Enhancing your user experience in the Merchant Center with 5 new features

Managing all products, catalogs and business projects in the Merchant Center, commercetools’ business tooling, is now even easier with newly released features and enhancements. From more extensibility options to efficiently handling discounts, you’re empowered to achieve even more in a simpler and faster way. 

To meet the evolving needs of our customers, we’re committed to enhancing the UX of the Merchant Center, the central hub for all commerce activities powered by commercetools. Beginning with a significant improvement in user experience, featuring a clean and modern design, we’ve recently rebranded our business tooling with our new colors and commercetools logo.

More than a design makeover, we’ve introduced features and enhancements while making the tooling more flexible and customizable than ever. Let’s explore the latest top five Merchant Center releases aimed at enhancing your working experience with commercetools. 

commercetools Connect provides a complete array of connectors hosted on the commercetools platform, significantly reducing the time, effort and costs required to integrate and maintain new functionality for your commerce. Previously, creating, managing and deploying these connectors was only possible with the Connect API. 

Now, you have the convenience to install and manage connectors directly in the Merchant Center. You can choose from connectors publicly available in the marketplace or view and install connectors provided for your organization only. 

With a diverse range of business and technology roles utilizing the Merchant Center, we’ve introduced role-based welcome pages to facilitate faster completion of daily tasks directly from the homepage. Tailored content to your role and project is provided, enabling you to access documentation, API clients and shortcuts to improve your job productivity. 

Even if you’re currently signed up for a trial project, you can still take advantage of this dedicated homepage with a helpful step-by-step guide designed to assist you in navigating the Merchant Center and enhancing your onboarding experience.

In response to popular demand, we have enhanced the Projects menu to provide clearer indications of whether a Project is in production. This update offers a more transparent view of data for each Project, helping streamline your daily work.

The Projects menu allows you to effortlessly switch between your Projects, ensuring that you’ve selected the appropriate one when working in the Merchant Center. Additionally, the Locales menu — displaying project-specific persisted data, including names, descriptions and other localized attributes — now contains additional information to better inform you about its intended purpose.

Defining the logic of your discounts is now easier with a redesigned UI that’s more intuitive for users to build and manage discounts. With this update, you can save time by quickly searching and selecting frequently used predicates, enhancing productivity and minimizing errors.

In the context of discounts, predicates refer to the conditions and criteria that must be met for a discount to be applied to a purchase and for what product. For example, a predicate might specify that a discount is only applicable if the customer’s order total exceeds a certain amount or if specific products are included in the order. Predicates allow businesses to customize and target discounts based on factors such as customer behavior, order attributes or product attributes.

When managing predicates to define discounts, providing the marketing team with the ability to save the frequently used predicates allows them to easily access them without the need to spend time searching. Moreover, new employees find it easier to locate predicates that can be used when creating discount conditions.

Extensibility enables platforms to go beyond their out-of-the-box features, leveraging existing functionality as a foundation to efficiently address specific business needs. While extensibility is one of the cornerstones of our composable commerce APIs, it’s crucial for our customers to extend functionality by developing their own UI applications and seamlessly integrating them into the Merchant Center. This capability has been made possible through Custom Applications, allowing customization to meet specific business requirements and use cases. 

Recently, we have also made Custom Views available, so you can expand the functionality of the Merchant Center without the need to create a Custom Application. This feature helps you create a customized view of additional information and content while performing actions within the Merchant Center, allowing you to address specific needs with greater precision. 

For example, this enhancement empowers you to display third-party data associated with a composable commerce entity (such as logs, memos or tracking information), as well as to initiate actions linked to a composable commerce entity (such as re-indexing or resetting customer passwords).

As part of our efforts to enhance extensibility options within the Merchant Center, we’ve introduced support for Custom Fields across various use cases. This update allows you to conveniently view and customize data models for order line items, transactions, payments and more, enabling you to tailor them to specific requirements:

• Transactions: View Custom Fields values on Transactions within the Merchant Center and define Custom Fields using the Custom Fields API, which are then displayed inside individual Transactions.

• Order Line Items and Custom Line Items: Edit Custom Fields values on Line Items and Custom Line Items within an Order. We’ve also redesigned the Order Line Item detail view to enhance usability. These improvements include moving the Custom Fields and Attributes information into separate tabs for easier navigation. 

• Quotes: View Custom Fields values on Quotes within the Merchant Center and define Custom Fields using the Custom Fields API, which are then displayed inside individual Quotes.

• Parcels: View and add Custom Field values on Parcels within an Order. You can also define Custom Fields using the Custom Fields API. These fields will be displayed when you create a Parcel in the Merchant Center.

In essence, expanding extensibility options for the Merchant Center enables your business to capture more detailed information about customers, whether you’re utilizing our API library or the Merchant Center.

Discover how to leverage the Merchant Center to optimize your commerce operations with our comprehensive documentation. Want to know what’s new? Check out the release notes.