In Release Notes 237, Icecat introduces a broad set of improvements to enhance product data retrieval, user access, content management, and platform reliability. Highlights include GTIN-based product retrieval and a new Product Warranty tool in MCP, seamless Single Sign-On (SSO) integration with Hexagon Freemium, smarter feature visibility in Brand Cloud, more accurate GB-to-TB conversions, improved coverage insights from file uploads, and a series of technical debt and maintenance enhancements that strengthen system stability and monitoring across all platforms. For additional details, please refer to the previous Icecat Release Notes.
We are pleased to announce new, valuable enhancements to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) delivered in this sprint. These improvements continue our mission to provide smarter, richer, and more flexible product data retrieval capabilities for AI-driven tools and integrations.
Until now, MCP supported product identification through Product Code and Brand. With the latest release, we have extended this capability to include GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) – one of the most widely used global identifiers in commerce, retail, and logistics.
Key Highlights:
Why This Matters:
We are also excited to introduce a new MCP tool: Product Warranty, designed to retrieve warranty-related information for requested products with the same clarity and structure as Icecat’s product XML and JSON outputs.
Example Use Cases:
| Use Case | Benefit |
| AI-based product assistants | Provide warranty guidance to end customers |
| eCommerce product pages | Auto-populate warranty details from MCP |
| Support chatbots | Instant access to warranty rules and coverage queries |
This MCP release significantly enhances product data retrieval by prioritizing GTINs as identifiers, improving accuracy and interoperability across systems. Additionally, the new Product Warranty tool expands MCP’s functional scope by providing structured warranty information consistent with Icecat standards. These improvements empower better automation, richer product insights, and more intelligent user experiences across all MCP-based integrations.
We are pleased to introduce an important milestone in user authentication: Single Sign-On (SSO) integration between Icecat and the Hexagon Freemium platform. With this release, users can now access Hexagon using their existing Icecat credentials, eliminating the need to create or manage separate accounts.
This is a pilot release, laying the foundation for a seamless multi-platform experience, with further enhancements and a full user flow to come.
Users of the Hexagon Freemium platform can now log in using their Icecat account. While additional implementation is required on the Hexagon side, the Icecat integration is now fully enabled and operational.
The login flow works as follows:
This release marks the first phase of SSO enablement between Icecat and partner platforms like Hexagon.
This SSO pilot is a strategic step toward building a centralized identity experience across the Icecat digital ecosystem, enabling a single, secure login to access multiple platforms, tools, and services, thereby improving productivity and user satisfaction.
We are excited to introduce a set of impactful improvements delivered in this sprint to Icecat Brand Cloud, focusing on smarter product feature visibility, clearer classification, and better usability for editors and brand managers.
The Specs block on the product page has been significantly enhanced to improve the way product features are visualized, classified, and managed. These improvements support faster content enrichment, more accurate data, and better control over feature readiness for completion.
A powerful new filters panel has been introduced, allowing users to quickly narrow down features based on classification and configuration criteria. Users can now filter features by:
| Filter Category | Description |
| Used in title generation | Features used to generate product titles. |
| Searchable | Features coming from brand-specific taxonomy and unique to specific brands. |
| Mandatory | Required features based on taxonomy rules. |
| Brand-specific | Features coming from brand-specific taxonomy and unique for specific brands. |
| Optional | Non-critical, complementary content |
| Hidden | Features not visible in standard product listings, usually legacy or not popular features. |
This allows brand users and content teams to focus precisely on what needs attention to achieve data completeness and optimization.
To improve clarity and minimize uncertainty, we introduced visual status indicators with distinct colors and combined pattern styles effectively showing when a feature has multiple status classifications (e.g., mandatory + searchable). These indicators help quickly identify feature relevance, purpose, and publishing readiness.
Mandatory fields now feature a smart, dynamic highlighting behavior to support content completion:
This color transition helps editors immediately see progress and track what remains to be completed.
The determination of mandatory features follows a structured priority:
This ensures accurate compliance with channel partner-defined rules when available, while preserving Icecat data governance by default.
These enhancements make the Icecat Brand Cloud more intuitive, structured, and powerful, helping brands ensure data completeness, compliance with governance requirements, and richer product presentations.
We are pleased to announce an enhancement to our presentation value conversion logic, specifically the conversion of Gigabyte (GB) values to Terabyte (TB). This update improves the accuracy of displayed product storage values and better reflects real-world brand data practices.
Before this release, all Gigabyte values were converted to Terabytes using a simple fixed rule: 1 TB = 1000 GB
While straightforward, this method did not reflect real-world variations across brands, especially for values near the conversion boundary or when brands used binary (1024-based) standards.
After this update, the presentation conversion logic now uses a smart hybrid mechanism that improves accuracy and reflects how brands provide storage capacity:
Smart GB to TB Conversion Rules:
| Condition | Conversion Standard Used |
| Values below 41 TB | New Smart Mechanism (1024 and 1000 GB considered) |
| Values 41 TB and above | Standard decimal conversion (1 TB = 1000 GB) |
How the smart mechanism works:
The new logic intelligently balances both methods to produce an accurate and realistic TB representation, depending on the Gigabyte value and common brand rounding patterns.
Storage values are critical in product content, and inaccuracies can lead to incorrect comparisons, confusion, or a lack of trust from users and brands. With this update, Icecat now presents capacity values that are:
This enhancement ensures our data remains both technically accurate and market-relevant, supporting better user experiences across digital catalogs, feed exports, and eCommerce integrations.
We are pleased to introduce a valuable enhancement to the Coverage From File functionality: the addition of a new metric, Total Count of Unique Existing Products. This improvement is designed to help Account Managers gain clearer insights into real product coverage, offering precise visibility into how many unique Icecat products are matched from a channel partner feed.
In many feeds, multiple channel partner products may point to the same Icecat product (e.g., regional variants or duplicate listings). Until now, coverage statistics have not clearly differentiated between total matches and unique matched products, making it difficult to understand the actual coverage potential.
The new statistic solves this by showing the true number of unique Icecat products available to enrich the partner’s catalog.
This new value helps answer a key question: “How many unique Icecat products can be retrieved to cover the partner’s catalog with Icecat content?”
By exposing the unique matched product count, account managers can now present more transparent, data-driven insights to partners, enabling better planning, realistic expectations, and improved communication about Icecat coverage capabilities.
In this sprint, we strengthened our platform’s core infrastructure, improved system reliability, and reduced technical debt. These strategic updates enhance stability, monitoring, performance, and developer efficiency – ensuring smoother operations across icecat.biz, Brand Cloud, Studio, and REST-based systems.
We successfully migrated get-image.cgi to PHP, resulting in a noticeable reduction in user-facing errors. This migration also helped uncover and resolve several small gallery-related issues affecting the icecat.biz, improving both functionality and maintainability.
In the Brand Cloud, the Country and Languages store was migrated from Redux to SWR, while the unused authentication store was removed. These optimizations reduced complexity, improved performance, and made the front-end architecture more efficient and easier to manage.
The new editor journal underwent stability optimizations after replacing the old version, addressing issues that emerged during the transition. These improvements strengthened logging accuracy and ensured consistent performance during content operations.
We expanded monitoring by adding get-image.cgi and multimedia requests to status.icecat.biz, improving visibility into system health in a more client-friendly format. This update improves the communication of service availability and enables quicker incident awareness.
The Redis cluster was successfully updated to the latest production version, while Redis monitoring was added to Grafana. These changes enhance performance insights, accelerate issue detection, and improve operational reliability.
The health monitoring system was enhanced with more informative, descriptive messages, helping teams identify the root causes of warnings and errors more effectively. This results in faster troubleshooting and better decision-making during support and maintenance.
In Studio, we improved CI/CD pipelines by adding a testing stage to the Stories microservice and implementing an automated migration stage for the core microservice. Additionally, a MongoDB backup configuration was implemented for the development database, improving data safety and recovery readiness.
The yii2-restful project now uses PHP-DI for dependency injection, improving modularity, scalability, and maintainability. This change supports better development practices and prepares the system for future feature expansion.
We also introduced additional parameters to JSON and Live requests when these services are used indirectly. This enhancement enables us to identify the true demand for JSON and Live data services from channel partners, which supports better decision-making.
These updates represent significant progress in improving the stability, transparency, scalability, and maintainability of Icecat systems. By addressing core infrastructure, migrating legacy logic, enhancing monitoring, and optimizing front-end and API systems, we have strengthened our foundation for future feature development and platform growth.
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