Accelerate Your Business in the Current Commerce Landscape with Magento 2.4

The commerce landscape rapidly shift at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an expectation that we would see an unprecedented acceleration of digital transformation initiatives. Recent research from McKinsey shows that 96% of surveyed B2B businesses have, in fact, changed their sales model to favor online and eCommerce-based selling.

To quickly ramp up B2B commerce sales, businesses need to support their customers’ varying purchasing policies and requirements. 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.

To smooth the transition to digital commerce, B2B companies must be able to guide and assist their customers as they utilize new online purchasing and account management capabilities. 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 multiple ways:

• Troubleshoot any part of the buying process – for example, help the customer find a product, show them how to set up a wish-list or requisition list, or address something that doesn’t work as expected.

• Walk the customer through custom functionality that may only be available in the storefront experience, such as a product configuration.

• Save the customer time by creating orders and quotes on their behalf or handling administrative tasks, such as adding buyers and setting up approval rules.

Among all these changes in shopper behavior and merchant needs, some things remain the same. Shoppers continue to expect – and merchants continue to prioritize – an experience that is secure, fast, and reliable. The release of Magento 2.4 includes several enhancements to platform quality, security, and performance. Highlights include:

• Starting with 2.4, we are securing the Admin portal by requiring tw-factor authentication (2FA) for all users. Learn more about implementing 2FA throughout Magento.

• 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. See the full list of capabilities in the Magento Marketplace.

• Scalability improvements include Redis optimizations that allow merchants to serve a higher amount of traffic without performance degradation and pages that load up to 43% faster at high traffic volumes.

• Faster cart and checkout performance, such as 50% faster reordering and 30% faster add-to-cart performance during quick ordering.