Adobe Launches Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4

Today, Adobe released version 2.4 of Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source to help merchants capture new opportunities in the current commerce landscape.

Noteworthy features of the 2.4 release include the following:

• Purchase Approval Workflows: New approval workflow functionality included in Magento 2.4 enables B2B buying companies to customize their approval processes using a simple form. They can define approval rules based on order value, number of SKUs, or shipping costs. Rules can specify multiple approvers and be assigned to specific roles.
• Seller Assisted Shopping: New Seller Assisted Shopping functionality empowers merchants to improve customer engagement and deliver exceptional service by allowing sales or customer service reps to log into their websites as the customer from the Magento Admin. Having access to the buyer’s experience enables the rep to support them in several ways, including helping troubleshoot the buying process, walking the customer through custom functionalities and creating orders and quotes on their behalf, or handling administrative tasks, such as adding buyers and setting up approval rules.
• In-store Pickup: With In-Store Pick Up in Inventory Management, merchants can select which physical inventory locations are eligible as customer pickup locations. During checkout, customers can find locations near them and view other essential information, such as store hours. Once orders have been placed, store associates can notify them when their orders are ready for pickup with a single click.

The release also introduces improved asset management capabilities in Magento Media Gallery. A completely rebuilt Media Gallery performs up to 30 times faster and strengthens integration with Adobe Stock, tightens control of access, and provides easier search and management of images.

Magento 2.4 also includes several enhancements to platform quality, security, and performance. The Admin portal now requires two-factor authentication 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 more traffic without performance degradation and pages that load up to 43 percent faster at high traffic volumes. Cart and checkout have also been sped up, with 50 percent faster reordering and 30 percent faster add-to-cart performance during quick ordering. A new Composer Update Plugin automates several previously manual upgrade steps, and updated tech stack components ensure long-term compliance and security while unlocking additional performance improvements.

Concurrently, with Magento 2.4, Adobe also released the latest version of PWA Studio for Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source, which introduces new Venia storefront experiences built using Page Builder content types, and a complete cart and checkout workflow to accelerate implementations. Adobe also introduced an extensibility framework to make it easier to customize and extend the capabilities of PWA Studio, both through custom development and apps in the Magento Marketplace.

Greater coverage of GraphQL APIs empowers merchants to build custom experiences for all digital touchpoints using their preferred front-end development tool.