According to Adobe Digital Economy Index (DEI), the migration in customer behavior to digital commerce has been persistent during the past few months of the COVID-19 outbreak. Since April, online shopping has consistently tracked above the shopping levels seen during special offers or the holiday season in 2019. In June alone, $73.2 billion online spendings were seen which was up 76.2% year over year (YoY). To empower online merchants with capabilities that will help them to find new opportunities in the current commerce landscape and future, Adobe released Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source. Magento Commerce has a flexible Headless Magento 2 architecture, rich features, unlimited ability to customize, and seamless third-party integrations that can bring your commerce vision to life. Let’s find out what Magento 2.4 entails.
What’s New with Magento 2.4 Release?
1. Purchase Approval Workflow to Streamline B2B Purchasing
The Magento 2.4 comes with a new purchase approval workflow functionality that empowers B2B buying companies to customize their approval processes using a simple form. They can define approval rules based on the number of SKUs, order value, or shipping fee. These rules can also specify multiple approvers and be assigned to specific roles.
The purchase approval workflow functionality is also designed to bring efficiency by streamlining B2B purchasing. Approvers are automatically notified when reviews are required and can easily approve, comment, or reject the purchase order in their accounts. Buyers also have complete transparency of their orders and receive notifications at every stage of the purchasing process.
Using this self-service approval workflow functionality, B2B sellers can now deliver quick, convenient online ordering, while ensuring that traditional expenditure controls are in place. It is a perfect combination to attract new business opportunities and boost online sales. So, if you want to simplify your approval workflow, just hire Magento 2 developers from us and we’ll help you incorporate this functionality in your Magento 2 store.
2. Seller Assisted Shopping to Deliver Excellent Customer Service
When a customer visits your website, he expects your website to offer proper guidance and assistance throughout their buying journey as they utilize new online purchasing and account management capabilities. The New Seller Assisted Shopping functionality enables online merchants to enhance customer engagement and deliver delightful customer service by letting sales or customer service reps to log into their websites as the customer from the Magento 2 Admin Panel. Gaining access to the customer’s experience helps the rep to support them in various ways:
- It helps in troubleshooting any part of the buying process, whether it is about helping the customer find a product, show them how to set up a wish list or requisition list, or address something that requires attention.
- It guides the customer through the custom functionality that may only be available in front-end experience, such as a product configurator.
- The functionality helps in saving time of the customers by creating orders and quotes on their behalf or managing administrative tasks, such as adding customers and defining approval rules.
3. In-Store Pickup to Offer Buyers New Fulfillment Options and Bring Back Value to Physical Stores
Using this functionality in inventory management, merchants can easily select the physical inventory locations that are eligible as a customer pickup location. During checkout, customers can quickly find a location near them and view other relevant information, such as store open and close hours. Once orders have been placed, store associates will notify them when their orders are ready for pickup with just a single click. Moreover, this functionality can be utilized for curbside pickup which has become the preferred way for many shoppers to pick their purchase and reduce their health risks.
With all these functionalities available in both Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source versions, we as a leading Magento eCommerce development company recommend merchants to upgrade their Magento store to Magento 2.4 version to leverage the power of these functionalities.
4. Asset Management in the New Media Gallery
To keep your customers engaged, merchants need to provide them with fresh content regularly. To create a content-driven experience by creating new and unique content can be time-consuming. The latest version of Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source simplifies your creative workflow with a newly designed Media Gallery that performs up to 30 times faster and improves Magento 2 integration with Adobe Stock.
- This New Media Gallery reshapes asset management which in turn helps in saving time and resources for creative stakeholders.
- It helps in the easy management of images used on your website with new image details that include how often and where an image is used across web pages, products, or categories.
- The functionality allows for searching and filtering images more quickly using new image attributes including tags uploaded from Adobe Stock and licensing status.
- It saves time with an updated Adobe Stock integration that drives the image licensing and management workflow completely into the New Media Gallery.
We, as an experienced Magento 2 development company believe that Magento eCommerce development is not only about designing and coding, it’s about adding value to your business and creating an exceptional customer experience that makes you the premier choice of your customers.
5. Makes Headless Magento 2 and PWA Development Faster and Easier
Magento has released the latest version of PWA Studio for Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source that introduces new Venia storefront experiences created using Page Builder content types, and a complete cart and checkout workflow to facilitate implementations. Magento is also going to introduce an extensibility framework to make customization and extension of the capabilities of PWA Studio much easier and simpler. This will be done through custom development and applications in the Magento Marketplace.
As online merchants, Magento eCommerce development companies, and developers are focusing on the adoption of PWA Studio, Magento is constantly trying to make it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to launch PWA storefronts with Magento Commerce and Open Source
It also continues to expand its support for headless Magento 2 commerce. Venia UI elements can be used with Adobe Experience Manager-based storefronts to enable commerce in personalized user journeys while providing greater coverage of GraphQL APIs that enables merchants to create custom experiences for all essential digital touch-points using front-end development tool of their choice.
6. Magento 2.4 Platform Security, Performance and Quality
Customers expect and merchants need to focus on the customer experience that is fast, reliable, and secure. The latest Magento 2.4 version includes several improvements to platform quality, performance, and security. These include:
- Secure Admin Portal with Two-factor Authentication for all users
- Migration of the core Braintree integration to a Vendor Bundled Extension that allows for the delivery of more frequent updates and enables new functionalities such as support for Venmo, Google Pay, and Apple Pay
- Scalability enhancements include Redis optimizations that enable online merchants to serve a higher amount of traffic without performance degradation and pages loading up to 43% faster at high traffic amount.
- Improved cart and checkout performance including 50% faster reordering and 30% faster add-to-cart performance during the quick ordering
- The new Composer Update Plugin, that automates various previously manual upgrade procedures making the process much easier, faster, and safer.
- The updated tech-stack components for long-term compliance and security while bringing in additional performance improvements to your Magento 2 store.
Wrapping Up
Many B2B businesses have changed their sales model and favor online and eCommerce-based selling. Magento 2, is one of the powerful eCommerce platforms, offers a plethora of benefits to merchants to help them stand out from the crowd. With the latest release of Magento 2.4 version, the merchants are going to tap into new business opportunities and improve sales.
As a top-notch Magento 2 development company, we recommend store owners to keep their websites up-to-date to make sure their website is enriched with new features and delivers exceptional customer experience. If you need help with Magento 2upgrade and migration, you may hire Magento 2 developers from us and they will help you with a smooth, fast, and safe Magento 2 upgrade.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q.1. What is a headless Magento 2 website?
A headless Magento 2 website is a site where your store frontend and the backend are separated, and data exchange is set up through API requests and retrieving. The frontend is known as the ‘glass’ and can be configured with an eCommerce solution, the CMS, or both.
Q.2. What are the benefits of adopting a headless commerce approach?
The headless commerce approach offers more flexibility to manage website content without affecting the website infrastructure since both frontend and backend are separated. It gives the liberty to customize both parts of the website independently. It ensures more speed as changes made on the frontend don’t require the same changes in the backend and vice versa.
Q.3. I need to update my Magento store. Can you help?
Yes, of course. Just hire Magento 2 developers from us and they will help you upgrade to the latest version of Magento 2 quickly, smoothly, and safely.
