Learn about the other important recent changes to Composable Commerce.
After completing this page, you should be able to:
- Explain benefits of commercetools Checkout and where it can be configured in the Merchant Center.
- Differentiate between Custom Views and Custom Applications and when to use which solution for customising the Merchant Center.
- Recall what was deprecated in 2024.
Time to complete page: 10 minutes
Checkout in Merchant Center
commercetools Checkout is a prebuilt solution designed to revolutionize your checkout process with speed, efficiency, and security. Seamlessly integrated into the Merchant Center, it empowers you to create a smooth and customizable checkout experience for your customers, supporting both current and future sales channels.
Why choose Checkout? Building a checkout solution from scratch can be complex and time-consuming, requiring the integration of catalogs, orders, pricing, carts, and payment providers. With Checkout, you save valuable development time, reduce integration complexity, and speed up your time-to-market by up to 80%, thanks to features like the Checkout Browser SDK and streamlined API calls.
Key Features:
- Out-of-the-box UI: Launch a sleek, one-page checkout with minimal effort.
- Lightning-fast integration: Cut down API calls from 50 to 3 and go live faster.
- Built-in PCI compliance: Handle payments securely without compliance headaches.
- Localization: Support local currencies, taxes, and languages for a tailored experience.
- Customization: Set rules like region-specific payment methods or cart-triggered options.
- Real-time feedback: Stay informed with event-based updates during the checkout process.
Checkout is now seamlessly integrated as a built-in application in the Merchant Center. You can find it conveniently in the main menu, positioned between Discounts and Audit Log. Unlike before, when manual installation was required for each project or organization, Checkout is now ready to use without any additional setup.
Merchant Center Custom Views
The Merchant Center just got even more versatile! You can now enhance its built-in applications with Custom Views, unlocking new possibilities for tailoring your workspace. This exciting addition means you have two powerful ways to extend the Merchant Center: Custom Views and Custom Applications—together known as Merchant Center Customizations.
What’s the difference?
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Custom Views: Add specialized functionality directly within a specific page of a built-in Merchant Center application for a seamless, context-aware experience.
For example, create a Custom View for Products containing a generative AI component to the Product list allowing you to automatically create descriptions for your products:
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Custom Applications: Create entirely new applications with unique features, accessible from the Merchant Center’s main menu.
For example, create a Custom Application that will allow you visualize States in your Project:
The best part? If you’ve already worked with Custom Applications, you’ll find developing Custom Views just as straightforward—they share many of the same concepts and resources. Start building with ease and take the Merchant Center to the next level.
Visit the Merchant Center Customizations documentation to learn more.
Deprecations
Out with the old and in with the new! Let’s wrap up this module by highlighting the elements that have been deprecated. Rest assured, these changes pave the way for improved and more advanced implementations:
ImpEx
As you may have noticed, numerous import/export capabilities have been added to the Merchant Center. With these enhancements, we’ve decided to deprecate ImpEx as of January 31, 2025.
What about the API Playground and GraphQL IDE, you ask? No need to worry—they’re now integrated into the Merchant Center and better than ever - you can find them in your project by navigating to Settings, then Developer settings:
TypeScript SDK v2 client and Java v1 SDK
The TypeScript SDK v2 client was officially deprecated on October 30, 2024, and the Java SDK v1 reached deprecation on January 1, 2024. Both versions will no longer receive updates, including bug fixes or security patches.
To maintain continued support, security, and reliability, it is strongly recommended that developers upgrade to the TypeScript SDK v3 client and the Java SDK v2.