Magento has garnered a reputation for being constant in improving itself as an e-commerce platform and periodic version upgrades is the biggest proof its commitment for moving towards next level. After the release of Magento 2.3.0, it has come up with Magento 2.3.1.

Although Magento 2.3.0 was equipped with revolutionary tools and features for e-commerce growth and the latest upgrade is a smart move for businesses by bringing 200+ functional fixes, 30+ security enhancements, and 500+ pull requests by the community.  Magento 2.3.1 has now become more impressive even if have a first look on it. However there is much more to be unfolded. So let us do it for you.

Superior Experience
Merchants need to continuously manage the stores and they would always prefer a platform that eases the entire process. The new version of Magento store can be appropriate for online sellers because of its enhanced merchant experience manifold. The improvements offered are as follows:

• Improved workflow for order creation with elimination of delays in editing of billing and shipping addresses.
• Easy in inventory management through features like Elasticsearch support, in-store pickup fulfillment, optimized inventory transfers, and distance priority source selection algorithm.
• Uploading PDP images larger than 1920X1200 without any compressing or downsizing.

Higher Security
Security has always been priority for any ecommerce platform and Magento 2.3.1 presents 30+ new security enhancements. Moreover these upgrades can translate a store that secured enough to keep the crucial information of their customers absolutely safe. Other key enhancement includes:

• Cross-site scripting
• Sensitive data disclosure
• Arbitrary code execution

Embellished Performance
Magento has always been appreciated for its performance improvements but latest version makes it even better. This will also increase the demand for professional ecommerce website development company in the future, especially Magento, as more merchants would be eager to shift towards Magento 2.3.1. Some other points of performance perspective include:

• Easy management of customer addresses as newer ones will now be rewritten with UI components.
• Improved admin order page with capability of handling accounts with 3000+ addresses.
• The shipping and billing data entered by the customer during checkout process is kept secured if checkout is delayed or customer decides to continue shopping later.
• Multiple customer addresses getting displayed in grid view of customer address book to enable easy selection.

Simplified development

The newly released version not only offers a lot to merchants and customers, but it has good opportunity for developers also. There are various tools and improvements that simplify Magento development process. Some of these includes:

• New composer plugin which upgrade all dependencies automatically.
• Improved PWA Studio experience enabling developers to create, deploy and maintain PWA storefronts.
• GraphQL is empowered with more features like cart creation, customer account creation, and shipping address setup.

Strong infrastructure
Apart from platform improvements, the latest version also brings a stronger infrastructure for your e-commerce store. Here are ways in which infrastructure is improved:

• Authorize.Net Direct Post module is replaced by Authorize.Net extension.
• The PayPal Express Checkout has been updated to checkout.js v4.
• Extensive support for Elasticsearch 6.0, Redis 5.0, and PHP 7.2.x.
• MySQL Views can be extracted directly from regular database without impacting on back-up and data restoring.
• The checkout information stays intact even if they update the cart.

Enhanced bundled extension
Bundled extension is a great option for development due to simplified development process. In the new release, developers get access to enhanced bundled extensions listed below:

• Amazon Pay with added support for multiple currencies, especially UK and EU which makes it great option for merchants.
• Feature enhancements for Magento Shipping, including access to shipping portal, cancel shipments, field validation to batch processing workflow, apply cart price rules, etc,
• Rebrand dotmailer to dotdigital Engagement Cloud with new features to enable marketing preferences.
• Additional support for B2C VAT and configurable logging.

Other improvements
Apart from aforementioned enhancements, there are some other improvements that you can expect by opting for Magento 2.3.1:

• Now customers can configure options for products after adding them to the shopping cart.
• CAPTCHA is available in Login pop-up window.
• Merchants can update custom address attributes while editing the billing address for an order in Admin views.
• This version enables zip code validation for new addresses if billing and shipping address are the same and unchecked.

Conclusion
There is much offered by Magento 2.3.1, but the best approach for merchants would be hiring professional ecommerce web development agency to migrate it. This will also open new opportunities for taking the store a step ahead.

If you do plan to make this move, RPA Technologies is a name that you can trust. We are a leading e-commerce development company with expertise in Magento development and all its versions and editions. From design, development, migration, marketing, and more, we are capable of handling every aspect of creating and managing a Magento store. Share your requirements with us and we will have a solution to match!