One of our favourite platforms just keeps on giving! Last week Shopify released their Summer Editions 2023 where they announced all the Shopify improvements and updates that have been in process over the last six months and what’s to come.
As a product first company, Shopify are always wanting to bring innovation to the table with new ideas and features to improve the experience for both developers and consumers.
There are 100+ updates, but here’s a few things that caught our eye.
AI for Commerce
We're all on the AI bandwagon right now and Shopify are no different. Shopify believe we're entering a new era for technology and with that; human creativity. AI is already changing how customers search and shop, and how businesses operate both internally and externally. Shopify Magic combines cutting-edge AI with the platform's data to help millions of businesses work faster, smarter, and more creatively as we navigate this new digital time.
From helping you with product descriptions to writing emails, Shopify Magic harnesses AI to boost your business potential. Built on Shopify’s robust security architecture, and privacy policy trusted by millions of companies around the world, Shopify Magic will enable you to unlock creativity you didn’t even know you had!
Meet your new sidekick
Imagine you had a deeply competent, incredibly intelligent, passionate, and non-judgmental sidekick—available to you whenever you need them at the click of a button. With Shopify you can use everyday language to improve your store, tackle time-consuming tasks, and make smarter business decisions with the new AI-enabled sidekick. From suggesting the best apps for your business to helping with creative and outstanding marketing campaigns, Sidekick answers questions, solves problems, and helps you get more work done – faster – growing your business.
Shopify Credit
Take charge with Shopify Credit, a pay-in-full business card designed for entrepreneurs, and turn everyday purchases for your consumers into cashback rewards. Apply with no impact to your credit score, pay wherever Visa® is accepted, and put real money back into your business—no fees, no interest. Shopify credit is currently only available to select businesses in the United States but we cannot wait for this to come to the UK!
Find out more here.
Shopify Bundles App
Shopify have implemented improvements to the Shopify Bundles app and are going to provide native support for creating product bundles. These can be simple fixed bundles and as part of this, Shopify is going to increase the current variant limit from 100 to 240. You can now include more variants in your product bundles and have them sync in real time with your inventory. This is a great way to boost the average order value and improve the overall buying experience for customers.
Tik Tok Integration
As we all know, TikTok had already been showing significant potential as an emerging platform for ecommerce with its User Generated Content, branded hashtags and native advertising. Now, a new TikTok integration comes to Shopify which will provide the ability to synchronise and sell products from your store on TikTok Shop and manage TikTok orders in Shopify.
This is different from the TikTok Sales Channel because the products in the Sales Channel only sync to TikTok Business Centre instead of TikTok Seller Centre, so they can only be used for Ads rather than TikTok Shop itself.
Shopify Checkout
With Shopify Checkout, you get great conversion, globally recognised buyer experience, and now flexibility to customise what you need for your unique business. In August 2024, Shopify is going to remove the checkout.liquid template so customisations to the Checkout will need to be made in the Checkout customisation settings, which works similar to creating a Theme for your store meaning you can customise your checkout even more than ever with new UI extensions and APIs. With this removal of the checkout.liquid template, apps and extensions can extend Shopify’s checkout and apps will have the ability to inject server-side validation logic in the Cart and Checkout.
The Checkout customisation settings appear to have a new setting for Checkout layout, which allows you to choose either a One-page checkout or a Three-page checkout depending on the experience that you want to provide to your customers. Great huh?
B2B on Shopify
Let’s not forget about the B2B companies out there. Shopify are adding new features that make ordering easier for your wholesale buyers and make it easier for you to sell DTC and B2B from the same shop. Here is what you can expect:
Volume pricing: Easily implement quantity price breaks to encourage business customers to buy in larger quantities.
Store personalisation: Design website pages optimised for your business customers, surfacing relevant content in a single store—no coding required.
Quick order lists: Show customers a list of product variants, so they can easily order sizes, colours, and more, all from one section of your product pages.
PayPal payments: Customers can now conveniently pay for their orders and invoices with PayPal, and you can easily reconcile payments in the admin.
Vaulted credit cards: Now business customers can use a previously stored credit card on draft orders at checkout or when paying an invoice.
Full Stack Marketing
The final feature we want to highlight – out of the 100+ product updates in Shopify’s Summer ‘23 Edition – is for the marketeers out there. Shopify are connecting their marketing tools to help you scale your audience, understand your customers, advertise smarter, and fundamentally spend less. As we face our current economic situation in the UK it is more important than ever to be vigil with your marketing spend, that’s why we just love that Shopify are thinking ahead.
Marketing Tools help you convert more customers and deliver a great experience at every step, from signing someone up for your newsletter to sending them great emails. They help you make the most of everything that happens after a customer gets to your store, and they go hand in hand with Shopify’s advertising and traffic-generating tools like sales channels, SEO, and more. Find out more about integrated marketing tools.
But that’s not all for you marketing and content managers; collaborate with creators and influencers to promote your products and drive sales with Shopify Collabs. Whether you're finding partners, sending out gifts, or tracking affiliate offers, Collabs is built to help you drive more sales. You can customise your own creator application page to reflect your unique brand and appeal to potential collaborators who wish to work with you, send direct invites with perks to spread the word about products.
As you can see, Shopify Summer Editions 2023 provided an extraordinary amount of updates and new things for Shopify businesses, developers and marketeers to suck their teeth into. It was really hard to pick just a handful of the most important ones, so make sure to go and check the rest of them here.
As a Shopify agency, brands come to us when they want bold strategies that put growth first. Find out more about how you can replatform your site to Shopify, or grow your Shopify business, by getting in touch with our experts.
