Bringing a big smile to all the Magento store owners and spreading a wave of amaze among the developers Magento 2.2.4 has come with all the good news. Encompassing its focus around the most daunting issue of cart abandonment and improving the checkout process. This version has evolved to be a power-packed performer along with 80 engineering fixes and more than 200 contributions by the community. Incorporating out of the box enhancements in their version 2.2.4, Magento has taken up the world by storm.

Here we bring to you some of the most significant and awesome features released last week.

New Features
Third party extensions have incorporated in this version of Magento.

1. Amazon Pay
We all are very much familiar with Amazon as an online shopping portal and Amazon Pay as their payment gateway. By including Amazon Pay in the enhancements in version 2.2.4, Magento has been successful in opening doors to millions of users who already have their accounts on Amazon. Another advantage for the users will be that of faster and easier checkout process as they will not have to compulsorily create an account, their information shall be fetched from their amazon accounts. This will not only benefit user but also the store-owner as it will reduce the cart abandonment.

2. Vertex
Vertex is an integration which will make it possible for your customers to know the details of their payments. This shall include the calculation of real-time taxes, availing the discounts and even generate pdf returns. Now how does this benefit your store? Earlier when the customer was not shown the additional charges of taxes and the amount of discounts availed, the rate of cart abandonment was quite high. But now when he will be able to access the total amount he needs to pay for the selected item along with its complete breakdown, he will be able to modify the cart if needed, before he reaches the checkout page. This transparency in tax calculation will surely lead a lot of reduction in the rate of cart abandonment.

3. Klarna Pay
Another significant integration in Magento 2.2.4 is the introduction of Klarna Payments. With Klarna, you will be able to allow your customers to pay right away, pay later or slice it. Pay now is quite a familiar term, but “Pay later” will allow your customer to pay the dues within 30 days from the date of delivery. “Slice It” option allows your customer to pay the total amount in easy instalments with lower interest rates. This is also a part of efforts focussing on reduction of abandoned carts.

Enhancements
In the name of enhancements, this release have a number of them in form of Magento Shipping and Dotmailer bundled extensions. Being a store-owner, now you can experience the following:

• The all new Abandoned Cart table.
• Facility to design your own transactional email template and even lets you set the email ate store level.
• Avails you with a dedicated payment and shipping debug files to secure the information to the functional areas.
• Gives you enhancement of syncs of subscriber’s sales data. This will only be possible by enabling the sales data option in configuration.
• An extensible and translatable Admin global search, which takes into account the ACL settings for the existing users.
• Supporting the multi-shipping checkout, CyberSource payment method can be used.
• Faster image loading and improved search performance enhancements.
• Upgraded Emogrifier dependency to 2.0.0 or later.

Fixes
There has been numerous fixes right from installation and setup, General, cart and checkout, tax, performance and shipping. A few of them are like:

• Provision of Helper object to facilitate access in Symfony console for styling objects.
• Your customer can now log out and log back in immediately.
• Inclusion of symbols, letters and image in CAPTCHA labels.
• Removal of HTML tags from attribute names in the drop down menu of Catalog Products.
• Simple Product views will witness 11% improvement in performance.
• Availability of credit card form while making an order from the Admin. This will be there even if there is a single payment method.
• Duplication within one product category is eliminated along with random products.
• Low stock report shall be available to you for the out-of-stock products.
• While re-saving a product attribute under a new name, you will face no more errors.
• While the checkout page is loading, custom checkout and shipping steps are separated.
• The appearance of checkout page on mobile devices has been improved for Payment Methods section.
• Automatic updation of Credit memo when Admin issues a refund.

There are many more to the fixes which can be viewed from Magento 2.2.4 Release Notes.

How will Magento 2.2.4 help improve your business?
One of the most important questions of all times, “How will Magento 2.2.4 benefit my business?” Also read our previous article on Why Magento is Best Platform for Enterprise Level. Now the answer to your question lies here:

1. Reduced Cart Abandonment.
   This version has been fully packed with features overcoming the challenging issue of cart abandonment. With the improved speed allowing customers to experience faster checkout and even incorporating mobile optimized payment options resulting in lesser customers leaving without completing the purchase.
2. Increase in AOV.
   AOV refers to the Average Order Value. Being a store-owner an increased AOV shall always be welcomed by you. So, Magento 2.2.4 brings in this opportunity for you by ensuring transparency in tax and shipping rates calculation with Vertex and Magento Shipping right from the cart. Even flexibility in payment options are rendering a sturdy base for you to get increased AOV.
3. Simplified Operations saving time.
   By introducing the integration of Vertex serving as tax and shipping rates calculator, has simplified some of the most complex manual processes. This shall serve you not only with exact amount of tax but also do returns and exemption certificate management for you. Streamlining the shipping processes by enabling easy access to carriers, shipping rates, and returns processing right from Magento Admin has simplified the core operations resulting in saving time.
4. Amazing Shopping Experience.
   A whopping 300 product quality enhancements is more than enough for delivering better and faster shopping experience to your customers. Faster product image loading and over 36% quicker response time taken for fetching popular search results are sure to improve your customer’s shopping experience.

Conclusion
Magento 2.2.4 is undoubtedly transformed to a positive and far more efficient avatar. With all these incredible updates and upgrades in Magento 2.2.4, it is highly advisable for all the Store-owners to get upgraded to the new version. For a professional Magento Development support, please feel free to contact us.