In Icecat Release 236, we introduced powerful improvements that enhance discoverability, optimize workflows, and strengthen the technological foundation of the Icecat platform. This sprint demonstrates meaningful progress with the public launch of the Icecat MCP Server in the official MCP Registry, enhanced partner guidance through actionable error messages, expanded channel partner coverage, taxonomy automation, and proactive analytics. In parallel, we delivered multiple technical improvements, including legacy cleanup, database modernization, Brand Cloud front-end optimization, and strengthened data synchronization between MySQL and ClickHouse. For additional details, please refer to the previous Icecat Release Notes.
In the current sprint, we are excited to share major progress in the evolution of the Icecat Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server. These improvements strengthen our ecosystem’s readiness, enhance partner experience, and increase transparency through actionable system feedback.
We are proud to announce that the Icecat MCP Server has been officially published in the public MCP Registry.
You can now find it here: https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/v0/servers?search=biz.icecat/mcp
This makes the Icecat MCP Server discoverable for developers, integrators, and AI ecosystems, significantly increasing accessibility and awareness.
It also allows partner platforms and AI agents to instantly identify our server’s capabilities and integrate Icecat content more seamlessly.
During this sprint, we focused on making error messages more intuitive, contextual, and helpful. Users will now receive clear guidance on what went wrong and how to resolve it. Key improvements include:
Together, these improvements make the Icecat MCP Server more reliable, predictable, and supportive, ensuring that users always know what to do next.
We also introduced a new internal statistics collection to monitor brand partner users who attempt to access the MCP Server.
This enhancement enables us to identify brand partners with an interest in MCP earlier, proactively reach out to them, and guide them through the onboarding process, offering support and explaining the value of MCP for their workflows.
This data-driven approach strengthens partner communication and helps us convert interest into meaningful adoption.
In addition to the progress made with the Icecat MCP Server, this sprint includes several improvements aimed at boosting operational efficiency, data quality, and partner support across the Icecat ecosystem.
Our category managers received a valuable enhancement this sprint. Icecat taxonomy contains numerous Yes/No type features, and previously, each newly created Yes/No feature required manual input of the restricted values “Yes” and “No”. This manual step carried a risk of human error.
The system now automatically populates restricted values for any new Yes/No feature. Additionally, existing Yes/No features across the taxonomy were also updated to ensure consistent and correct restricted values.
This improvement increases taxonomy consistency, reduces manual work, and eliminates data discrepancies created by human oversight.
To strengthen the distribution network and improve brand partner cooperation, we expanded channel partner assignments, with one additional channel partner now assigned to over 300 brands.
This enhancement improves visibility and alignment between brands and channel partners, enabling them to benefit from broader product data reach within the Icecat ecosystem.
Our account managers received new insights into the usage of Icecat Brand Cloud and the activities of sponsor brands related to adding new products.
These insights provide account managers with enhanced visibility into partner engagement and product portfolio dynamics, enabling them to identify opportunities, prioritize support, and guide partners through best practices.
To ensure correct traffic routing and provide a stable user experience, we added a fallback rule to one of our domains. Our platform domain will now redirect users to icecat.com until the domain is fully prepared to handle new traffic.
This proactive measure ensures continuity while infrastructure preparations continue.
In this sprint, we reduced technical debt, optimized performance, modernized the database, and improved health monitoring for critical data synchronization. These improvements bring our systems closer to a more scalable, maintainable, and future-ready architecture.
We completed the removal of legacy Editor Journal and Product History code from the platform.
This step reduces maintenance overhead, removes unused dependencies, and helps streamline future development efforts.
It marks significant progress in the ongoing modernization and cleanup of our legacy codebase.
We continue transforming our MySQL infrastructure to ensure better Unicode support, future compatibility, and dataset accuracy.
This sprint, we completed:
This reduces clutter, improves data consistency, and prepares the system for the future MySQL update to the latest version.
A series of UI component optimizations was delivered to improve code quality, performance, and maintainability.
Key updates:
These changes contribute to a cleaner codebase, better UX responsiveness, and improved developer experience.
We finalized a cleanup plan for icecat.biz MySQL tables, based on previously collected usage and access frequency data.
This plan prioritizes the removal or transformation of rarely used tables, ensuring that cleanup decisions are data-driven, minimizing risk and improving efficiency.
We enhanced data synchronization monitoring between MySQL and ClickHouse.
The timestamps of updated records in ClickHouse now match those in MySQL during synchronization, ensuring precise alignment and data traceability.
This strengthens data reliability for reporting, and analytics.
This release combines strategic improvements across product capabilities, partner enablement, and platform reliability. We made MCP easier to access and more informative by automating manual steps in taxonomy and partner assignment, providing better insights for account managers, and refining our platform to enhance performance, stability, and long-term maintainability.
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