Shopify Editions Summer 24: an N&O Perspective

Shopify never fails to show how it looks to continuously stay ahead of the curve when it comes to their latest innovations. As always, their latest ‘Editions’ have brought over 150 powerful new tools and updates, all designed to enhance every aspect of your online business. From cross-border selling enhancements to (shock) AI-powered functionalities, let me take you through my own highlights of this latest event and how it can radically revolutionise your Shopify store and overall experience for your customers.

 

Shopify Markets: Centralising Your Global Expansion

Shopify Markets is a game-changer for businesses looking to expand internationally. It consolidates all your cross-border, B2B, and in-person selling efforts into a single, streamlined hub (something which in the past was a bit of a disjointed experience, one in which you really had to know your way around Shopify’s settings). This comprehensive platform allows you to manage and customise the buying experience for each market with ease.

• Bird’s Eye View: Gain a holistic perspective of your international operations in one place, allowing merchants to truly see their own setups and make informed decisions.

• Customised Marketplaces: Create specific markets, select products via catalogues, and tailor pricing and store themes to resonate with local audiences.

• POS Integration: Set specific catalogues for Shopify POS, manage prices, and stock bestsellers efficiently.

• Market Previews: Preview exact product listings and prices for specific markets, ensuring accuracy and relevance.

 

Split Shipping: Enhancing the Checkout Experience

Split Shipping introduces a new level of transparency and convenience for your customers. Previously, customers saw a single shipping rate and delivery date, which in many cases would mean customers dropping off if it would not meet their requirements. Now, they can see if their orders will arrive in multiple shipments and choose from 'lowest price', 'fastest', or 'custom' shipping options. This feature also extends to subscription services, providing more flexibility and clarity.

This feature is not available at the time of writing this, but you can be sure we’ll be checking this out when it is!

 

All New Analytics: Real-Time Insights

Understanding your store’s performance is crucial. The revamped analytics tool in Shopify Editions | Summer '24 offers real-time data streaming, eliminating the 24-hour wait for updates as well as updating the overall experience to make it far more useful than before.

• User-Friendly Interface: An updated UI allows you to access key metrics on a customizable dashboard.

• Custom Reports: Edit pre-built Shopify reports for deeper insights and add new metrics. View conversion rates and sessions together for a comprehensive analysis.

• Data Explorations: Create new reports, save custom views, and control how your data is presented.

 

Tracking Web Performance Over Time

With the new web performance tracking tools, you can monitor how changes to your store impact core web vital scores. Adjust time ranges, dates, and device types to drill down into specific performance metrics, ensuring your site remains fast and efficient.

 

Latest AI Updates: Smarter Store Management

As expected, Artificial Intelligence is at the heart of many new features in Shopify Editions | Summer '24, designed to simplify and enhance your store management.

• AI Image Editing and Generation: Available in the mobile app and store editor, making image management seamless.

• Shopify Magic: Provides real-time customer service responses, suggesting customer responses based on your store’s data and allowing you to edit these responses before they get sent to the customer.

• AI-Powered Categories & Attributes: Recommends product categories and attributes, improving searchability and organisation.

• Sidekick: Shopify’s chatbot understands your store’s data, helping with best practices, how-to guides, and tailored responses. For example, it can launch targeted marketing campaigns from a segment of customers and send them a personalised email with a specific discount offer.

 

New Style Settings: Advanced Customisation

Style settings introduce unparalleled control over your store’s design. This is one we’re particularly excited about here at Noughts & Ones, as we’re hoping that it’ll provide us with even more options to provide an optimal experience for the custom themes we create for merchants.

• Customisable Layouts: Adjust direction, alignment, spacing, and layout settings without separate configurations for different devices.

• Static Blocks and Conditional Logic: Create complex layouts with static blocks and apply conditional logic to elements like for example ‘View all’ buttons that only show when there are more products in the collection than displayed on the page, enhancing the overall user experience.

• Allow blocks to pass resources (like products, collections, metaobjects) to their children, making it simple to hook up data with custom layouts with lots of nesting

 

Shopify Combined Listings App (Plus Only)

Exclusive to Shopify Plus, this app allows you to create combined listings with unique titles, descriptions, and media for each variation. Optimise your SEO with unique URLs and manage everything from a single product detail page (PDP).

 

Store Credit: A Versatile Customer Incentive

Currently in early access, store credit can be displayed as a payment method at checkout. This feature is perfect for goodwill gestures, retention strategies, or marketing campaigns, providing customers with a compelling reason to return.

 

Flow Template Apps

The new template app extension streamlines your workflow, making it easier to manage and automate various aspects of your store.

 

Hydrogen Visual Editor: Collaborative Development

Hydrogen Visual Editor empowers your team to build and ship pages collaboratively in a visual environment. It integrates with GitHub, ensuring the code remains the source of truth while allowing non-technical team members to contribute effectively.

• Real-Time Updates: Devs can see changes in real-time and manage content updates within the editor.

• Collaboration Tools: Add comments, tag collaborators, and manage branches and releases, facilitating smooth teamwork.

 

Conclusion

Phew - there’s a lot there to digest, and this isn’t even all of it! The Shopify Editions | Summer '24 release is packed with features designed to elevate your e-commerce business. From enhanced analytics and AI capabilities to advanced customisation and global market management, these updates ensure that your Shopify store remains competitive and user-friendly. Here at N&O we always look to embrace these innovations to deliver exceptional shopping experiences and drive your business forward. We can’t wait to dive deeper into these new updates!