What’s New in Magento 2.3.1 Release? Features, Highlights & Improvements!

Today, Magento powers over 230k eCommerce stores across the globe. Pursuing growth and innovation has been the key to its exponential growth. Magento stands behind its products and releases regular updates to ensure their users stay ahead of the competition. With each update, the company aims to set new boundaries for commerce innovation.
Magento 2.3.1 is the most recent update released by Magento on 26th March 2019.

#MagentoCommerce 2.3.1 is now available! New features like Page Builder and @PayPal smart buttons and more enhancements empower merchants and help them scale for growth. Learn more: https://t.co/DKwsGqX5ZK pic.twitter.com/VLYPRXFQFw

— Magento (@magento) March 26, 2019

According to the company, “This release includes over 200 functional fixes to the core product, over 500 pull requests contributed by the community, and over 30 security enhancements.”
Let’s quickly look through some essential updates and enhancements:

Order Creation: The admin order creation workflow has been greatly improved. The delays while editing billing and shipping addresses have been eliminated.
PDP Images: From now on, merchants can upload PDP images larger than 1920 x 1200 and Magento will no longer compress or downsize those images.
Inventory Management: Along with enhancements to mass inventory transfers, options such as distance priority source selection algorithm (SSA) and in-store pickup fulfillment have also been added to make inventory management easier than ever before. What’s more, Magento 2.3.1 supports Elastic search to ensure all site searches return correct products and quantities.

Automatic Updates: A new composer plugin to automatically upgrade all the dependencies.
PWA: An improved PWA studio experience to help developers build, deploy, and maintain PWA storefront on top of Magento 2.x
GraphQL: Several features such as cart creation, shipping address setup, and customer account creation have been added to GraphQL with Magento 2.3.1.

Magento 2.3.1 brings more than 30 security enhancements to help you safeguard your customer’s crucial information. Some major enhancements include closing:
– Cross-site scripting
– Arbitrary code execution
– Sensitive data disclosure

– The new customer address has been rewritten with UI components to increase platform performance and streamline management of a large number of addresses.
– The performance of the admin order creation page has been greatly improved. Now it can handle customer accounts with over 3000 addresses without any lags.
– Magento now displays the list of additional customer addresses stored in their address book as a grid facilitating easy selection of address while checking out.

– Magento 2.3.1 has replaced the old Authorize.Net Direct Post module with new Authorize.Net extension.
– Elasticsearch 6.0 and Redis 5.0 are now supported.
– Customer information remains intact even after updating the cart.

– CAPTCHA now appears in the Log in pop-up window.
– Customers can now configure options for a configurable product after adding it to their shopping cart. Previously, under these circumstances, Magento threw a fatal error.
– Magento 2.3.1 will validate zip codes for new addresses as expected when the “My billing and shipping address are the same” option is unchecked.
– Expired gift cards are no longer applied to a customer’s account. Previously, if a gift card applied to a customer account expired, Magento could not complete the checkout process.
– Custom customer address attributes can now be updated when you edit an order’s billing address in the Admin.

– Amazon Pay: Added multi-currency support for EU and U.K. merchants.
– Several improvements to the shipment workflow user experience.
– Added support for B2C VAT & configurable logging.

Of course. Magento 2.3.1 brings to you an array of exciting new features that will help you take your Magento store a level further. Hence, if you are still running your store on any version older than Magento 2.3.1, or Magento 1 you must consider upgrading it to the latest version of Magento.
As an Enterprise Magento Partner, we have been working with Magento since its inception. So far, our team of 50+ certified Magento developers have seamlessly migrated 30+ Magento stores. Thus, we have the experience and expertise to guide you through the seamless transition of your store to Magento 2.3.1. Give us a shout and let our Magento experts guide your migration journey through to its successful completion.