Summarized 2024 Shopify Additions

Shopify typically releases new features twice a year. Trevor did a deep dive into their latest updates and got familiar with each, so you don’t have to. 

The general vibe is they realized their ecosystem was slowly starting to get a little too ‘spread out’ between their diverse app marketplace and ways to manage shops within Shopify itself. The theme product-wide is ‘unification’, to give businesses on the Shopify platform a more ‘in-one-place’ experience to manage their business and operations.

Since there are over 150+ updates and features in this drop Trevor focused on those that seemed mostly likely to impact Movetic, our current clients, and potential clients. Get a quick look at what’s good with the most impactful new updates.

• Shopify Segments

Shopify is creating AI tools that let you quickly spin up segments of your customers, create emails and discounts within Shopify, and then send emails to your customers directly from Shopify, to micro-target segments of your customer base and have it all tracked through Shopify analytics.

 

• Image Editing

It’s now surprisingly easy to edit product images and change out or improve image backgrounds with AI image editing directly within the Shopify admin.

 

• Product category tagging

Shopify is now using AI to help Merchants tag, categorize, and add attributes to their products, to improve search-ability across all search mediums and make their products more discoverable. Many of these will be available to developers via meta fields as well.

Merchants can now offer their Buyers more flexibility at checkout, and the experience for Buyers can feel more ‘Amazon-like’. Users can choose when an order will be split into multiple shipments so they can choose the lowest price, fastest delivery, or custom shipping options.

Shopify is starting to incorporate more logistics management features into Shopify, and a big offering off the bat is giving Merchants the ability to add a ‘pick up in store’ option, that syncs with their inventory if they want to offer the option.

Issue store credit to customers directly in admin, view balances and transaction history, and enable customers to spend their credit at checkout. This could also be huge in terms of managing returns as well.

Identify how changes you’ve made to your store impact its performance such as app uninstalls, theme updates, and new code. Site metrics, load speed, etc is now also viewable from the Analytics area of the Admin, and store owners will soon have much more visibility into their Load times and the impacts this has on conversion rate, sales, etc.

Bundles have proven industry-wide to be a great way to boost average order values and pair products in stores, Shopify is expanding their native Bundles app and fixing some bugs that were happening in Shopify surrounding it.

We can now add a bit of customization to these pages in a more ‘native’ way, that was taken away in the ‘additional scripts’ and various apps editing methods.

Shopify is expanding the ability to add automation to your store and power-connected services with their Flow app (think Zapier, but native to Shopify and fully customizable based on data from your orders, and eCommerce actions).

Shopify is enhancing the ability to do Omnichannel, and making it easier to manage your product catalog from Shopify, and export your catalog to Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Shopify Theme Blocks, Sections, and Settings

• They’re adding more Shopify Settings within Blocks and Sections so that developers can give more flexible ways to manage content and make things more editable to clients managing from the ‘Customize Theme’ areas of their store.
• They’re going to allow blocks to be ‘statically rendered’ so they can’t be re-ordered or deleted by an unauthorized user tinkering around with content in the backend.
• They’re also going to start offering conditional logic within blocks and sections. For example, you could make a ‘collection section’ that only offers a ‘view all products in collection’ button if there’s more products in the collection, than are currently displayed in the section.
• You can now hook meta-objects into Shopify section blocks, which makes it easier to display nested information about a product on other pages without copy-pasting the same content everywhere. E.g.: ingredients on a product page saved as data but share-able elsewhere.
• TLDR: Slowly but surely Shopify is creating greater levels of flexibility into their Admin to manage diverse content, taking a small bite out of their the app metafield ecosystem to keep things ‘in-house’. Still plenty of progress to go, but I like the direction the flexibility is going!

We hope you learned a thing or two with us today. Have any questions about Shopify and how to use it to amplify your brand? Our experts would love to chat: hello@themovetic.com.