Magento Commerce 2.4.2 will continue to drive digital commerce growth.
Despite the challenging year 2020, ecommerce sales experienced a remarkable growth of just below 30%. We learned a lot from 2020. All businesses must be digital. Based on eMarketer‘s 2021 forecasts, businesses are hoping for a rebound of brick-and-mortar business sales. A Digital Commerce 360 B2B survey that looked to 2021 shows that more than 80% B2B respondents indicated they were very or somewhat likely in the next year to purchase more online. It is becoming more crucial than ever that you keep your ecommerce platform up-to-date as customers become more dependent on it. You will need to upgrade to Magento 2.4.2 to take advantage of the security and performance enhancements.
Adobe today releases Magento Commerce 2.4.2. It also includes security-only patches 2.3.6–p1 and 2.4.1–p1. These patches are designed to improve Magento Commerce’s security and performance and provide enhanced tools for merchants that can expand and maintain their business in order to keep up with eCommerce growth. Magento Commerce 2.4.2 helps merchants maximize their opportunities by providing enhancements to B2B buy approvals, expanded PWA/GraphQL support, improved Page Builder performance, Media Gallery performance, and better developer experience.
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B2B enhancements for purchase approvals, and headless commerce
Magento Commerce 2.4.2 now supports online payments. This is an improvement on the experience of purchasing approvals, which was previously only possible with offline payments. Merchants can now accept purchasing policies regardless if they use online payments. Buyers can also use the same approval process for all orders.
Online payment options at checkout. Email notifications and screen reminders for adding payment details.
Magento Commerce 2.4.2 includes new GraphQL APIs, such as Company Credit and Requisition Lists. These APIs support important B2B use case scenarios for headless commerce implementations.
Storefront performance and content management improved
Image Optimization is now available in the Media Gallery. This feature was first introduced with Magento 2.4. When enabled, the storefront will now use a web optimized version of an image rather than the full, high-res version that is stored in the Media Gallery. The storefront will generate a smaller file of the image without altering the original. This ensures that the shopfront renders quickly for shoppers.
The Media Gallery now supports an Access Control List in Admin. Merchants can create user permissions to access the Media Gallery and manage actions. This enhancement allows digital agencies and designers to access the Magento instance without having to expose their data.
Page Builder allows you to view previews of content on mobile and desktop. There are improvements that will reduce the effort required to migrate content to Page Builder. Customizing Page Builder CSS will also reduce developer effort.
PWA Studio offers a faster time to market and lower ownership costs.
PWA Studio continues its efforts to speed up the time to market and lower total cost of ownership in Progressive Web Application development. PWA Studio now supports multi-language and multicurrency merchants, making it easier and faster to launch international websites as well-performing PWAs.
The latest PWA Studio updates include new Venia components that cover “My Account”, which will accelerate launches. There are also extensibility enhancements and performance enhancements that greatly improve the developer and shopper experiences. All the latest updates can be found in the PWA Studio Release Notes.
Internationalization and new Venia components
With In-Product Guidance, you can achieve a faster time to value
Magento Commerce 2.4.2 introduces In Product Guidance. In-product Guidance provides proactive, personalized and scalable in-product experiences that help users connect with key product features and value pathways. These experiences increase time to value and enable customers to become more self-served power users faster. In-product experiences, for example, can be used to increase awareness, teach users how to use high-value features that are under-used, and help new customers get on-board quickly.
Magento Commerce merchants that are running on 2.4.2 or higher can only access in-product guidance. Users must opt-in to Admin Usage tracking. This option may be enabled by many customers. Customers can disable this option or change it in the Admin UI under Stores> Configuration > Advanced > Admin .
Performance and quality of platform
Magento Commerce 2.4.2 features numerous enhancements to platform performance and quality that support both merchant and developer experience. Highlights:
- VBE enhancements include: Braintree now offers Buy Now Pay Later functionality; dotdigital delivers transactional text messages; Vertex supports commodity codes to ship in and out from global regions.
- Multi-store implementations and large catalogs can benefit from greater scalability thanks to better API performance and quicker admin response times.
- Cloud supports remote storage solutions. AWS S3 support is available out of the box. This will allow for infrastructure optimization and cost savings.
- More than 280+ issues of functional quality were solved, including all known problems from 2.4.1.
Additional Q1 announcements and updates
Upgrade Compatibility Tool
The Upgrade Compatibility Tool is now in Alpha. It allows you to compare your Magento Commerce 2.x version against a newer release and analyze the compatibility with installed custom modules. This tool can be used between any Magento Commerce 2.x version and will produce a report detailing issues and warnings regarding compatibility of custom codes, along with an estimate of the complexity of the upgrade process.
Alpha releases are limited in scope. We will expand our coverage as we gain insight from customers. To learn more and get started, visit our blog Introducing Upgrade Compatibility Tool.