On February 8, Adobe announced the release of Magento Commerce 2.4.2 and two security-only patches, 2.3.6-p1 and 2.4.1-p1. “Magento Commerce 2.4.2 assists merchants in maximizing their opportunities with enhancements to B2B purchase approvals, expanded PWA and GraphQL support, and improvements to the Page Builder and Media Gallery performance and developer experience,” explains Adobe’s senior technical writer Ken Hicks.

The latest Magento release has resolved all known issues from Magento 2.4.1, making over 280 fixes to the core code and 35 enhancements to the platform’s security. The Magento community also came together to fix nearly 290 GitHub issues in total, ensuring that Magento Commerce 2.4.2 will be more user-friendly and work more efficiently than ever before.

New Tools and Enhanced Features

After the rapid growth of eCommerce in 2020, retailers need to continue delivering excellent experiences to their customers in order to build long-term loyalty and further expand their businesses. Individual consumers and B2B buyers alike expect websites to be fast, mobile-friendly, secure, and simple to use, and stores that fail to meet these requirements risk going overlooked.

Magento Commerce 2.4.2 contains several notable improvements that will make it easier for merchants to keep up with ever-changing consumer wants and needs. Some of the most significant highlights from the release include:

• Upgrade Compatibility Tool. This new tool allows merchants to identify any incompatibilities before upgrading their platform, which can reduce costs and make the entire transition process go smoothly.
• Infrastructure improvements. The updated release will improve the quality of the Framework, along with these following areas: Customer Account, Catalog, CMS, OMS, Import/Export, Promotions and Targeting, Cart and Checkout, B2B, and Staging and Preview.
• Performance enhancements. Magento 2.4.2 boosts API performance and it supports complex catalogs up to 20x larger than earlier platform releases.
• B2B fixes. The new Magento release includes B2B v1.3.1. This updated feature includes several bug fixes and supports numerous types of online payments. B2B v1.3.1 is capable of:

• Maintaining compatibility with third-party, custom, and community-developed payment methods.

• Notifying buyers by email when they need to add payment details.

• Allowing email customization from the Admin account.

• Letting buyers change payment methods throughout the buying process to improve flexibility and encourage more conversions.
• PWA Studio release. Retailers can expect various performance enhancements, bug fixes, better scalability, and support for numerous languages and currencies through Venia.

• New Resources for Media gallery. Merchants can better manage their gallery by limiting which accounts can insert media into content and upload, edit, or delete items from the gallery. Retailers can also use web-optimized images instead of high-resolution images so performance doesn’t slow down while rendering.
• In-Product Guidance. For merchants wanting to deliver highly personalized experiences to customers, this latest concept works to help shoppers use self-help options to find exactly what they’re looking for in your store. This feature can also be utilized to inform shoppers of new products or store capabilities, get new customers onboarded, or educate users about relevant topics.

For more information about everything Magento 2.4.2 has to offer, check out the official release notes here!