One of the reasons we love Shopify so much at Ecommerce Platforms, is that the ecosystem is constantly evolving, introducing new features and capabilities for sellers. Twice a year, we look forward to Shopify Editions, where the company outlines all of its most exciting updates.
Shopify Editions Summer 2024 covered more than 150 updates to Shopify’s platform, covering everything from global selling to AI. Here’s our rundown of the most exciting changes you can look forward to on Shopify this year.
The Biggest Announcements from Editions Summer '24
The theme for Shopify Editions Summer '24 was “Unified” selling. The ecommerce leader is doubling down on integrating key workflows and infrastructure to help teams accomplish more, with less effort.
While there were certainly a lot of updates to cover, Shopify did helpfully highlight some of its most impressive announcements, which I’ll introduce here.
The Updates to Shopify Markets
First, Shopify introduced it’s new “unified home” for its Markets feature, the solution that empowers companies to sell across multiple region and territories from a single dashboard. The upgraded solution allows users to more easily expand their reach across B2B, retail (point of sale), and regional locations, with a unified business management dashboard.
Companies can now customize user experiences for different segments, adjusting themes, currencies, domains, and more within the Markets dashboard. You can also access, manage and compare your markets in one place, and unlock custom pricing and publishing for different POS retail markets.
Speaking of in-person selling, Shopify has introduced new features to streamline returns and receipt printing, effortlessly capture customer contact data with Shop Pay, and create new discount and promotional codes.
Plus, the new “Managed Markets” solution, allows companies to add duties and taxes in regional prices, avoid selling restricted products in certain areas, and secure discount shipping rates in one location. There’s even a feature to offer a wider range of shipping options.
Shipping Updates: Split Shipping and More
Moving onto Shopify’s new shipping solutions, the platform is now allowing vendors to give buyers more insights into when their orders will be split into multiple shipments. This allows them to choose the lowest price, fastest delivery, or custom options for shipping.
I already think Shopify’s shipping features are fantastic, but this update will certainly drive better customer experiences. Plus, Shopify has combined the new split shipping features with other updates, like the ability to include custom duties in product prices, and access UPS Expedited shipping.
There are even specialized shipping and business management tools for retailers in Japan, from QR code payments, to suggested shipping apps. Other updates to the shipping experience include subscription control, cross-border order editing, and end-to-end tracking.
Plus, Shopify has introduced the option to ship to and from retail stores, enhancing the omnichannel flexibility of their platform for those using Shopify POS. You can offer in-store collection, and enable ship from shop workflows for physical locations.
Shopify Magic Updates: Next Level AI
Shopify Magic is one of the most exciting new features I’ve seen added to the platform for some time. Already, Shopify’s AI tools are helping companies create product listings, access real-time assistance, and generate images. Now, the AI capabilities can also:
- Suggest answers to customer questions in Shopify Inbox.
- Translate ShopifyQL code into simple language.
- Provide suggested categories and attributes for merchandising
- Edit and create images on any device (including mobile)
- Automatically complete business tasks and answer merchant questions.
Notably, certain features, like Shopify Sidekick (which helps you with time-consuming admin tasks), are only available in the US and Canada to begin with.
Next Level Analytics Updates
The analytical and reporting features are another top selling point for Shopify in my opinion. Now, they’re about to become better than ever.
The Shopify team has rebuilt its analytical stack to make it more intuitive and flexible. You can get deeper insights into store performance in real-time, with visuals, and a customizable dashboard for all of your most important metrics.
Users can also edit pre-built reports to combine different metrics and dimensions, and build custom reports from scratch, with full control over how their data is presented.
Plus, Shopify will soon be introducing ShopifyQL to allow users to query their data from within a report.
You can also import data into your store for more in-depth insights, track campaign data from marketing strategies with unified ad insights, and monitor global sales.
Style Settings and Checkout Customization
If you’ve always wanted to go deeper with the customization of your Shopify store, you’re in luck. Shopify has introduced new style settings for themes, allowing Shopify Liquid theme developers to give merchants more flexibility with static blocks and block targeting.
You can also now build hydrogen stores visually with the “Utopia” powered Hydrogen visual editor. This allows a full team to design, brand, and build a store with a shared view. All changes will still be synced with GitHub too. This will make headless commerce design much easier.
From a checkout perspective, Shopify has updated its already world-leading checkout with a host of exciting updates. Aside from split shipping options, users can now access checkout blocks for free, to customize the checkout experience.
You can also customize more pages with apps, and automate payment capture. There’s also pick-up in store enabled by Shop Pay.
Plus, there are tons of features for pre-filling delivery addresses, capturing tax IDs at checkout, creating one-tap digital receipts, and streamlining return rules. You can even add more address fields at checkout, and enable discounts on draft orders.
Shopify Audiences and Marketing Updates
If you need more help expanding your reach and increasing sales on Shopify, you’ll love some of the updates from this Shopify Editions Summer 2024 release.
You can now promote campaigns on external channels like Meta and Google, and create custom retargeting boost lists for Shopify Audiences and Shopify Campaigns on Shopify Plus.
Shop Campaigns is also now available in Canada, and there are advanced analytics available for all users to track ad performance data across channels.
Shopify is also introducing better marketing automation with Segments, pixel solutions based on customer consent, and the ability to access a YouTube Shopping affiliate program.
There’s also the new “Shop Minis” feature, which allows you to create simple shopping experiences on the Shop app. On top of all that, you’ll get access to the new Shopify Pixel helper, new filters and semantic search to help customers find products, and so much more.
Other Key Updates from Shopify Editions Summer 2024
It’s almost impossible to cover everything introduced by Shopify in this update, but on top of all of the other features outlined above, here are some notable mentions:
- Selling online: Shoppers can now sign into accounts with their Shop account. Sellers can also access 10k categories and 2k attributes for product taxonomies, and issue store credit via their admin portal. Plus, there’s a new combined listings app.
- Selling in person: For in-person sales, you can create Buy X get Y discount codes, POS detail pages, rebuilt shipping orders, and smart grid UI extensions. There’s also support for stacking discounts and creating promotion combinations.
- Wholesale sales: Wholesale sellers now have access to a new B2B Trade theme, customizable B2B stores, deposits at checkout, bulk product marketing, overselling protection, price list sharing, and bulk filters. There’s also the “Shopify Collective” feature for connecting with other brands and sourcing products.
- Shipping and fulfilment: Vendors can automate Amazon listings, access location management indexes, showcase Shop Promise buttons at checkout, and automatically correct addresses that have been entered with mistakes.
- API and developer updates: There are too many to mention here, but some major changes include new Extensions and APIs for checkout compliance, POS UI, returns, pixel events, and more. There’s also Shopify ad targeting, tools, discount functions for POS, storefront cart APIs, customer account API metafields, and branding API updates.
Check Out all the Latest News from Shopify
With more than 150 new features to explore, Shopify is continuing to cement its position as the number one ecommerce and omnichannel commerce platform for modern vendors.
The features covered here represent just a fraction of what’s coming to Shopify users, and enterprise companies on Shopify Plus, so I definitely recommend checking out the full Editions report for more insights.
One thing is for certain, if you’re looking for incredible tools for omnichannel and global selling, cutting edge AI, store customization, and business management, you really can’t go wrong with Shopify. It’s no wonder Shopify is one of the world’s favorite ecommerce platforms.
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