a platform that connects to Magento and allows customers to engage with a business via what Lavelle referred to as a shoppable window. Businesses can put these windows in their dressing rooms to enable guests to use them to, for example, request another size. Businesses can also place the windows outside their locations so during off hours customers can still view merchandise and log into their profiles. This same platform can be used by sales associates to assist shoppers with checkout.

The company was acquired by eBay (News - Alert) in 2011. Later on, eBay elected to spin off eBay Enterprise, of which what is now Magento Commerce was part. Magento Commerce today is an independent company backed by Permira funds and it’s headed up by former eBay and PayPal (News - Alert) executive Mark Lavelle.