Accelerate your eCommerce business with Magento 2.4

The new Magento 2.4 release has now launched and is the third quarterly upgrade of 2020. As well as all the usual upgrades you’d expect, such as security and code quality, Magento 2.4 also offers some additional functionality and enhancements.

Adobe’s release of Magento 2.4 will provide merchants with capabilities that will enable them to capture new opportunities in the current eCommerce landscape that has seen exponential growth over the last few months, not to mention preparing them for a future that has come early.

We’ve enlisted the noteworthy upgrades for merchants considering an upgrade or migration:

Headless Commerce & PWA Development made even faster & Easier!

Adobe was named a leader in the Forrester Wave: B2C and B2B Commerce Suite reports that came out in May. One of the main points was that Magento’s PWA Studio is positioned to lower the cost and complexity of adopting Progressive Web App experiences for merchants.

To coincide with Magento 2.4, Adobe have released the latest version of PWA Studio for Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source. This introduces new Venia Storefront experiences built using Page Builder content types, as well as complete cart and checkout workflow that will accelerate implementations. Adobe have also introduced an extensibility framework that makes it easier to customise and extend the capabilities of PWA Studio, both through custom development and apps in the Magento Marketplace.

As merchants, partners and developers accelerate the adoption of PWA, Adobe is investing more to make the functionality faster, easier and more cost-effective to launch PWA storefronts, as well as extending support for headless commerce. Venia UI components can now be used with Adobe Experience Manager-powered storefronts in order to enable more personalised buying journeys for customers, whilst GraphQL APS’s empowers merchants to build customer experiences across digital touchpoints using their preferred front-end development tool.

This is great news for us here at JH, the leading agency for Magento PWA!

Order Approval Workflow feature for B2B retailers

In order to quickly ramp up sales in B2B eCommerce, businesses need to support their customers’, which includes meeting their varying requirements and purchasing policies.

New approval workflow functionality in Magento 2.4 enables B2B businesses to customise approval processes using a simple form. This means that you can quickly define approval rules on variables such as order value, shipping costs and number of SKUs. As an example, a company might require an approval from a manager when a junior buyer submits an order over a certain cost.

This new approval process has been designed for efficiency; approvers are automatically notified when reviews are required and can easily approve or reject orders. This also means that B2B buyers have complete transparency through a full history log, as well as receiving notification updates at each stage of the buying journey.

Magento has long been the strongest platform for the B2B eCommerce space, this specific focus and investment around B2B functionalities have definitely reinforced this positioning!

Seller-Assisted Shopping features

This new feature allows retailers to access the storefront on behalf of their customers in order to troubleshoot any part of the buying process. This might involve helping the customer find a particular product, demonstrating how to set up a wish list or address something that hasn’t worked as expected. It also serves as a great way to save the customer time by creating orders and/or quotes on their behalf – such as setting up approval rules.

This makes this feature another great tool for B2B, but can also be easily adopted and utilised amongst B2C merchants to improve customer service.

In-Store Pickup

Adobe has been tracking buying trends online since March in order to monitor buy online, pick-up is store orders and have reported a sustained spike in BOPIS orders. As local restrictions on businesses have loosened over the last couple of months, implementing this service as an option for customers can bring significant value back to physical stores, whilst encouraging shoppers to return to your store and increase their average order value. Business Insider actually found that 85% of shoppers say they’ve made an additional purchase in-store whilst picking up an online order.

With In-Store Pickup Inventory Management, merchants can easily select which physical locations are eligible for customer pickup. During checkout, users can quickly find a store nearest to them and view essential info such as opening times. Once the order has been placed, store assistants can notify customers when their order is ready to pick up with a single click. This feature can also be adopted for curbside pickup – a preference for some customers during the pandemic.

Asset management in the new Media Gallery

Recent months have seen a huge spike in new online shoppers, it’s now more important than ever that merchants are empowered to create a content-driven experience to engage visitors and stand out against their competitors.

Keeping content fresh and continuously updated can be time-consuming, which is why the latest version of Magento 2.4 streamlines your creative workflow with a rebuilt version of Media Gallery that performs up to 30 times faster and has a stronger integration with Adobe Stock. Updates to Media Gallery include the following:

Easily manage images used throughout your site with new image details that include how often and where an image is used across pages, categories, or products.
Search and filter images more quickly with new image attributes, including tags uploaded from Adobe Stock and licensing status.
Save time with an updated Adobe Stock integration that moves the image

Platform Security, Quality & Performance

Though we have seen big changes in consumer behaviour drive new merchant requirements over the last few months, some things remain the same. Customers and merchants alike continue to expect fast, secure and reliable shopping experience online. The release of Magento 2.4 includes several updates that enhance quality, security and performance:

Starting with 2.4, Magento is securing the Admin portal by requiring two-factor authentication (2FA) for all users.
The core Braintree integration has been migrated to a Vendor Bundled Extension, allowing the delivery of more frequent updates and enabling new capabilities, including support for Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
Scalability improvements include Redis optimizations that allow merchants to serve a higher amount of traffic without performance degradation and pages that load up to 43% faster at high traffic volumes.
Faster cart and checkout performance, such as 50% faster reordering and 30% faster add-to-cart performance during quick ordering.
A number of enhancements have been enabled for third party integrations including Klarna, Amazon Pay, Dotdigital and Yotpo.

If you’d like to learn more about how Magento 2.4 is helping merchants, you can join Adobe for an introductory on Thursday, September 17, 2020. You can also check out the release notes or get in touch with us here at JH: breakthrough@wearejh.com