Magento is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms along with WooCommerce and OpenCart. eCommerce platforms help to create and integrate features that are essential for an online shop into the website. These eCommerce platforms enable designers as well as owners to easily update and enrich their shop’s product portfolio, manage inventory and track sales – all in one place.

Magento 2.3 was eagerly awaited by all of us in the eCommerce community. Armed with a plethora of new features and updates, the new release is all set to make your eCommerce journey a much more exciting one in 2019.

We are glad to confirm that FlexiCloud supports all the requirements for Magento 2.3.x, so rest assured, if you plan on upgrading, you’ll have a smooth, hassle-free transition.

Magento Releases Roadmap

Magento 2.3.0 features

1. Multi-source inventory

One of the main features of 2.3 is multi-source inventory. Anyone involved in procuring products knows that it is practically impossible to source everything you need from one place. As shops grow, so does their inventory. A Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) system helps eCommerce owners to manage their inventory across multiple physical locations from within the Magento admin. This should considerably improve operational efficiency.

In Magento 2.3, merchants can also assign products as well as quantities to each fulfillment source, such as warehouses, stores, distribution centers or third-party drop shippers. Tracking inventory at each source for easier management of inventory as well as integrating them with third-party inventory systems can also be handled within Magento admin. We can also set up rules to prioritize and automatically control the inventory sources that are used to fulfill orders for each website in real- time. This helps to streamline operations and help inventory management a breeze.

The inventory reservation system in the MSI is beneficial even for merchants with a single source of inventory. The system tracks deductions from the salable product stock when customers add products to carts resulting in better accuracy in inventory counts and high performing checkouts. These measures ought to improve the conversion rates as well.

2. PWA studio

With over 2 billion smartphone users, mobile commerce is seeing unprecedented growth. eCommerce merchants can’t afford to miss this opportunity to provide a superior mobile shopping experience to their customers which account for nearly three-quarters of consumers engaging in mobile shopping. Progressive Web Apps (PWA) from Magento facilitates eCommerce merchants to provide awesome mobile shopping experiences to their customers. PWA Studio makes it easier to build Magento-powered PWA experiences that will boost conversion rates and increase mobile shopping engagement. PWA studio is designer focused on guided development, reference themes, open web standards, and lower costs.

For information on how to work with PWA Studio visit pwastudio.io.

3. Page builder

Page Builder for Magento Commerce is an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface. It’s quite user-friendly and has lots of content types to create awesome web pages and shop pages. Be it images, videos, and banners, or instant preview capabilities that enable non-technical users to take control of their content, the new Page builder has it all so that we can enrich pages, update content and a lot more, without the help of a front-end web developer. The new grid is highly customizable and in-context editing makes the whole process quite simple. It can be used to create dynamic content blocks as well. The existing Magento functionalities are fully integrated into the Page builder for better ease of use while creating pages.

Page Builder will only be available for all Magento Commerce customers only by the 2.3.1 release, as it is currently limited to the Early Adopter Program.

4. Additional features

Magento 2.3.0 delivers updates and enhancements across the entire platform, in addition to the following features:

• Magento Shipping
• GraphQL
• Asynchronous & Bulk Web APIs
• Declarative schema
• Improved indexing performance
• New security tools

Magento 2.3.x technology stack requirements

• Operating systems (Linux x86-64): Linux distributions, such as CentOs, RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, Debian etc.
• Memory requirement: up to 2GB of RAM.
• Composer (latest stable version): to develop Magento extensions.
• Web servers: It easily works in all major web servers like Apache, nginx or LiteSpeed.
• Database: MySQL 5.6 or later.
• PHP: Magento 2.3.0 is compatible with PHP 7.2 compatibility for the 2.3.0 release. Please visit the release notes for more information on required PHP extensions and patches.
• PHP OPcache: verify that PHP OPcache is enabled for performance reasons.
• SSL: A valid SSL for HTTPS and TLS 1.1 or later.
• Mail server: Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) or an SMTP server.

It’s always beneficial to review the full copy of the release notes for detailed information on the new release. You can also read more information about Magento here.

FlexiCloud supports all the requirements for Magento 2.3.x. If you liked this article, you’d also like our hosting services.