Shopify Winter ‘24 Editions: What’s New?
Quick Summary Focusing on the core elements that underpin Shopify's identity as a premier ecommerce platform, this edition centers its updates on FOUNDATIONS. These foundational pillars span across four key categories vital for merchants' success: conversion, channels, marketing, and operations.
Over the past few years, Shopify Plus has undergone significant expansion, attracting a multitude of mid-market and enterprise-level brands and retailers.
Shopify stands out in the digital commerce landscape as a multifaceted, SaaS eCommerce platform committed to staying current and meeting the diverse needs of businesses, irrespective of their size. A noteworthy aspect of Shopify's strategy is its ongoing and proactive efforts to adapt and evolve in response to the rapidly changing industry landscape. This ensures that Shopify remains a relevant and valuable choice for online businesses, especially high-growing brands.
Winter’24 Editions: Foundations
Just a few of days ago, Shopify released its biannual Editions; a digital showcase, tailored to exhibit comprehensive details about the latest launches, updates, and improvements across the platform.
Focusing on the core elements that underpin Shopify's identity as a premier ecommerce platform, this edition centers its updates on FOUNDATIONS. These foundational pillars span across four key categories vital for merchants' success: conversion, channels, marketing, and operations.
Without further due, let’s dive in.
Conversions
Variant Limit Increase:
Now accessible in developer preview and select businesses, Shopify has introduced developer preview access to its advanced GraphQL product APIs. This enhancement empowers merchants to enhance their capabilities in managing intricate catalogues, extensive SKU counts, multiple colorways, and sizing options, accommodating a substantial increase to 2000 variants per product.
Combined Listing:
For products featuring multiple variations, such as different colors or styles, buyers can now conveniently explore and purchase any variant directly from a unified product listing. Each variation is equipped with its unique description, media gallery, descriptive URL, and publishing tools.
That said, customers won't have to navigate across multiple PDPs to see each variant of a product. Instead, they can seamlessly cycle through all variations directly from a single PDP – providing a smoother, high-converting shopping experience.
Enhanced Product Classification:
Shopify's updated taxonomy streamlines the process for merchants in generating product listings. The product page now autonomously incorporates standardized categories and specific attributes (such as color, age group, or size) across various variants, eliminating the need for repetitive manual entries. This not only saves time and effort but also enhances the discoverability of your products when shared on social and marketplace channels.
Shopify Subscriptions:
Enhance customer lifetime value and ensure a steady revenue stream for your clients by utilizing our new Shopify Subscriptions app, available globally at no cost. Businesses can effortlessly establish and oversee subscriptions directly within the Shopify admin, granting customers the flexibility to adjust or skip subscription orders directly from their accounts.
Checkout & Extensibility:
Shopify is introducing additional features to assist merchants in creating an optimal checkout experience for their clients. This includes new capabilities such as customizing delivery through the Local Pickup Generator API and Order Routing API. Shopify is also expanding checkout extensions to other surfaces, including the Thank You and Order Status pages, and Checkout Sheet Kit.
Moreover, you can now personalize the appearance of the checkout process with advanced colour settings, header and footer customizations, and container styles. Additionally, updates like Checkout/Cart Validation, Privacy Consent, map components, choice list, toggle-button group, payment icon, and product thumbnails are part of these enhancements.
What’s more? With a focus on efficiency, Shopify has transformed its checkout into a streamlined single-page experience, contributing to a 4-second reduction in average buyer completion time.
Increased Performance:
Elevating your storefront's performance directly translates to improved conversion rates. Shopify's innovative Web Performance Dashboard now showcases industry-standard Core Web Vitals, focusing on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability—three key metrics that significantly impact a merchant's page ranking and sales potential.
Over the past year, Shopify has dedicated efforts to make its infrastructure 35% faster. Moreover, Shopify’s global presence has expanded to nearly 300 points, ensuring that merchants are now just 50 milliseconds away from connecting with users worldwide. This commitment results in a swift and efficient shopping experience that many merchants have already noticed.
Operations
AI Product Photography:
Utilize AI advancements to transform your product photography. Merchants can soon easily create polished product images using the new AI-powered features for media editing, at no extra cost. Whether generating, matching, or removing backgrounds, achieve professional results with just a few clicks or keywords directly within your Shopify Admin.
Shopify Magic:
Leverage AI for swift store page development. Shopify Magic offers automated content creation for critical pages like About Us or FAQ. Allow AI to craft a compelling brand narrative, facilitating trust-building and engagement with customers.
Commerce Assistant:
Sidekick is on track to become the premier AI-enabled assistant for global commerce. Merchants can leverage its capabilities to boost productivity, optimize workflows, make informed decisions, and minimize time spent on operational tasks. Shopify has introduced Sidekick to a select group of merchants in its early access phase.
AI-Powered Search:
While keyword matching serves as a fundamental aspect of search functionality, it cannot often fully grasp the nuanced meaning and context behind a user's query. Acknowledging this limitation, Shopify has unveiled its innovative AI-powered semantic search capabilities for its Plus merchants – to be activated through the Shopify Search and Discovery app.
Unlike traditional methods confined by keywords, this feature aims to delve more comprehensively into understanding a shopper's intent, leading to more relevant and accurate search results.
As an illustration, consider a user searching for "Professional attire for the office." In this scenario, the algorithm adeptly recognizes that the user is inquiring about items such as shirts, suits, office-appropriate dresses, and formal shoes. This not only saves the user time but also increases the likelihood of them discovering and purchasing the exact professional attire they are seeking.
Marketing
Shopify Audiences Enhancement:
Shopify Audiences is engineered to transform your customer acquisition strategy, bringing about cost efficiencies and heightened advertising effectiveness. This application simplifies the creation of personalized targeting lists for diverse ad platforms, including Meta, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok. Capitalizing on the extensive commerce data within the Shopify ecosystem, Shopify stands out in its ability to deploy machine learning for an enhanced digital advertising experience.
In its latest Edition, Shopify released Shopify Audiences v2.2 which incorporated more advanced retargeting algorithms, resulting in a substantial increase of at least 2x in retargeting audience sizes for the majority of its users. Additionally, the application now incorporates performance benchmarks, empowering users to assess their advertising outcomes against similar stores or industry benchmarks. This insightful feature equips Shopify users to pinpoint specific areas for enhancement and effectively fine-tune their advertising strategy.
Shop Campaigns:
The Shop Cash Offers, Shopify’s secure customer acquisition initiative, has successfully enabled merchants to gain over 1 million new customers since its launch last year. In this latest release, Shopify is reimagining and rebranding this program as Shop Campaigns. Alongside this transformation, Shopify is introducing estimates and analytics features, aiming to amplify the effectiveness of merchants’ marketing budgets.
Launching campaigns across various platforms is simplified with a single click, eliminating the need to construct audiences or develop assets. What's more, you only incur charges for customers who make a conversion, ensuring a cost-effective and results-driven approach to your advertising endeavours.
Channels
Internationalization
To capitalize on the global ecommerce market expansion, Markets Pro, powered by Global-e is strategically designed to assist businesses in their internationalization endevours, and it is now available to all enterprises in the United States. This comprehensive product bundle is engineered to simplify the complexities of international selling, covering essential elements like global taxes, duties, restrictions, international shipping labels, customs procedures, fraud prevention, and foreign exchange matters.
Empowered with inherent operational capabilities, enhanced localization tools, increased automation, and a merchant of record service for simplifying complexities, Markets Pro enables the seamless expansion of your global business.
In-store POS
Merchant’s feedback has been heard loud and clear – a more streamlined Point of Sale (POS) fulfillment process. Elevate your in-store checkout experience with the introduction of the new POS Terminal. This update simplifies online order fulfillment for retail staff by integrating fulfillment tasks directly into the POS. Additionally, the new Ship from Store feature and the index menu in Orders make it effortless for staff to handle order processing tasks such as picking, packing, and shipping.
The POS terminal also promises to revolutionize your payment process at the counter. Customers have the flexibility to tap, chip, or swipe for payments, ensuring a smooth and efficient checkout. Experience top-notch connectivity, along with the added bonus of personalized, branded displays that engage and captivate customers throughout the transaction.
As a dedicated Shopify Plus agency, we are excited to harness the power of these innovative features to deliver an unparalleled experience for our clients. If you're eager to discover how these cutting-edge updates can elevate your business, please reach out to us without hesitation. Our team is here to guide you and ensure you make the most of these advancements, unlocking the full potential for your business.
