Magento has come a long way since its inception; during these years, it has powered up millions of e-commerce stores and helped businesses to craft and deliver enriching customer experiences. At the same time, it has constantly endeavored to improve itself with version upgrades and feature enhancements. 2018 has been an eventful year for Magento merchants in this context as the platform has come up with several improvements during this year. As Magento 2.3.0 has brought several innovative tools this year, 2019 looks bright for the merchants selling through Magento e-commerce stores. Let us have a glimpse of these tools and features that are tailored to propel e-commerce growth to a significant extent.
Multi-Source Inventory: Enhancing operational efficiency in inventory management
Inventory management is one of the key e-commerce functions that need to be streamlined to run the business successfully. Multi-Source Inventory, as the name suggests, enables the management of inventory across multiple locations right from within the Magento admin. This is critical for the evolving businesses that need to manage greater inventory across diverse locations and sources such as warehouses, third-party drop shippers, and distribution centers. The new feature also enables them to track inventory at each of the sources, assign products and quantities to the fulfillment sources, integrate seamlessly with third-party inventory systems, and streamline operations with rules to control the inventory sources. Even the sellers with a single inventory source can avail extensive benefits from this tool, with accurate quantity counts in addition to high-performing checkouts.
Page Builder: Improving the interface of the e-commerce store
While Multi-Source Inventory is the tool that enhances the operational efficiency of the store, Page Builder is meant to improve the store’s customer interface. This tool is available for Magento Commerce edition and has an array of features including a drag-and-drop interface, a diverse set of content types such as banners, images, and videos, and instant preview capabilities which allow effective management of content even by non-technical users. With this tool, you can create new pages, manage products and categories, and make content updates, even without the help of a professional developer. Additionally, it provides a flexible grid system which renders customizability for the store. Furthermore, Page Builder is integrated with the existing Magento functionality such as widgets and media gallery as well. It can be used to create dynamic content blocks throughout the site and even schedule content updates with content staging and preview.
PWA Studio: Boosting mobile experiences for better conversions
As mobile becomes the key aspect of Magento marketing arsenal, PWA Studio is another tool that has been made a part of Magento 2.3 to assist e-commerce businesses in preparing itself for the m-commerce move. Progressive Web Apps help the merchants to craft excellent mobile experiences for better engagement and higher conversions. PWA Studio has been empowered with reference themes, open web standards, and guided development to enable Magento developers increase their speed and efficiency while building PWAs. Being an open source initiative, this tool is expected to come up with regular updates, with respect to addition of new features, quality improvements, and reference theme enhancements.
Additional Updates: Unlocking new opportunities for Magento stores
Besides the aforementioned tools, there are several other updates that Magento 2.3.0 offers to unlock new opportunities for e-commerce stores running on it. These include:
Magento Shipping – The enhancement offers additional support for new fulfillment options along with expanded global availability.
Enhanced indexing performance – With this feature, you get the advantage of massive reduction in indexation times with sharding and parallel processing of indexers; this translates into extensive support for larger sites and faster product updates.
GraphQL – This is a flexible storefront API that comes within the Magento API ecosystem and offers rich developer tooling. It enables developers to query specific data elements from the APIs in a single request.
Declarative schema – This feature simplifies the upgrade and installation process by enabling developers to declare the desired database state and have the system adjusted automatically, without needing to perform redundant operations.
Asynchronous & Bulk Web APIs – These scalable APIs provide better control over the execution visibility and timing of API calls and enhance the performance as well.
New security tools – Magento 2.3 also brings greater security out-of-the-box as it strengthens the store with security features such as Google ReCAPTCHA and Two Factor Authentication.
Conclusion
Considering the enhancements that Magento 2.3 offers, a Magento upgrade seems to be the smartest decision that you can take for your business in the New Year. The upgrade will fortify your website in every single aspect, from performance, to security, features, and more. But making this transition requires professional expertise, which you can ensure if you hire Magento developers for the job. OrangeMantra is the name you can trust to engage expert professionals who can help you with the transition and open bring new opportunities for your business in 2019. Share your requirements with us and we will strategize the upgrade for you.