Welcome back to our bi-annual update on Shopify Editions! This summer's theme is "Unified"—a nod to Shopify’s mission to integrate all aspects of the platform into a cohesive ecosystem.
You can find a complete list of the announcements at this link, but here’s a closer look at the key highlights:
Markets
Markets aggregates all of a business’s expansion activity into one central location, coming soon to all Shopify customers over the next few months.
Up until now, the geographical regions, B2B and retail are all scattered within Shopify. Markets will be the central command for the business' expansion, offering a bird's eye view of all the markets and context where they operate and their configuration.
This update stands out for its impact on multi-currency retail and the ability to manage different pricing and product catalogs by location. Merchants will soon be able to manage stores in Milan and London seamlessly from one Shopify account.
Unified Analytics
Shopify has rebuilt their analytics tech stack to make it faster, more flexible, and more intuitive.
Progressively, there will be a complete overhaul of the Analytics dashboard within Shopify
- customizable dashboard where you can drag and drop the pre-built reports that track those metrics that make sense for your business
- centralized code editing experience to write ShopifyQL code and query the data inside your report [COMING SOON]
- Real-time data streaming, replacing the 24-hour delay.
To find out more, check out this video.
AI & Shopify
Shopify is leveraging the power of AI to improve various aspects of managing a store:
- Business Insights: Shopify Sidekick, which is the AI assistant announced at Shopify Editions 2023, is being progressively rolled out to merchants across the globe. We can't wait to see how it will support our merchants in their day to day operations.
- Image editing: Shopify Magic in Media Editor will be coming to more places in the admin and is now available in the Shopify mobile app, so you can make professional-level edits on the go and improve the store images.
- Product taxonomy:
Product data is an integral part of your Shopify store, woven throughout every aspect of your shop, and has a big impact on buyer conversion, playing a major role in how customers find and interact with your products. It powers everything from on-site search and filters to how items are displayed on platforms like Google or our Shop app.With AI-suggested categories, attributes, and values merchants can make their products more discoverable on their storefronts, on social and on marketplaces.
- Assistenza Clienti: As we already discussed with our friends at Gorgias, AI can really make a difference in customer support. Eligible stores will soon be able to quickly answer customer questions in Shopify Inbox with AI-generated replies that understand your business.
Storefront
Shopify is in the process of unifying the visual theme editing experience for both themes made with Liquid and with Hydrogen.
- Visual Editor for Hydrogen: They announced users ill soon be able to visually build headless storefronts with Hydrogen and Utopia. Utopia is an open source platform that will allow merchants or other stakeholders to visually edit the theme, making headless commerce development faster and more collaborative between devs and merchants.
- New Style Settings and Theme Blocks for Liquid themes: Style settings is an update, now available in developer preview, that lays the groundwork for the Flex Sections announced in the Winter 2024 Shopify Editions. Flex Sections will allow merchants to easily drag and drop, resize and arrange different components and sections in their themes.
In the announcement video, the Shopify team shows how styles will control layout, size and spacing of the elements of each section, for example an image gallery, which with a click can be arranged horizontally, vertically and spaced out differently.
Checkout
As in every edition, there is a series of updates related to the checkout, one of the pillars of Shopify as a platform. Here are some notable ones:
- Split Shipping: Split shipping in checkout is now available, and customers will have more transparency about when an order will arrive in multiple shipments. They will be able to see estimated delivery dates for each shipment and they will be able to choose between different shipping options.
- Checkout Blocks: One of the checkout extensions that has been on our radar for a while, Checkout Blocks, is now free and included in all Shopify Plus plans. It's an intuitive way to customize checkouts, adding blocks from the checkout editor to insert promotions, text, validations and other visual elements.
- Address validations and more options for address autocomplete: Two updates related to address validation have caught our attention. First of all, when customers enter potentially invalid shipping addresses while placing their order, ignoring the address autocomplete, the orders are flagged in the Shopify admin with a warning or error icons - you surely have noticed these new icons in the past week. This allows merchants to proactively reach out to these customers or fix address errors.
Another update announced yesterday is the possibility to replace the native address autocomplete with a provider of your choice
Conclusion
Shopify Editions Summer 2024 ushers in a wave of innovations designed to create a more unified and streamlined ecommerce experience. From the powerful Markets feature that centralizes your global expansion efforts, to the real-time insights of Unified Analytics, and the intelligent enhancements of AI-powered tools, Shopify continues to evolve to meet the dynamic needs of merchants.
For those looking to elevate their store’s checkout process, the latest updates provide greater transparency and customization, ensuring a smoother customer journey from start to finish.
