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Sep 14, 2021 | 5 minute read
written by Shaneil Lafayette
As the summer continues to wind down and fall begins to creep in, we have a lot of new things to look forward to. Some of us are getting ready to go back into offices; sending our kids back to school; starting new journeys; and long awaiting the normalcy to gather for holidays with our loved ones. But even with all these new beginnings, one thing remains the same, consumers will be SHOPPING - And as such Elastic Path continues to innovate and make updates to our products to ensure that brands are able to provide the best eCommerce shopping experiences for their customers.
This summer at Elastic Path, we focused primarily on enhancing existing feature capabilities within Elastic Path Commerce Cloud. These enhancements address a variety of concerns from locale support to advanced pricing. While we have made a plethora of changes, this article focuses on the major updates to the solution. These include:
With the release of these new innovations, Elastic Path is making it easy to support your complex eCommerce strategy across multiple business models such as B2C, B2B, B2B2C, and DTC. Learn more about all of our product innovations here.
The traditional catalog management we see today was built over a decade ago, before brands had even begun to think about addressing multiple geographies, deploying multiple touchpoints, and launching multiple brands all under one umbrella. Therefore, there’s no surprise why addressing the aforementioned concerns have been so difficult. Traditional catalog management, until today, has been extremely rigid, and usually results in brands spending excessive time and money to customize their unique catalog needs, only to still delay time to market and hold back the organization.
Catalog Composer by Elastic Path, previously introduced as a part of Product Content Management (now EP Product Experience Manger (PXM) in March, alleviates these complexities by leveraging the industry’s only decoupled catalog architecture, to empower brands to rapidly compose and continuously optimize products and pricing into unlimited, unique catalogs across all your routes-to-market such as multiple brands, accounts, geographies, touchpoints, and business models. Catalog Composer will be key in managing catalogs across your B2B, B2C and B2B2C business models 5x faster than any other eCommerce solution.
Learn more about Catalog Composer
Elastic Path Commerce Cloud previously only leveraged Open ID Connect to enable user authentication with external identity providers such as Okta and Ping. However, we have now implemented a new password profile support that enables users to log in using a username and password, instead of only relying on an OpenID Connect profile. Now your team has the ability to create user authentication info to be associated with either Password Profiles or OpenID Connect Profiles. These APIs can also be used for account member authentication.
Explore more about Account Members with Password Profiles
In a competitive market, eCommerce owners are always thinking of ways to stay ahead of the competition and increase their value. One such way we see this done is by deploying a variety of pricing strategies. Elastic Path has released both Volume Pricing and Sales Pricing to help with your strategies.
Volume Pricing now allows you to offer different pricing for minimum quantities of items that your customer purchases. This means when a customer has added a sufficient quantity of an item and meets the minimum quantity specified, all items in that cart will be discounted.
On the other hand, Sales Pricing grants you the ability to advance-schedule the specific time and date for sale prices books to go live. This will be great for stores that want to schedule season pricing in products without creating a new pricebook or catalog request.
Explore more about Volume and Sales Pricing
Since the launch of Product Content Management (now EP Product Content Manager (PXM)), customers have found it so easy to import, enrich and organize their product data in one central location. To make Product Content Management more customizable, we have added templates and attributes to configurations, support for multi-byte languages and locale support. Templates and attributes allow you to attach a specific set of custom fields to your products in Product Content Management. Multi-byte language support extends Product Content Management to support languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, making your offered languages more inclusive. And lastly, locale support allows you to localize product names, descriptions and other strings if your store supports multiple languages.
Explore more about Product Content Management enhancements
Promotional offers play a major role in a customer’s shopping cycle and can make a significant difference in cart value. Elastic Path has updated and added new promotions to be offered throughout your eCommerce journey.
Bundle Discount - Bundle discounts allow your team to offer bulk discounts when selected products are purchased together.
Free Gift Discount - Free Gift discounts allow your teams to offer a free item when a specific product or a group of products are purchased.
Usage Per Line Item - Usage Per Line Item promotions grant your team the ability to set usage per line item for all promotion times. This allows you to limit the buyer to use the promotion for a specific number of times.
Max Application Per Cart Limit- This promotion update allows your team to limit the quantity available for purchase at the promotion price.
Elastic Path Commerce Cloud is equipped with a variety of other promotions that you can explore here.
We are thrilled to continue innovating here at Elastic Path. If you would like to keep up to date on our newest product innovations, explore our product innovation page for major updates and our product changelog for all major and minor updates.