Magento 2.2 is Coming — 3 New Features We're Most Excited About

The Magento ecommerce platform powers a long list of amazing national and global brands like BevMo!, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Zumiez, Murad and Ghiradelli (mmm, chocolate). We started using Magento with verion 1.8 back in 2013 when we designed and developed Xenith.com. Magento is not for every business, but for businesses and brands that require specific levels of customization and control, Magento can be the ultimate platform to grow with. The Magento replatform from 1.x to 2.x was a great step forward and we're super excited by the new features coming next month in the 2.2 release.

The 3 new features in Magento 2.2 that we're most excited about:

1. Fraud Protection Integration with Signifyd

Fraud, chargebacks, ugh, what a headache. To relieve the pain Magento 2.2 will include an option to integrate Signifyd, a fraud detection and protection service. When Signifyd is enabled with an active subscription, it will proactively flag and reject fraudulent orders and even provide 100% protection and reimbursement of chargebacks.

2. Advanced Reporting

75 built-in Best Practice Reports with Google Analytics data integration. 'Nuff said? One of the biggest complaints we hear about Magento 2.x is the somewhat anemic looking dashboard summary charts and graphs. So more ways to graph orders, customers, and other necessary metrics—we are ready to start playing with that.

3. Platform and Performance Improvements

Number 3 in this list is maybe more for us (the nerds) than our clients :) That being said, marketers and business stakeholders alike will be excited to hear that security will be improved with the removal of unserialized calls and an upgrade to Magento 2.2's hashing algorithm. That's music to all of our ears. Magento has been doing a great job being open about how they are proactively pushing the platform forward.

As designers and developers, one of the key things we like about the Magento 2.x platform in general is its commitment to running on a modern tech stack. A lot of businesses freaked out when it was announced that 1.x was going to be replaced with 2.x, but as time moves on, it is definitely the correct approach. Ecommerce cannot exist safely running on old tech. Magento 2.2 adds new version of PHP, Varnish, Redis and MySQL and will drop PHP 5.6. It will also update the performance toolkit to make it up to 14 times faster. Other nerdy updates like quicker production environment updates, improved logging of cron and JS exceptions show that Magento is continuing to refine the development process.