As we enter the final quarter of the year, the ecommerce industry shows no sign of slowing down! If you’re looking to stay updated on the latest trends, upcoming technologies shaping the sector, this blog is for you. In this edition of the eCommerce roundup, we cover recent platform updates, technological advancements, and upcoming events to watch out for.
PLATFORM UPDATES
1. Adobe Commerce Security-Only Patches Are Live!
Adobe Commerce recently released security-only patches for versions 2.4.7-p2, 2.4.6-p7, 2.4.5-p9, and 2.4.4-p10, focusing on addressing critical vulnerabilities. These patches do not include any new features or functionalities. The patches enhance security by fixing issues in scripting, remote code executions, and other potential threats, ensuring sensitive data is protected and compliance standards are met. Although no new features have been rolled out, these updates are essential for maintaining site stability and security.
All Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source release packages can be downloaded from repo.magento.com using Composer.
2. Magento Open Source Community Prioritization Process
The Magento Open Source Community Prioritization Process lets Magento users and developers have a say in implementing improvements or changes on the platform. The community can vote on Pull Requests (PRs) which are suggestions for the change in code they find valuable. Adobe Commerce then picks the highest voted and adds them to the community dashboard labeled “Project: Community Picked”. This process gives the Magento community a chance to determine what features and fixes must be worked on, ensuring the updates are guided by users.
Here’s the combined status of pull requests selected through the community prioritization process:
3. Magento Deployment Service To Be Decommissioned In September
Adobe Commerce recently announced that the Magento Deployment Service will be decommissioned on September 19th, 2024 for security reasons. This indicates that merchants need to explore alternative deployment options such as self-managed, cloud-based, or other managed hosting platforms for a seamless transition. Merchants must also take into consideration the impact the decommissioning will have on their existing data and plan for a smooth migration, ensuring customer data, product details, order history, etc. are safely transferred.
4. Streamline Marketing Campaigns With Adobe Workfront Planning
Businesses can now streamline their marketing campaigns with Adobe’s new Workfront Planning. The company intends to provide a more integrated and efficient solution for managing marketing campaigns by offering a centralized hub that oversees everything from planning to execution. This unified view enhances visibility, enables marketers to keep track of their progress, and identify any bottlenecks along the way, thereby ensuring smooth and timely delivery. By streamlining all marketing campaigns businesses, businesses can easily manage creative briefs and approval workflows while improving collaboration between teams and reducing data silos. Adobe Workfront Planning boosts efficiency, offers data-driven insights and improves decision-making, and ultimately delivers distinctive customer experiences.
5. Boost Content Creation Efficiency With Adobe’s AI Assistant Content Accelerator
Adobe’s AI Assistant Content Accelerator is designed to transform the content creation process with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The tool automates content generation, helping content creators produce blog posts, social media captions, and product descriptions more efficiently. It also offers personalized recommendations for topics, keywords, and styles based on user preferences and audience data, while optimizing content for SEO and social media platforms. By automating tasks, it saves time and costs, ensures consistency in tone and style, and enhances productivity. Adobe’s AI Assistant generates content that can be reviewed and edited as needed.
6. Adobe Announces Firefly Video Model
Adobe Firefly Video Model is an innovative generative AI tool that transforms the video creation process, making it easier and more creative than ever before. It enables users to generate original video content based on text prompts or existing footage, specifying styles and themes for a customized outcome. The model also automates tedious editing tasks, like color grading and noise reduction, while offering creative suggestions for transitions and effects. The tool offers a wide range of features and benefits, making it a valuable asset for creators.
7. Enhancing Flexibility With Shopify’s Split Shipping Feature
Shopify’s Split Shipping feature allows merchants to offer customers the option to split their orders into multiple shipments, providing greater flexibility and convenience. This is especially helpful for large or heavy orders or when customers prefer to receive items at different times. This feature can be easily enabled by merchants in their storage settings. At checkout, customers can easily choose split shipping and input separate addresses for each shipment. Shopify further calculates shipping costs for each shipment based on the address and methods selected. By offering split shipping, Shopify aims to boost customer satisfaction, reduce cart abandonment, improve order fulfillment, and tailor improved shopping experiences for merchants.
INDUSTRY UPDATES
1.Meta X Together AI unveils LlamaCoder
The collaboration between Meta and Together AI has culminated in the Llama Coder, a powerful language model to enhance coding tasks. This language model is built on Meta’s Llama language model and is incorporated with a large dataset of code repositories to enhance its ability to understand, write, and generate code. Key features include code generation based on natural language prompts, real-time code completion suggestions, and explanations of complex code snippets. In addition, Llama coder also helps in code debugging, identifying errors, and proposing fixes, while suggesting improvements for code readability and efficiency through refactoring. The model can aid education for students learning to code, in the software development field, and research purposes.
2. X TV Launched
The social media platform “X” formerly called Twitter has designed a dedicated app for television use. X TV is an innovative app that enhances browsing and interaction experience by optimizing content for larger screens. The app is crafted with intuitive navigation controls that can be easily managed with a TV remote while providing an immersive viewing experience to users. The viewer can enjoy familiar functionalities such as posting, liking, and following new accounts, etc. The larger display further enhances the consumption of images, videos, and other multimedia content more engagingly from the comfort of the living room.
3. LinkedIn Enhances User Experience With In-Feed Video Carousels
LinkedIn recently launched in-feed video carousels to boost engagement on its platform to meet the growing demand of video-based communication. This new feature showcases a dynamic, side-scrolling collection of video clips tailored around the viewers professional preferences and in-app activities, similar to TikTok’s vertical video format. This new feature is aimed to attract younger users to the platform while adapting to the evolving content consumption. Video carousels are a unique way to provide users with engaging content and experts suggest that this could further benefit the platform with engaging video feeds featuring industry updates and live events.
4. Amazon Ads Unveils AI Tools to Transform Video Advertising
At the recent Accelerate event, Amazon Ads launched Video Generator, a new feature that uses generative AI to help advertisers create engaging video ads quickly without ads quickly and at no extra cost! With this tool a single product image can be used to create a visually spectacular video tailored to showcase the product features. Additionally, the tool also has a live image capability within the image generator that helps in creating animated videos. These innovations come in response to consumer demands for more video content.
5. Big Announcements At YouTube’s Annual Event
At YouTube’s annual event, several new features were introduced to improve creativity, community building, and monetization for creators, The key highlights include creating enhanced video backgrounds by integrating Google’s DeepMind video model Veo and Dream Screen, an upgraded inspiration tab for in YouTube Studio to help creators refine ideas, and launch of a Community Hub for deeper audience interaction. Auto dubbing is also being worked on where users can add dubbed audio tracks, and the new”Hype” feature will allow viewers to boost smaller creators through a leaderboard system. YouTube Shopping feature is further being expanded to more countries creating a revenue system for content creators.
UPCOMING EVENTS
1. Meet Magento, New York
Meet Magento New York is happening this October, bringing together over 500 eCommerce professionals including retailers, developers, and industry experts. With over 40+ speakers and 25+ sponsors, the event will offer key insights and networking opportunities centered around the Magento platform.
Date: October 10, 2024
Location: New World Stages, Manhattan
Register Now: https://meetmagentonyc.com/tickets
2. Meet Magento Netherlands
Meet Magento Netherlands, is a premier, community-driven premier event for the Dutch eCommerce community, focusing on the Magento platform. It is aimed to empower businesses, retailers, developers, and providers with industry best practices and future updates. Attendees can expect insightful talks, networking opportunities, and a chance to connect with key players in the Magento ecosystem.
Date: October 31, 2024
Location: LIEF AMSTERDAM
Register Now:https://nl.meet-magento.com/
3. Ecommerce Warsaw Expo
The 26th eCommerce Warsaw Expo, is a key event for Poland’s eCommerce industry. Attendees can interact with industry experts, explore new business opportunities, and gain insights on the latest trends and technologies. Exhibitors can showcase their innovative technologies and offer educational sessions.
Date: October 25, 2024
Location: To be announced
Register Now:https://ecommercewarsaw.com/
4. eCommerce Expo, Asia
The eCommerce Expo Asia is set to happen in Singapore. The event will explore the future of retail, and emerging technologies – from AI and blockchain to customer experience and omnichannel strategies, this event is ideal for both seasoned professionals and new entrepreneurs looking to stay updated.
Date: October 9-10, 2024
Location: Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Singapore
Register Now:https://www.ecommerceexpoasia.com/
