Release highlights of 2024

A lot of things happened last year in the world of commercetools. This module will review the most significant releases that took place in 2024, so that you are up-to-date and ready to take your commercetools Composable Commerce Developer Renewal Exam.

Please note that completing this module is not a mandatory requirement to take the Certification Renewal exam. If you’ve been following the Composable Commerce release notes over the year, then you’re most likely already aware of many of these changes. If you haven't been monitoring the release notes so closely, then this module lists all the releases that are important for the Certification Renewal exam!

As this is the Developer Renewal module, there will be a focus on how to programmatically work with the features. We have provided code for both the Typescript and Java SDKs. You should focus on the SDK that you have chosen for the certification.

A full list of 2024 release notes for Composable Commerce can be found in the Release Notes section of our documentation.

Prerequisites

As we will be going through the highlights, you may want to try out some code examples for yourself. To be able to use the code examples below please perform the following preparations:

• Create a new B2C project populated with sample data.
• Create an Admin API Client for the project.
• Use the SDK to build an HTTP API Client:
  • JavaScript: Get started with the TypeScript SDK
  • Java: Get started with the Java SDK
• Use the SDK to build an Import API Client.

You can use our Prepare your work environment module for more detailed instructions on completing the above if you require it.

Code examples provided in this module are simplified for readability and educational purposes. In a real-world application, proper error handling should always be implemented to ensure robustness, prevent unexpected behavior, and gracefully manage issues such as network failures, invalid inputs, or API errors.

Deprecations

When setting up your environment and creating your API Client, keep in mind that in 2024 Java v1 SDK and TypeScript SDK v2 client were deprecated, which means that they will not receive any future updates to fix bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Release highlights

In 2024, we introduced new features and released important updates:

• In March, we launched Product Tailoring, an exciting new feature that transforms how you enhance your product offerings across diverse markets. With Product Tailoring, you gained the ability to customize key product details—such as names, descriptions, slugs, and meta fields—specifically for different brands or countries. This is achieved by using Stores to represent these unique market segments. Additionally in June, that capability was extended to images and assets and to Product Variant attributes in September.
  By tailoring product data, images and assets to suit each market, you can adapt your messaging to resonate with different audiences, ultimately boosting visibility, strengthening customer loyalty, and driving higher order volumes.
• Another major release that happened in March was the launch of the powerful Product Search API, revolutionizing storefront search experiences across Stores, Product Selections, and Standalone Prices to enhance product discoverability.
  With advanced query capabilities like AND, OR, NOT, and filter, you could easily refine results—for instance, filtering by color or excluding certain products. The API also introduced prefix search for partial matches on similar product keys and, for the first time, allowed full-text searches on specific fields instead of across all indexed data—a feature not available with the old Product Projection Search API. This upgrade not only made search experiences more precise and efficient but also significantly increased performance, enabling faster response times and smoother handling of complex queries.
• 2024 was a big year for extending our search capabilities as in June we introduced the powerful Customer Search API, allowing merchants to quickly and efficiently search through large volumes of Customers within a Project with incredible performance and advanced query capabilities including searching for Customers using Custom Fields. Designed specifically for back-office use cases, this API empowered teams to streamline customer management like never before.
• The Import API has received a fair share of updates in 2024:
  • Discount Codes can now be imported using the Import API.
  • We simplified the process of importing Embedded Prices and Product Variants by adding the staged field to EmbeddedPriceImport and ProductVariantImport. This new staged field allows you to control whether the imported data would be applied to the current and/or staged representation of the Product being updated. As a consequence of this change, the published field has been deprecated and removed from EmbeddedPriceImport and ProductVariantImport.
• Connect (released at the end of 2023) lets you add functionality to your commercetools project without dedicated hosting and in 2024 it has received a few major updates. To improve how we work with Connect, a new applicationType for static and CDN assets is introduced along with the option for a common module. The integrationTypes field was added to categorize your Connectors based on their integration type and the version field in ConnectorReference has been removed.
• In addition to the improvements to the areas mentioned above, 2024 brought a lot of smaller new features, like being able to manage Channels by key, to make your work with Composable Commerce easier and even more enjoyable.

Ready for a closer look? Read on.