2020 has been a challenging year for many businesses except e-commerce. In 2020, the e-commerce business experienced an unprecedented increase in sales, to be more precise, by 30%. And this trend is not going to slow down. In 2021 polls, more than 80% of respondents surveyed said they would buy more using online stores. There are more and more customers at e-commerce stores, and they are becoming more demanding. As a result, it is very important to stay on the cutting edge of technology and keep your store up to date. In order to help you with this, in this article, we will highlight the recent Magento 2.4.2 update. It brought many beneficial changes to improve security, performance and provide important tools that help e-commerce stores cope with increasing online shopping popularity. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Improved B2B Capabilities for Purchase Approval and Headless Commerce
One of the main and most anticipated changes was the addition of support for online payments. Previously in older Magento versions, the process of confirming purchases that only support offline payments was very inconvenient and time-consuming. With the arrival of Magento 2.4.2, the entire process has been greatly simplified, and customers can now use the same convenient approval process for all orders.
Besides, the update brought new GraphQL APIs. These listings include various company credit lists and claim lists that support important B2B use cases for successful headless commerce operating.
Updated Storefront Content Management and Improved Performance
All entrepreneurs who work with Magento know a Media Gallery feature. Magento developers first introduced it in the Magento 2.4 update. Since then, the developers have done some serious work on this feature, and now Media Gallery fully supports image optimization. In simple terms, the storefront now uses browser-optimized resolution images, while the original image is stored in the media gallery. This feature creates a separate optimized copy of the image without affecting the original in any way. This is all aimed at significantly improving storefront store performance.
In addition, admins can distribute access rights to manage files through the admin panel. And the final improvement is the updated Page Builder feature that now provides content previews for mobile devices and desktops.
PWA Studio Now Provides Fast Time to Market and Significantly Lowers Ownership Cost
Magento 2.4.2 continues to make huge strides towards improving PWA Studio and lowering the cost of owning and developing progressive web applications. With the new update, we introduced multilingual and multicurrency support. This innovation greatly simplifies the launch of international sites in the form of PWA.
In addition, Update 2.4.2 includes Venia components covering My Account. They are designed to make launch times shorter, improve extensibility and performance that significantly enhance both developers’ and buyers’ experience.
Implementation of In-Product Guidance
For the first time, Magento is implementing In-Product Guidance on its platform. This concept is exclusive and is only supported on Magento 2.4.2 and higher versions.
In simple terms, the In-Product Guidance provides a proactive, personalized, and scalable product experience to help users interact with critical product features and value paths. For example, this feature can notify about new features that have been added with a fresh update, help customers learn how to use the platform, and highlight various little-used yet useful features.
Those who have already updated their platforms to Magento 2.4.2 can already enjoy this feature as it is automatically enabled. If you have not noticed any changes or do not want this feature to be enabled, we advise you to use the admin panel and configure this function manually. To do this, go to the “Stores”, click on “Configuration”, “Advanced”, “Administrator” and after that click on “Use by administrator”.
Minor Changes and Quality-Of-Life Improvements at Magento 2.4.2
In addition to major additions, Magento 2.4.2 has added many small improvements that fix bugs and improve the overall platform experience. Of these improvements, we can note the following:
- Various VBE improvements that affect Braintree, dotdigital, and Vertex.
- Improved API performance which now provides increased scalability for companies with large and complex catalogs.
- Implement AWS S3 support out of the box. This allows you to better optimize infrastructure.
- More than 280 fixed errors, bugs, and malfunctions that users have noted since version 2.4.1.
Wrapping Up
This was a brief coverage of the recent update to the Magento platform. As you can see, the changes are all pretty significant and will greatly improve your store’s workflows. If you have questions about the update or Magento Platform as a whole, don’t hesitate and drop us a line so our representative can provide you a professional consultation.
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