Magento® has proven itself time and time again in the business world. It is the preferred choice of thousands of online stores. Magento prides itself on always providing its best possible version to its users. It has the most productive features currently available. Let’s take a look at what highlights and upgrades it has undergone.
What’s New in Magento 2.2?
You can look forward to these impressive new features in Magento 2.2:
Advanced Reporting
Magento 2.2 offers improved reporting for customer, products, and orders. This feature is free and available across the Enterprise and Community editions. It can be accessed from the Magento console for admins. It is a working trial of the Magento Business Intelligence (BI) solution. This makes for a more comfortable transition into Magento Business Intelligence Essentials. It combines data from Magento and Google Analytics. This gives you powerful data visualizations of your business. You can adjust the reports per specified date ranges. You can also view all reports from a single dashboard. So you can see each metric’s performance in the context of each other. You don’t have to open many tabs or switch between reports.
Fraud Protection
Signifyd is a subscription service that has been integrated with Magento 2.2. It gives merchants chargeback and fraud protection. It can be implemented on an on-demand basis for individual orders. The full package applies this feature to all orders. Signifyd takes on total risk by offering 100% chargeback protections. It is available with Magento Enterprise and Community editions.
Since Signifyd protects many merchants already, they can flag suspicious behavior. If this happens, Magento keeps a special lookout on that user information (e.g., Email address, IP addresses, etc.) on its other websites. When the same information tries to order with another merchant, you get notified.
Magento 2.2 B2B Features
The cost and complexity of building a Magento B2B site are now reduced. It is possible by including company account features as a standard inclusion. Merchants can support companies that have more than one buyer. Accounts can be managed using Magento’s easy self-service tools. Buyer accounts can be arranged into a hierarchy like their company purchasing structure. Now you can define roles and permissions for each user.
Useful for you:
The request-for-quote workflow is streamlined and can be fully managed within Magento. Quotes can be requested directly from the shopping cart. They can contain additional comments and even documents to support their request. Customers can then view the status of the quote and correspond with the merchant. As a merchant, you can enjoy similar features when issuing a quote. You can also add comments, additional documents, and quote expiry dates. There are also negotiation tools within the quote to help you. You may adjust the actual order cost and/or shipping cost to suit your customer’s needs. You can also include suggestions/ substitutions and show how the quote is affected.
The purchasing process is much smoother and faster. Speed is essential to the success of your business. Ordering by SKU becomes easy. Customers can upload a file (CSV) containing SKUs to start their orders. Magento will confirm if they belong to the assigned catalog and if they are available. Images and descriptions of products get displayed to the buyer for verification. Requisition lists allow for easy re-ordering of frequently purchased items. Quantities can be easily tweaked. Customers can repeat previous orders without putting the same list together again. Repeating includes the same items, shipping address, and payment options.
The Payment on Account feature lets you extend credit to companies. You can enable and disable Payment on Account per website if you have more than one. You may also control which payment methods customers can use. You may also specify which countries are eligible to apply it. Minimum and maximum order amounts for credit purchases may be set. There is a comprehensive set of credit management tools available. These tools put you in complete control of who and how you extend credit to. Your customers get shown full details of their credit status with you. All past credit transactions are available to view.
Customized Catalogs and Price Lists lets your customer see relevant items to them. Products and categories get displayed according to settings for each customer. Custom pricing can be set for individual customers. You may use fixed or dynamic pricing for percentage discounts. Any changes to shared catalogs will run in the background and not affect work. Users get notified when the process ends.
There are new web APIs for new features. It enables simple ERP integrations for various new features. This integration uses the same authentication and documentation as current Magento 2 APIs.
Platform Changes
Magento 2.2 enhances security by only using unserialize() calls when necessary. Magento also uses a redesigned hashing calculation to improve safety for sensitive data. The developer experience has been enhanced by improving cron, and JS exceptions logging around plugins in the core is limited. Original call parameters have been added to after plugins. So debugging plugins is less demanding. The technology stack and library components are updated. The developer experience of the UI component has been improved.
Useful for you:
Mass Asynchronous Operations enable simple improvement of long-running processes in business. It assumes that business logic manages all retries. This is clear in B2B Shared Catalogs.
Pipeline deployment flow enables you to run separate stages in the processes for building and deploying. There are many new CLI commands to make configuration much more comfortable between environments. A production environment upgrade can now happen in under 60 seconds. This meet’s Magento’s goal to help new and emerging business technology.
Enhanced Performance
There are significant indexer improvements within Magento 2.2. Clients may use your store even while the indexers are running. Long-running indexers work in groups to manage memory and run times better. The cart has also seen improvements. Carts with over 300 items are now supported. Quantity changes activated by checkout are not invalidated anymore. Varnish “Grace” and “Saint” modes get enabled as a default setting. New B2C and B2B benchmark files are part of Magento 2.2.