Elastic Path Commerce version 6.2 was released in January with little fanfare, but don’t let that fool you; 6.2 is packed with lots of advanced ecommerce features. This release was all about giving merchants more flexibility in terms of how they sell their products. One of the big features we added was bundling (or kitting, if you prefer). Bundling gives merchants the ability to configure groups of products that can be sold as package deals. This gives their customers greater value and simplifies their purchase decisions. For merchants who wish to give their customers the value of package deals, but flexibility of choice, they can use dynamic bundles. Dynamic bundles give customers the choice between several merchant-defined options.
Many merchants will also be happy to learn that we've moved prices out of the catalog and into price lists. And by linking price lists to our targeted selling framework, we’ve given merchants the ability to target price lists to different markets and customer segments. For B2B merchants, price lists are a great way to manage negotiated contract pricing for different accounts.
In 6.2, we've also introduced the ability to personalize products. By creating a configurable product type, merchants can give their customers the power to customize products before checkout. A good example would be a custom screening printing site that allows shoppers to upload the designs they want to print on their T-shirts.
For store managers and IT staff involved in store operations, the new staging to production feature will be tremendously useful. It allows changes to products, prices, promotions and marketing content to be previewed in a staging environment, and submitted for review and approval before being pushed over to the production environment.
For the tech folks, the 6.2 release includes support for new versions of various application servers, Java 6 support, and an upgrade to JPA 1.2.1. Storefront performance has also been improved with the addition of multi-level caching and other performance enhancements. 6.2 includes upgrade scripts, which should allow existing clients to upgrade quickly and make use of all the new features that 6.2 has to offer.
For more information, check out the 6.2.0 release notes and stay tuned for blog posts looking more in depth at some of these exciting, new features.