The eCommerce industry moves at a rapid pace, and October was no exception.
PayPal adopted the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) service, Shopify transitioned to headless eCommerce, and Walmart ventured into eCommerce operations in India.
But remember, these are just a glimpse of what’s to come.
Here’s a summary of the prominent trends and technologies that emerged last month.
PLATFORM UPDATES
1. New Release: Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.7-beta2
This beta release, launched in October, serves as a testing platform for assessing the latest features and updates before the official release.
Let’s explore some standout features of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.7-beta2:
- New PHP Application Server for GraphQL APIs: This innovative server significantly enhances Adobe Commerce by preserving state information for Commerce GraphQL API requests. The elimination of bootstrapping leads to better throughput, reduced latency, and more efficient resource utilization for all GraphQL APIs.
- Expanded GraphQL Coverage: With this update, it’s now simpler to leverage GraphQL for accessing and managing custom attributes and resolver caches.
- Updated FedEx and UPS Service Support: This update ensures a seamless experience for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source.
In addition, the release comes with more than 200 quality improvements and fixes, contributing to the overall enhancement of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.7-beta2.
2. Adobe Sensei-Powered Live Search with Intelligent Category Merchandising and Multi-Language Support
Adobe Sensei’s intelligent category merchandising uses AI to sense shoppers’ behavior and preferences to automatically adjust product orders on category pages. Live Search now supports over 100 languages.
This helps in
- Smart product sorting by prioritizing products like new arrivals, bestsellers, or sale items.
- Promote categories and upsell products.
- Multilingual support enables merchants to provide search results in multiple languages.
Thus, enhancing sales, customer engagement, search engine rankings, and website traffic.
Visit the marketplace to download the Free live search extension
3. New Data Connection Extension
Adobe’s new data connection tool is a handy way for businesses to gather information from various sources, like customer databases and marketing systems, and put it all in one central location. This makes it easier to use the data for marketing and improving the customer experience. It also helps with cleaning up the data to ensure it’s accurate and provides a better understanding of customers and their requirements.
To know more,Click here
4. The Saas Pricing Index
The SaaS pricing index is a helpful tool for SaaS businesses to understand the average price of SaaS products. It allows businesses to compare their prices with competitors, follow pricing trends over time, and make informed decisions about how to set their prices.
With SaaS Pricing index, flow will be
Adobe has made an important update related to SaaS price indexing. They’ve moved it out of the Commerce application for Commerce Services. This change benefits businesses with large catalogs and dynamic pricing, as it significantly speeds up the time it takes for price adjustments to appear for customers. This update also simplifies the process, supporting all product types and eliminating extra setup steps.
Check out to know more.
Extensibility and Developer Updates for Adobe Commerce
1. Lowering the cost of maintenance with extended commerce business processes
Webhooks for Adobe Commerce now enhance online shopping processes without extensive application customizations. They allow calls to external services during specific shopping events, such as real-time shipping cost calculations.
This feature is versatile, supporting various real-time functions like tax calculations, inventory checks, and payment validation. Importantly, it doesn’t require core application code changes, simplifying maintenance and upgrades.
2.Improved Features for Modular Storefronts and Developer Experience
Adobe is investing heavily in enhancing the capabilities for composable storefronts and developer experience. This includes:
- API Mesh: A new capability that allows developers to bring together APIs from SOAP, REST, and GraphQL services to build composable storefronts. It simplifies the process of extending, securing, and transforming data from multiple sources, all while keeping the storefront less complicated.
- Updated developer tooling: The updated developer tools makes it simpler to manage configuration files and environment settings, improving collaboration among developers. They can now run, test, and troubleshoot API Mesh locally, improving efficiency.
- Enhanced security: Several security patches have been released for supported commerce customers and those on extended support.
3. Creating Event-Driven Adobe Commerce Integrations Using AWS Services
Adobe I/O Events will be available by the end of 2023, enabling Adobe Commerce and other solutions to send events to Amazon EventBridge seamlessly. Developers can easily build event-driven connections in a user-friendly, low-code environment. This integration supports more than 700 Commerce events, such as product catalog changes and order updates.
Event-driven Adobe Commerce integrations offer:
- Alerting for new orders via Slack or email
- Prompting reminders for abandoned carts,
- Delivering personalized shopping experiences when customers add items to their carts.
This empowers businesses to automate processes and enhance the customer shopping experience.
4 .Apple Introduces Apple Pay Later Service
Apple Pay Later, a new service from Apple allows consumers to split their purchases into four equal payments over six weeks, with no interest or fees. With this service you can easily pay for your purchases over time without paying high interest rates on credit cards. It is available for purchases between $75 and $1,000 made on iPhones or iPads at websites and apps that accept Apple Pay.
Though, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is a popular option, letting you split your purchase into several payments, you often need to integrate services like Affirm or AfterPay. What’s amazing about having Apple Pay in your Magento checkout is that it automatically gives customers the option to use Apple Pay Later. This offers your customers more payment options, boosting your store conversion rates.
As of now, Apple Pay Later is in beta, but it will be made available to all eligible users soon.
Industry Updates
1. Shop Like a Star: Join X and Paris Hilton on a Livestream Shopping Adventure
On November 1st, 2023, X, announced its collaboration with Paris Hilton for an exciting live-stream shopping experience. This event took place on XSpaces platform, where users can gather in virtual rooms to chat, watch videos, and shop together. It was a big hit, with over a million people tuning in to watch Hilton shop and interact with fans.
XSpaces allows you to shop with friends and influencers virtually while learning about new products and fashion tips. If you’re up for a unique shopping experience or a fan of Paris Hilton’s style, don’t miss her next live-stream shopping event on X’s Spaces platform.
2. Uber Announced the Launch of a New Feature Called “Return a Package.”
Uber has launched a “Return a Package” service in the United States, available through their apps.Customers can request courier pickups for $5 at post offices or shipping locations (or $3 for Uber One members).
This service aims to make returns more convenient, addressing the annoyance of mail returns and processing costs, especially among younger shoppers. While it’s currently limited in scope and location, Uber plans to expand it to other countries and support a wider range of items in the future.
3. Time Magazine has Recognized Adobe’s Liquid Mode and Photoshop’s Generative Fill and Generative Expand as Best Inventions of 2023
TIME magazine has recognized Adobe’s and Photoshop’s innovative feature additions in its products as the Best inventions of 2023.
Adobe Acrobat’s “Liquid Mode” adapts PDF documents to fit any screen, enhancing readability on mobile devices. Photoshop’s “Generative Fill” and “Generative Expand” employ AI technology to complete and expand images, even from incomplete or low-resolution originals.
These tools enhance creativity and accessibility worldwide. TIME acknowledges these innovations for solving real-world problems in creative ways like:
- Students and professionals can use Liquid Mode for mobile PDF document access.
- Photographers and designers can restore images and create art with Generative Fill.
- Filmmakers and video editors can extend videos without quality loss with Generative Expand.
UPCOMING EVENTS
1. Meet Magento Netherlands
Meet Magento Netherlands is a one-day gathering for people who use Magento, like online store owners, developers, and partners. At this event, learn about the latest Magento updates, how to make your online store faster and more secure, and other useful topics.
Date: 2nd November,2023
Location:Lief Amsterdam
Register Now:https://nl.mage-os.org/
2. Customer Engagement Summit 2023
The Customer Engagement Summit 2023 is all about helping businesses engage customers better. The summit features discussions on the future of customer engagement, how to use data to make personalized customer experiences, ways to create loyal customers, how to measure and boost customer satisfaction, and how to use technology to enhance customer engagement, etc.
Date:28th November,2023
Location: The Brewer, London
Register Now:https://www.engagecustomer.com
/events/customer-engagement-summit
3. Amz Innovate
AMZ Innovate is a conference for Amazon sellers, hosted by Million Dollar Sellers, a community with over $7 billion in Amazon sales. It features expert speakers covering various aspects of Amazon selling, workshops, and networking.
Date: 13th & 14th November
Location: Pier Sixty, Chelsea, NYC
Register Now:https://amzinnovate.co/
4. Web Summit 2023
Web Summit 2023 is among the world’s largest tech and innovation events, with 70,000+ global attendees. It’s a fantastic opportunity for tech enthusiasts to explore the latest trends, network with experts, and find innovative solutions for real-world challenges.
Date:13th-16th November
Location: Altice Arena, Lisbon
Register Now:https://websummit.com/
