What’s new at commercetools: Q1 2026 product recap

Welcome to the commercetools product update, your inside look at what we’ve been building 👷 

This quarter, we’ve rolled out new innovations and enhancements in the commercetools-verse, designed to help you deliver exceptional customer experiences, streamline your workflows and drive growth. Let’s dive in!

Agentic commerce expansion 

Following the rollout of Agentic Jumpstart for existing commercetools customers last year, 

we launched AgenticLift, a solution that fast-tracks AI-driven shopping for businesses running on other commerce platforms. In other words, businesses can leverage commercetools’ agentic capabilities without replatforming. 

Providing a fully managed AI commerce layer that connects catalog, pricing and transactions to consumer AI channels, AgenticLift provides a fast, low-risk and transaction-ready way to generate revenue without waiting for legacy roadmaps. 

In addition, for enterprises already running on commercetools AI Hub now supports UCP product feeds and checkout in Google's Gemini.

Cart management made simple 

Customers often experience pricing discrepancies at checkout still today. Cart Freeze Strategies help merchants tackle this problem by ensuring that the price and discounts a customer sees are exactly what they pay. 

By implementing this feature, merchants can easily provide a transparent and predictable checkout experience that removes the frustration of unexpected cost changes, reducing cart abandonment and driving higher conversion rates. 

Meanwhile, we also launched Cart Locking to enable customer support agents to view and edit carts without the risk of conflicting edits. Unlike Cart freezing, which prevents price-affecting changes but allows other updates, locking prevents all updates to a Cart.

Furthermore, merchants can now control whether Cart Discounts apply to recurring or non-recurring Orders, helping create targeted promotions for subscription-based commerce while preventing unintended discounting of recurring orders. 

Businesses can now add a Purchase Order Number to the cart. This means buyers can add their purchase order number right at the start of the shopping process, before creating a Quote Request or Order. When an Order or Quote Request is generated from a Cart, the purchase order number is automatically carried over. 

Inventory management at scale

Finding out an item is out of stock after adding it to the cart frustrates shoppers. Of the 70% of abandoned carts, roughly 15–23% are due to stock issues — whether it’s unavailable items, delays or inaccurate inventory data. For businesses selling across multiple channels — marketplaces, websites and stores — real-time inventory accuracy is essential.

Our new feature, Inventory Reservations, enables enterprises to reserve stock at add to cart or later in the checkout process, ensuring product availability throughout the shopping journey, using the new inventory mode ‘Reserve On Cart’. 

With the ability to process thousands of reservations and orders a minute, the commercetools platform will create the reservation and retain it for as long as the merchant wants for each line item, whilst orchestrating the cart at scale. This feature helps enterprises process fast-selling items, such as concert tickets, ensuring that items in the Cart remain available until the customer proceeds to checkout or the reservation expires.  

To further support the new Inventory Reservations feature and improve our platform’s scalability, we’ve changed how inventory records are processed. This foundational improvement benefits all projects and lets us handle higher volumes of orders and inventory changes.

Modeling your product data faster with AI

Product data modeling is essential for digital commerce, defining how product information is structured, managed and used across systems. However, building a strong data model is complex, especially when migrating from rigid platforms like SAP, Adobe or Salesforce to flexible solutions such as commercetools. The process is often slow, manual and costly, with risks like data inconsistencies and delayed time-to-market.

Smart Data Modeler addresses this issue head-on by utilizing GenAI to ingest customer data files (CSV, JSON, XLSX) and instantly propose a product data model, drastically reducing setup time. With review steps that help users validate AI suggestions and refine attributes, the Smart Product Modeler provides a fast and high-quality product model, combining the velocity of AI with the “human-in-the-loop” approach. 

By using the Smart Product Modeler, our customers can significantly reduce time-to-market for data modeling, accelerating their commercetools implementation. 

commercetools Connect and Checkout are available in AWS 

commercetools Connect lets you add applications to your commerce Project without needing to buy and maintain dedicated hosting or runtime environments. Initially available only on Google Cloud, now enterprises can deploy and run Connect applications within their existing AWS environment with full feature parity. Not only does this reduce architectural complexity, but it also enables faster integrations and lower latency. 

Following this development, commercetools’ checkout capabilities, our out-of-the-box checkout solution with built-in PSP integrations, are now supported on AWS. This enables customers to use the Checkout and PSP connectors in Connect natively within their existing AWS setup, making integrations easier and faster. ‍

Checkout enhancements for increased conversions 

Beyond availability on AWS, commercetools’ checkout capabilities saw a lot of action this quarter. 

We started with Express Payments, a feature that lets merchants add express payment buttons to their cart or product page. Customers can complete their purchase instantly using their saved payment and shipping information on PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay, skipping the full multi-step checkout process. Not only does this simplify the buying experience, but it also reduces cart abandonment. 

In addition, we also made available: 

• Drop-in Payment Integration Type is now generally available in Checkout. With this Payment Integration Type, you can render all payment methods in your Checkout through a single pre-built UI element with minimal configuration in the Merchant Center. 
• Payment predicates enable merchants to set conditions to control payment behavior using true/false logic. For example, you can tailor availability based on Cart amount or Customer Group to optimize the checkout experience, or define conditions for automatically canceling or refunding a Payment if the Order-creation process fails.
• Checkout Applications API and Checkout Payment Integrations API let you create and update Checkout applications without manual configuration in the Merchant Center, providing a fast and consistent way to manage your checkout and payment experience. 
• Checkout Payment Intents API makes it easy to manage post-payment actions such as capturing payments, issuing refunds and canceling authorizations. It automatically coordinates with your payment service provider (PSP) to perform the requested financial operation.

Making your commercetools ops even easier

We’re on a mission to make your job easier in many ways: 

The Import API now includes a new “partially imported” status. This means that some items in your import were successful, while others failed — often due to validation or concurrency issues. Previously, these mixed outcomes were grouped simply as “imported” or “rejected,” making it harder to see what actually happened. With this new status, you can easily identify which items failed, review the error details, fix the issues, and re-import only the problematic data instead of starting from scratch.

In addition, we increased the limit for CSV import file sizes to 100 MB and the number of rows to 500,000. This allows you to import larger datasets in a single operation, improving efficiency for bulk data management.

What’s more, we continue making features available in the Merchant Center, such as: 

• Carts list: Merchants can now view all Carts created within a Project, giving merchants a single place to view and manage all carts. For enterprises, this means improved visibility and faster workflows.  
• Sort Products by all Attributes: Business users can now sort Products by all Attributes, making it easier to identify product data they wish to review or modify directly in the Merchant Center.
• Variants list performance: To ensure faster page load times and a more responsive experience, the Attributes column on the Variants list page is now hidden by default, providing a cleaner and more efficient initial view of your Product Variants. 
  

Want to have an overview of all product launches and feature enhancements? Check the release notes.