Introduction
With the advent of the internet, there was a paradigm shift in the business world with the electronic exchange of products taking place over the World Wide Web (WWW). Ecommerce gained momentum in the last decade, growing exponentially in the last few years. The size of Ecommerce has skyrocketed to trillions, and it is not a surprise to see both B2B (online exchange of goods and services between businesses) and B2C (online exchange of goods and services between business and consumer) eCommerce flourishing like greased lightning with popularity at its peak.
In a cut-throat competitive business world, the new decade promises to be far more challenging for the merchants. The dynamics of consumer demands are rapidly fluctuating. It is imperative to constantly diversify and innovate to offer the best experiences to your customers. The first step is to select the best eCommerce platform that meets customer expectations and stabilizes sustainable growth for your business.
Magento has been the most reliable e-commerce platform throughout the last decade. With more than 100,000 online stores and over 2.5 million downloads, this open-source solution written in PHP is a vital organ for small scale businesses, mid-sized firms, and even king-sized corporates. This powerful tool offers a plethora of features to create the perfect online store for your business. In the past decade, Magento has consistently improved upon its model adding new attributes and elements which have left a lasting impression on the online e-commerce business.
Magento 2.3.4 – Version Highlights
Magento is dynamic and forward-looking. With such foresight, Magento has released its latest upgrade at the turn of the new decade. It is indeed a happy new year for all the retailers and sellers as Magento 2.3.4 is packed with stellar new features, coveted patches like PSD2-compliant payment methods, and additional security benefits. Hundreds of community contributions (around 300 contributions) have been incorporated accounting for performance enhancement. A list of amazing things that Magento 2.3.4 offers, has been given below.
- Over 200 functional fixes
- PWA Studio 5.0.0
- Page Builder and PWA Studio compatibility
- Security improvements
- Adobe Stock integration
- dotdigital live chat
- Page Builder enhancements
- Improved GraphQL coverage
Magento 2.3.4 Security
Magento has worked extensively on security concerns this time. A whopping 30 plus security improvements have been made that assures one of protection from unauthorized access to customer information. Security fixes have dealt with ongoing issues like cross-site scripting (XSS) and have also taken care of remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. It must be said that it is still possible to be a victim of phishing because of sophisticated measures taken by hackers these days.
Magento has thrown a word of caution to the merchants to be careful and follow steps like two-factor authentication, IP whitelisting, using a Virtual Private Network, use of a unique location and many more. Just simply relying on a password would always make you vulnerable to unauthorized access to customer information or hacked administrator sessions. The fixed security issues have been applied to the previous versions of 2.2.11, 1.14.4.4, and 1.9.4.4.
There has been tampering with the core code to bring forth further security enhancements. The custom layout updates have been removed to dispense with remote code execution (RCE). The custom layout field that can be found on CMS Page Edit, Product Edit, and Category Edit has been changed to a selector. So, instead of copying an extensive page layout and modifying the code, the user only needs to create a physical file containing the layout changes he/she wants and use that.
The content template features have been remodelled. This grants the facility to add whitelisted variables to administrator-defined templates that include newsletters, CMS, emails, etc. The email template allows a user to customize the template. The latest release also includes a feature where the user can control the data and methods that are used by the customized email templates.
Magento 2.3.4 Performance Enhancements
The latest update has boosted the performance standards by a considerable amount. Substantial improvements enable the seller to provide better customer experiences. Demanding customers will be impressed with the tweaks and refinements that have dealt with all the issues some of them were facing in the previous version. Some of the key performance enhancements are:
- Redundant non-cached requests that congested the catalogue pages have been removed. They have restructured the existing code related to the customer section invalidation and modifying the banner cache logic.
- A new configuration setting has been introduced that allows the merchants to deactivate the Magento Reports module partly or fully. This statistical data collection tool from customers, products, orders, etc. is disabled by default. Magento advises that disabling the Reports module will render better performance. The new configuration setting can be found as stated (System Configuration > General > Reports > General Options).
- PHTML files have also undergone massive code refactoring and micro-refactoring with the all-new bundling mechanism allowing for better parsing and recognition of all dependencies on JavaScript.
Live Chat Support
The previous version of Magento saw dotdigital becoming the first Vendor Bundled Extension (VBE) to be integrated into the Magento core. With the Magento 2.3.4 update, dotdigital has upgraded its VBE by adding Live Chat that provided all merchants (both Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce) exclusively with one free chat agent. You can get this advantage even with the full Engagement Cloud License.
Live Chat is a great tool that is a hit with customers as it puts them directly in touch with the makers to resolve their problems. This real-time engagement benefits the merchants as delivering quality customer service always ensures that customers will come back for more.
Chat agents are trained to handle multiple conversations at the same time and provide the customers with lightning-quick solutions to their queries. This includes interchange of tickets, product images, demo videos, eBooks, etc. Live Chat can also work as a great marketing tool. The agents can recommend products or divert customers to other products when the inventory of a particular stock is exhausted. Live Chat removes any barriers to sales and lets merchants synchronize custom attributes, data, wish lists, and campaigns from Engagement Cloud with Magento.
PWA Studio Compatibility
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) studio is a brilliant technology that enables revolutionary browsing experience for tech-savvy customers. This trailblazing suite of tools allows a merchant and a developer to build Magento-powered PWAs which magnifies conversion rates and redoubles customer engagement. The latest release has equipped PWA studio with more tools that have both the merchants and customers excited. The most exciting characteristic is its compatibility with Page Builder.
Such integration of Page Builder into PWA studio allows content pages created by the popular extension to be showcased in storefronts with the help of components of both the technologies. The headless storefronts can be created by translating in PWA studio’s proof of concept Venia reference storefront. Thus, developers have greater creative freedom while using the Page Builder extension for creating Magento-powered PWA studio based storefronts.
Other upgrades include the tampering with “Talons” for better handling of Venia UI, restructuring of Venia state management, smooth addition of high-quality media assets to online stores through Adobe Stock integration extension, enhanced GraphQL coverage enabling better search, navigation, merging of carts, etc.
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