Exploring Shopify's Summer '24 Editions: Unifying Infrastructure and Integration

“Make Commerce Better.” This mantra encapsulates Shopify’s relentless pursuit of enhancing the commerce experience. With bi-yearly product releases, Shopify consistently introduces groundbreaking updates that push the boundaries of what’s possible for merchants and agencies alike. The previous Editions—Connect to Consumers, Build to Last, Imagine my Business, and Foundations—have revolutionized B2B, B2C, Retail, and development functionalities.

In Summer '24, Shopify unveils the Unified Editions, a pivotal step towards unifying critical workflows and infrastructure across its ecosystem. This update aims to optimize efficiency, bolster resilience, and deepen integration across Shopify’s platform. By harmonizing key processes and enhancing system interoperability, Shopify empowers merchants to operate more agilely and capitalize on new growth opportunities.

Throughout this blog post, we’ll delve into the technical nuances and transformative capabilities introduced by Shopify’s Unified Editions.

Internationalization

Markets

Evolved from its roots in cross-border selling, Markets now serves as Shopify’s centralized hub for expanding your business internationally. The reimagined Markets acts as a unified command center, empowering you to tailor buyer experiences effortlessly across cross-border regions,  B2B, and in-person selling. 

By centralizing these functions within your admin, Markets streamlines your workflow, ensuring consistent management and effortless deployment of new market initiatives. Essentially, you can: 

1. Expand seamlessly across B2B, retail, and various regions, effortlessly tailoring the customer experience for each.

2. Gain a holistic view of your business expansion. From one dashboard, effortlessly access, manage, and compare your markets, while previewing customizations.

3. Customize catalogs, themes, currencies, domains, and business entities effortlessly for different markets, enhancing customer experiences with personalized touches.

Managed Markets: 

Previously known as Markets Pro, Managed Markets now offers enhanced capabilities alongside its trusted Merchant of Record capabilities, which handle duties, tax filing, shipping labels, customs documentation, fraud protection, and more.

Merchants can utilize Managed Markets to seamlessly include duties and taxes in regional prices, ensure compliance with product restrictions, secure competitive shipping rates, and easily modify existing orders. These enhancements are designed to deliver a more streamlined and buyer-friendly international commerce experience.

Split Shipping

The world's leading checkout experience now provides enhanced transparency regarding shipping options. Previously, customers only encountered a single shipping rate and delivery estimate, even with multiple shipments and warehouses. With Split Shipping introduced, customers can now expect upfront notifications if their order will arrive in multiple shipments. They can also choose between the fastest, most cost-effective, or personalized shipping preferences regarding each shipment.

AI

Time is money. Shopify continues to innovate with AI to streamline operations and increase efficiency for its merchants. 

Enhanced Media Editor: 

Since its introduction in the previous Winter Editions, Shopify's AI image generator in the Media Editor has enabled merchants to incorporate over 1 million AI-generated images into their storefronts. Now, Shopify is expanding this feature, introducing an AI image editor across the admin—including the online store and email platforms—and enabling mobile editing through the Shopify mobile app. 

AI-Driven Product Creation: 

Adding new products to your store is now simpler and faster: Magic instantly provides personalized and intelligent suggestions across all product categories. It accurately assigns attributes such as color, size, and style to minimize listing errors, ensuring customers can easily discover them on your online store, social media, and marketplaces.

AI-Enhanced Customer Support: 

Save valuable time by leveraging AI for instant response recommendations in Shopify Inbox. Tailored to your store’s details, these suggestions allow you to approve or modify responses swiftly. Keep your customers engaged and focus on maximizing sales.

Sidekick: 

Now in early access, Shopify’s AI-enabled commerce assistant, Sidekick, offers personalized merchant guidance and comprehensive support. From decision-making to task resolution and feature utilization across Shopify, Sidekick utilizes its knowledge of your specific products, orders, and customer data to assist in segment creation and analytics insights.

New Style Setting for Themes: 

For eCommerce storefronts, customizability and flexibility are key. Capturing the brand's identity and having the ability to scale and adapt as the brand evolves is vital.

The latest developer preview introduces new style settings for Liquid theme developers, providing enhanced layout flexibility and enabling the creation of detailed sections with static blocks and block targeting. These updates make blocks more generic and reusable.

Shopify continues to introduce innovative features and advanced layouts through style settings, making it easier for storefronts to stand out. Merchants now have the flexibility to fully customize section and block layouts. Additionally, the new Style Settings are adaptable to different devices, ensuring that mobile optimization is seamless and does not require separate settings.

Conditional logic can also be applied to enhance the user experience. For instance, a "view more" option will not be displayed if there are no additional products to show.

Hydrogen Visual Editor Powered by Utopia

Shopify continues to streamline headless development with a range of powerful tools. This includes Hydrogen and Oxygen, along with investments in metafields, metaobjects, and ongoing enhancements to the Storefront API. An exciting addition to this lineup is the integration of Utopia, an open-source visual design tool, directly into Hydrogen.

The Hydrogen Visual Editor, powered by Utopia, underscores Shopify's commitment to advancing open-source projects that drive innovation in web and commerce. Acquired in 2022, Utopia now drives this cutting-edge tool, offering a user-friendly WYSIWYG editor tailored for headless storefronts. This empowers non-technical users to participate in editing workflows while optimizing developer resources.

This tool ensures that the developers' code remains the authoritative source, providing full control over your builds. Changes seamlessly synchronize with GitHub, resulting in concise and manageable updates. This capability enables the creation of custom interfaces for internal teams to manage simple content edits and structured page layouts.

Furthermore, developers can leverage familiar tools such as VScode, GitHub, and CI/CD processes for efficient workflow management. Integration of data—from metaobjects, the Storefront API, or your CMS—is streamlined, and complemented by Oxygen for rapid deployment of preview versions.

Shopify now offers a comprehensive solution that bridges Liquid Themes and headless storefronts, incorporating powerful visual editors for both environments. This integrated approach consolidates functionality within a single platform, distinguishing Shopify in the commerce landscape. The Hydrogen Visual Editor, powered by Utopia, is set to enter early access soon.

More Comprehensive Analytics

Shopify has revolutionized data-driven analytics by providing real-time insights tailored to your business needs. The new analytics platform is designed to be smarter, faster, and more intuitive, transforming how you visualize, export, and manage data.

Merchants can now personalize their dashboards with essential performance metrics displayed in draggable, resizable cards. Each metric card is powered by pre-built detailed Shopify reports, addressing common business questions. Additionally, users can enhance these reports by adding further metrics to explore intersections within their data.

Beyond pre-built reports, users have the flexibility to create and save their own exploration templates, focusing precisely on the data they wish to highlight. This capability ensures that businesses are not limited by standard reports but can tailor analytics to their specific requirements.

Centralized Operation

Beyond enhancing the reporting dashboard, Shopify is focusing on streamlining business operations. Soon, all plans will empower merchants to efficiently manage billing, staff access, and more across multiple stores by centralizing them under a single organization.

Shopify Plus users will enjoy the exclusive ability to quickly create production or development stores using existing store data such as products, variants, collections, and associated metafields.

Additionally, users can assign access rights based on roles or combinations of roles. For Shopify Plus, managing users in bulk through groups will be simplified. This role-based access control model allows roles to be assigned directly to users or through user groups, which aggregate users sharing specific organizational attributes like "North American Customer Support" or "B2B Sales Team."

In the Summer '24 Edition, Shopify is embarking on a significant initiative to streamline its infrastructure, aiming to consolidate systems, reduce duplication, and achieve seamless integration across its platform. This strategic effort is designed to enhance efficiency and performance, ensuring a more cohesive and robust experience for users.

With such a comprehensive array of updates, a single blog post cannot do justice to all the details. If you're interested in specific features, the Avex team is eager to connect and provide a thorough overview.