What's New in Magento Commerce 2.2.4?

Today is the day! Magento Commerce 2.2.4 is available starting today and features new integrations with Amazon Pay, Klarna, and Vertex, as well as performance enhancements. 

This new release hopes to empower merchants to:

• Reduce cart abandonment and increase average order value by improving checkout speed, transparency, and flexibility.
• Save time and simplify operations with integrated shipping and tax solutions.
• Enable faster shopping with image loading and search performance enhancements.

Read on to learn what’s new and how these updates can improve your business.

What’s New?

This release includes new tools and numerous functional fixes and enhancements, plus a substantial number of contributions from the wider Magento community.

Extensions

There are significant new bundled extensions in this release that add instant and accurate tax calculation capabilities and new payment methods, including:

• Amazon Pay, which provides a trusted, familiar way for customers to check out.
• Vertex, which simplifies and automates the complexity of calculating sales tax.
• Klarna Payments, a new payment method. With Klarna Payments, merchants can provide customers with the option to pay now, later, or by installment.

You can learn more about these extensions in the Magento Partner Portal.

Enhancements

This release includes numerous fixes and enhancements to the Magento Shipping and dotmailer bundled extensions. Merchants can now use dotmailer to create their own transactional email templates. The dotmailer bundled extension features the following enhancements for this release:

• The new Abandoned Cart report table.
• The ability for merchants to design their own transactional email template.
• Enhancement of syncs of subscriber’s sales data. Sales data is now synced only if the sales data option is enabled in config.
• The ability to set transactional email at the Store level.

Also included are nearly 300 product quality enhancements, including performance improvements that enable faster shopping with image loading and search performance enhancements. Some of these enhancements include:

• The now translatable and extensible admin global search, which takes into account the ACL settings for the current user.
• CyberSource payment method can now be used for multishipping checkout and payment flows.

Perhaps the coolest part of this new release is the contributions from the Magento community. Magento Commerce 2.2.4 includes almost 200 community contributions. These community contributions include performance-tuning enhancements plus at least 80 engineering fixes.

How Will These Improvements Help Your Business?

These improvements aim to help you reduce cart abandonment and increase average order value, save time and simplify operations, and improve your customers’ shopping experience.

Reduce Cart Abandonment and Increase AOV

New capabilities improve checkout speed, transparency, and flexibility to reduce cart abandonment and increase average order value.

• Speed: Enable customers to check out faster, without ever leaving your site, using mobile optimized payment options offered by Amazon Pay and Klarna.
• Transparency: Ensure instant and accurate tax and shipping rate calculations, right from the cart, using Vertex and Magento Shipping.
• Flexibility: Take the stress out of purchasing by allowing customers to pay later or in installments with Klarna, and by utilizing Magento Shipping to provide more shipping, delivery, and pickup options to meet varying needs and budgets.

Save Time and Simplify Operations

Magento enables you to save time and simplify core operations by integrating Magento Shipping and Vertex tax solutions.

• Tax: Avoid complex manual processes and setup by having Vertex handle tax calculations, returns, and exemption certificate management for you.
• Shipping: Streamline fulfillment processes by accessing carriers, shipping rates, configurations, and returns processing right from the Magento Admin.

Improve Your Shopping Experience

Deliver a better shopping experience with faster product image loading, 36% quicker response times for popular search results, and over 300 product quality enhancements.

Upgrading to Magento Commerce to 2.2.4

The latest version of Magento Commerce 2.2 offers powerful functionality that benefits merchants on earlier Magento editions, and upgrading between patch releases (for example, from Magento 2.2.1 to Magento 2.2.4) should be relatively straightforward. However, be aware that upgrades tend to take longer for merchants with lots of customizations. You should always plan on conducting a full suite of tests when taking a new release as a best practice.

Merchants on Magento 2.1 should review the list of backward incompatible changes in Magento 2.2 to better understand what customizations they may need to update as part of an upgrade to Magento 2.2.4.

Want to learn more? Magento is hosting a webinar on May 15 called 8 Ways to Optimize Your Checkout with Magento Commerce. It will give more information on how this latest release can help significantly reduce cart abandonment.

Are you ready to take your Magento site to Magento Commerce 2.2.4? Contact our experienced team to get started.