September 2026 Product Release: Improved Navigation & UX, Smarter Media Asset Handling, AI-Ready Shopify Stores grade

This month's release gives you more reasons to switch to the new UI, brings media asset transformations directly into your PIM, and gets your Shopify storefront ready for how AI assistants are driving product sales. New features give you the power to:

• Work faster and with more control over your screen space with wide-ranging enhancements to the new UI, including an optimized navigation rail
• Preview, organize, and adjust your product images within Inriver with our modernized media asset management features
• Deliver product media faster and more reliably to high-traffic channels worldwide with our optional new CDN hosting
• Get your Shopify storefront ready for agentic commerce with new Combined Listings support in our adapter

Here's the detail on everything that's new for your business this month:

Wide-ranging enhancements to the new UI to help you make the switch

We've been listening to your feedback on the new UI, and we've made lots of updates in recent weeks that are already helping many of you to work more efficiently when enriching your product content. 

If you opted back into the legacy UI a while ago, we've summarized what's changed: including a big improvement to space utilization in the navigation rail. With the legacy UI being end-of-life from December 31, now's the time to make the move. 

The image below provides a preview of some of the recent enhancements: 

• More apps at your fingertips in the left-hand navigation rail. Getting to the right features is now faster as the full length of the dark blue bar is being used to display application links, instead of the list being capped at five apps. The options shown will depend on the functionality you’re entitled to use, and you may still need to use the three dots More menu if you have access to many apps. Note that we’ve also updated some of the app icons for easier visual recognition. Further enhancements are planned in the future, including the ability to collapse/expand this navigation rail, choose your own icons for application templates, and see the apps arranged into groups. Please see our New UI FAQs for further details.
• Faster vertical navigation with collapsible field sections on the details tab. You can now open or close field sections one at a time using the clickable chevron by the section name. Or you can use the new Collapse All/Expand All button in the toolbar to reduce your overall clicking to get to the content you need on screen. 
• Go full width within Enrich. Use more of your screen for enrichment with the new toggle that hides/shows the section navigation within the details tab. The extra room for working means less text wrapping, less horizontal scrolling and fewer distractions from your work.
• Greater visibility for your tabs. Custom Tabs are no longer hidden by layout density settings. You’ll see more of them without digging into the More menu.
• Plan & Release index column, now on-screen. The index column is visible right away in table view, so you can reorder channel entities without scrolling across.
• Longer names and descriptions are more visible. In compact view, display name and description now sit on two separate lines, reducing the risk of them being cut off when text is longer.
• Dropdown fields, easier to spot. Fields with a dropdown now have a clearer visual indicator.
• Better visibility for completeness indicators and the Hide Details toggle. Both these features are now easier to locate and use in compact view.
• Card view names expanded. Card View now shows more characters of each product's display name, so it's easier to tell cards apart at-a-glance.
• Easier Access to Open History. We've reduced the number of clicks required when navigating to the Open History feature.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to provide feedback on the new UI and help us make your product enrichment experience the best it can be. If you've previously opted out of the new UI, you can try it again using the toggle switch under the User Details menu. 

Enhance Your Product Media Without Ever Leaving Inriver

In June, we announced early access testing for some enhancements to Inriver's media asset handling features. Thanks to useful feedback from our customers and partner testers, we're now making the first wave of those enhancements available to all users, making it quicker and easier to work with your product images, video, and documents. 

You can now preview any asset, including images, videos, PDFs, or Office files within the Inriver interface. There's no need to download files just to see what's in them. A new table view with search and filter capabilities makes it easy to find what you need within large sets of assets, and multi-select lets you delete or manage assets in bulk instead of one at a time. Large batches of files can now be uploaded asynchronously (in the background), so you're never stuck waiting. And one-click copy of the URL for any asset variation removes much tedious effort if you're still sharing asset information manually with downstream channels.

At the same time, we're giving users the ability to transform images within the PIM, on the same screen where other product data is enriched. Supported adjustments include: 

• Resizing
• Cropping
• Rotating
• Brightness, contrast and saturation changes
• Color tweaks
• Applying filters (greyscale, sepia)
• Sharpening, blurring or altering the hue
• Adding text or logo watermarks

This means you don't have to export files to an external tool for adjustment and then re-upload. Users will require the new permission MediaAssetClassicEnhancements to gain access to this functionality. Here's a preview of how it looks in the PIM:

Many larger organizations will continue to require an enterprise digital asset management (DAM) solution alongside their PIM, and Inriver is closely integrated with several leading DAM systems. These updates to asset handling are designed to save time and improve efficiency around everyday media workflows for teams who manage both product data and product imagery. 

These enhancements are available to all Inriver customers at no extra charge. However, we are not automatically applying them to every account. Please contact Inriver support or your Customer Success Manager when you are ready to have the new features enabled for your environment. Once it is enabled, the new functionality will replace the existing experience on the media tab for each entity and on the screens where you upload media. Existing assets and links will not be impacted by the change. 

Your Product Media, Delivered Globally, Straight From Inriver's CDN

The farther your media assets have to travel from where they're stored to where buyers actually see them, the more it costs you. Load times rise, links become broken or inconsistent, and you may need third-party integrations to reach all your desired destinations. This is a real problem for any team serving product media to high-traffic storefronts, marketplaces, or marketing automation systems. 

Inriver can now serve your media assets direct from the PIM through a content delivery network (CDN), generating stable, performant, public URLs your downstream systems can rely on. This means one consistent way to reference assets across every channel, faster load times for shoppers, and no separate delivery infrastructure to stand up or maintain.

The CDN functionality is available at additional cost and switching to CDN hosting of your media assets will require a one-time migration. Please speak to your Customer Success Manager if you are interested in learning more about this new functionality. 

Get Ready for Agentic Shopify Stores with Combined Listings Support

Inriver's Shopify support continues to evolve, and this month's update is a big step forward to getting your presence ready for Shopify's AI initiatives like Shopify Catalog and Agentic Storefronts. These AI tools surface products directly inside chat interfaces of Shopify's AI partners. Your catalog can provide product data more accurately when each product variation is its own distinct product with its own details, rather than folded into one generic listing. Now the Inriver Shopify Adapter can turn your approved PIM data into what Shopify calls "Combined Listings" to create that structure. 

Here's how it works: Combined Listings let you link variations, such as the same shirt in five different colors, into a single page shoppers see as one listing, with clean, clickable swatches to switch between options. Behind the scenes, each variant remains its own product, with its own URL, description, images, and searchable pages for every variation. 

Combined Listings give your Shopify catalog the clean, well-structured foundation that both shoppers and AI shopping assistants respond to best, no matter how complex your product variations get.

Stay Up To Date With Inriver Innovation

That’s it for the September release. We’ll have more for you soon. 

If you’d like to be among the first to try our upcoming features, we’d welcome your participation in our early access testing program. Your feedback can help us shape the future of the Inriver platform. You’ll find the list of the features currently open for testing here along with instructions on how to register your interest. 

If you, or one of your team members, aren’t getting our monthly email alerts about new product features, you can sign-up to our mailing list.    

Or you can hit follow in the Monthly Product Announcements section in Community to be the first to hear what’s new. You'll also find more details on how to use the new features in the Monthly Product Updates channel in HowNow.  

And you can always find details of smaller feature releases and bug fixes in our regularly published technical release notes.