Documentation

Release highlights of 2023

Get a quick overview of Composable Commerce's release highlights in the past year.

  • After completing this page, you should be able to:

    • Describe the key changes and updates made to Composable Commerce in the past year.

    • A lot of things can happen in a year, and that certainly is true in the world of commercetools. In this module, let's review the most significant releases of 2023, and get you up to speed for your Composable Commerce Functional Architect Renewal Exam.

    To see all our API releases in the last year, see the HTTP API release notes.

    Completing this module is not a mandatory requirement to take the Certification renewal exam. If you've been following our releases over the year, then it's possible that you're already aware of many of these changes. We would then suggest you to go through the necessary information in the release highlights below, and then complete the exam here.

    But, if you haven't been monitoring our releases regularly, then this module has everything you need to bring you right up to date!

    Prerequisites

    As we progress through the module, you might want to try out some of our new features. To start experimenting, creating a new Project populated with our sample data is a great way. For more information, see Set up your Project.

    You might also find some of our Administrator learning path modules useful.

    Release highlights

    In 2023, we released some new features and important updates.

    Products

    Product Selections and the IndividualExclusion mode became generally available. This helps in ensuring that stores offer only those products that they want customers to see.

    Additionally, Attribute Groups became generally available. It's now easier than ever to give teams editing permission for Attribute values in Products and Product Variants in the Merchant Center.

    Pricing and Discounts

    Standalone Prices can now have a staged price, similar to Embedded Prices. For example, you can add a Standalone Price to a Product Variant, have it approved by a manager, and schedule it to go live at a dedicated time.

    Direct Discounts became generally available. With Direct Discounts, you can add a fixed or percentage discount to a single Cart directly, which is useful if you want to discount the Cart using logic from an external system.

    Store-specific Cart Discounts became generally available. With Store-specific Cart Discounts, you can build Cart Discounts that are specific to a Store, for example, customer-specific or brand-specific Cart Discounts.

    Cart total price discounts also became generally available, allowing cart discounts to target the total price of a cart.

    Stores

    Countries on Stores became generally available. This feature lets you define the countries a Store supports. It is useful because it allows Store projections to be smaller and may mean that they index faster, by only including those countries. This applies across Product Projections, Orders, and Carts. For example, a Store with country as Australia will only have Prices that are eligible for Australia.

    B2B and Quotes

    A very important component of our B2B implementation of Composable Commerce, Quotes, now became generally available along with Business Units and Associate Roles. With Quotes, a Buyer can initiate a transaction with the Seller by creating a Quote Request to ask for special pricing. In short, the process is as follows: Quote Request -> Staged Quote -> Quote -> Order.

    API extensibility

    API Extensions became generally available. Additionally:

    You can now subscribe to Messages on Custom Fields for a number of APIs:

    GraphQL

    The GraphQL API has now been upgraded to be in line with our HTTP API. Using GraphQL, you can now query for B2B features and multiple Shipping Methods in a Cart.

    Operations

    As part of commercetools' business expansion, Composable Commerce is now available in China on AWS Ningxia.

    Authentication

    External OAuth became generally available.

    Audit Log

    Audit Log—previously only available on Google Cloud—is now available on the AWS platform. In addition, Audit Log can now track changes to B2B resources.

    Check endpoints

    You can now verify if a resource exists without needing to GET the resource. This is possible using the newly introduced HEAD requests. The HTTP API supports all resources using this HTTP method.

    Updated documentation structure

    We've restructured our API documentation, aiding in increasing visibility for our important performance tips. Make sure to study both of these in detail!

    As you can see, a lot has changed with Composable Commerce. If you're keen to read more on these topics, continue reading the next pages.