Icecat Studio – Sprint 100 Release Notes

Sprint 100 marks a milestone — our 100th sprint of Icecat Studio development. This release delivers three major features: full variant versioning with campaign naming and publication scheduling, Group Actions rollout, and a redesigned AI image editing experience in the Sandbox.

Variant Versioning – Campaign Variants, Custom Naming & Publication Scheduling

We have completed a major development phase for story variant versioning, enabling brands to run time-sensitive marketing campaigns directly from Icecat Studio.

Campaign Story Variants

The Add and Copy Story Variant flows now include a “Create campaign story variant” toggle.

When a variant slot (e.g., Standard) is already occupied, the system automatically prompts the user to supply a campaign name, producing named versions such as Standard – Black Friday.

Regular and campaign versions of the same variant type can coexist, and all variants remain available in the selection dropdown.

If there are two or more variant versions – the latest approved story is prioritized for publication.

Publication Scheduling

A new “Publication schedule” action opens the Publication Settings modal, where users can configure the start and end date/time of a story’s publication. Scheduled stories are marked with a calendar icon in the Stories table, including an active-publication indicator and a tooltip showing who configured the schedule and when publication starts or ends.

On the backend, an hourly job processes scheduling constraints for the Icecat Network channel: if a variant has an active scheduled period, it takes absolute publication priority; otherwise, the system falls back to the standard variant priority order. The submission progress bar also reflects scheduling — an approved story with a future schedule displays a schedule icon until the publication window begins, at which point the story publishes automatically.

Sandbox – Redesigned AI Image Tools

The Sandbox Image Editor received a significant user experience upgrade, consolidating all image-specific operations into a single, predictable workflow:

• Dedicated Image Toolbar: A contextual toolbar now appears when an image is selected, providing access to Crop, Remove Background, Enhance Quality, and Fit to Original Size — replacing legacy controls previously scattered across the Properties panel.
• Modernized AI Modals: Background Removal and Image Enhancement now follow a unified design pattern with tab-based quality selection, dedicated results sections, and workflow-aware footer actions (Process → Save / Process Again).
• Crop Reliability: Undo/Redo now correctly reverts crop operations, crop changes are only committed via explicit Save, and toolbar availability reacts immediately to object state changes such as rotation.

Group Actions – Rollout Completed

We finalized the Group Actions feature on the Assets Search Page. Authorized users can now select multiple assets — per page or across the entire filtered dataset — and trigger bulk Submit, Republish, or Generate Output operations. The release includes safety constraints for Amazon-channel content, confirmation modals, progress indication, background processing with toast notifications, and audit logging in the Report Log.

Icecat Studio AI Assistant – Story Authoring

The AI Assistant can now author Product Stories end-to-end:

Attachments: Users can attach data files, images, and video to assistant messages.

Story Creation: Through a guided, confirmed flow, the assistant maps source content onto the layout’s component catalog — respecting slot types, length limits, and the asset’s language — and reports per-component results.

Documentation Knowledge: We are adding search tools over the official user documentation, enabling the assistant to answer “how do I…” questions with links to relevant articles.

Asset Links Security – Signed URLs

We strengthened the security of asset access:

• Header-Based Authentication: The API key is no longer passed as a URL query parameter (where it could leak via logs, browser history, or referrer headers) and is now accepted via a request header.
• Signed URLs: Asset links are now cryptographically signed. Each signature is valid only for its exact resource and the specific user it was issued to, with a configurable expiration (24 hours by default). Expired or tampered links are rejected.

Custom Index File

We are developing on-request index file generation. Users of our endpoints will be able to request an XML or JSON index of all stories grouped by assets, filtered by text-based parameters such as brand and category. Generation runs asynchronously, with endpoints to initiate a request, track its status, and download the resulting file.

Auto-Import Pipeline

• Styles & Decorators – Finalized: Imported Product Stories can now include styles and decorators, arriving in the system fully styled from raw formats.
• Producers: We advanced producer development for few brand feeds.
• FTP Setup: We configured FTP server access and are now set to allow brands to deliver rich content import files directly to our endpoints.

Product Story Framework v2

• Preview Migration: We are moving the story preview to the new framework and fixed an MPN switching bug in the MPN list along the way.
• Advanced Preview: Migration of the Advanced Preview to the new framework has started.

Amazon A+ Premium API – Setup

With the A+ Premium API beta approaching, we studied the latest documentation and completed our setup ahead of the launch date. Initial content push attempts returned validation errors, which we reported to Amazon and are awaiting recommendations. We also requested a dedicated test Vendor Central environment for development purposes.

Sandbox – SVG Import Improvements

Based on brand partner feedback on importing SVG modules into the Sandbox, we analyzed the most frequent blockers and formed an improvement roadmap:

• Gradients: Gradients exported from Figma previously failed to import — we have started developing full gradient support.
• Fonts rendering: Investigating rendering differences between editing mode and final rendered output.
• Shadows: Text shadow support is under investigation.

Additional Improvements

• Media Service: Migrated media processing to stream-based processing for improved performance.
• Terminology Simplification: Replacing “Version” with “Source” across story-related UI — Story Builder and HTML Package are now the user-facing values.
• UI/API Fixes: A set of smaller fixes and improvements across the platform.

What’s Next

In Sprint 101, we plan to enter Amazon A+ Premium API beta testing, continue AI Assistant development, ship the gradient feature and investigate shadow support for SVG import, advance the Custom Index File, expand auto-imports, continue the Advanced Preview migration to Framework v2, and investigate MCP capabilities.

If you are interested, click here and book a demo with Icecat Studio.