Shopify Editions 2024: Summer updates focus on creating a centralised experience
- Olly Green
- Tiempo de lectura: 12 minutes
Shopify Summer ‘24 Edition has arrived, featuring over 150 updates aimed at creating a more integrated platform for merchants.
Instead of simply rolling out new features, Shopify Summer Editions has focused on providing a unified experience, ensuring all their new and existing tools work together seamlessly.
We’ve pulled together all you need to know for the Summer installment of Shopify Editions 2024 so you can maximise your use of the world class ecommerce platform.
Split shipping added to checkout
Markets Pro becomes Managed Markets
Shopify Edition 2024 Summer ‘24: Tim's verdict
The most recent release by Shopify is called Shopify Editions. What Shopify have done with the 150 feature releases has been to unify all Shopify's functionalities to create a more seamless eCommerce platform. Think along the lines of Apple products where all your devices work seamlessly together.
The standout functionality, is the new Markets Unified interface which is the perfect example of the unification. The new UX is going to make store expansions easier giving you holistic control over each territory including B2B & Retail. Markets brings together your entire business and helps you grow towards any future you can imagine.
It's a really exciting time to be part of Shopify, and as a Shopify Plus Partner, we're placed well to help merchants get the most out of the platform. With all the functionalities we have available Shopify is the #1 enterprise platform.
With so many updates and new functionalities announced at the conference in Canada, this really does add up to a Shopify OS3.0.
Markets unified for expansion
Markets has been reimagined to provide a central platform for all expansion activities. Whether you’re looking to sell internationally, expand into B2B, or sell in person with Shopify POS, Markets will be the go-to for all your cross-border activities.
Accessing these business configurations from a single location in the Shopify admin – instead of from across different parts of the platform as has previously been the case – provides a more logical, cohesive experience.
Markets also enables customised buyer experiences from a single store and eliminates the need for splitting inventory or keeping data in sync between multiple stores across a business. Product pricing and availability can be easily customised for each region, as can themes.
For businesses using Shopify POS, you can set specific catalogs to manage pricing and publishing for your retail stores. This means you can mark down prices for outlet stores, or only stock best sellers at your flagship store.
Again, store themes can be customised for each B2B market, making it easier for Shopify Plus merchants selling B2B to expand wholesale business into new regions.
A range of views and panels within Markets offer clear snapshots of your expansion activity, such as performance metrics and flow charts of your key markets. The Products section in the admin will also reflect your buyer experience customisation, providing a preview of the product and prices for a specific market.
Split shipping added to checkout
Customers will now be shown when an order will be split into multiple shipments at checkout.
This provides more clarity on shipping – customers can instantly see if their order will arrive in multiple shipments and will be provided with a choice over shipping prices and speeds.
This means that customers can choose to have one part of their order delivered quickly via express delivery while the other parts arrive later with standard delivery.
Further AI tools implemented
AI assistant Sidekick is now live on thousands of Shopify stores and acts as a helpful resource of information for your business.
Sidekick can provide advice on best practices and context on your business data. Its responses are relevant to your specific needs, and because it’s trained on your products, orders, and customers, it can generate customer segments.
For example, if you want to launch a marketing campaign targeting your most valuable recent shoppers, Sidekick can create that segment and generate a discount for the email, saving you time and effort.
After over one million AI-generated images were saved by merchants following Shopify Editions Winter ‘24, Shopify have further expanded their AI creation tools. Media can now be modified in the Online Store Editor, Email Editor, and anywhere else media can be accessed in the Shopify admin.
The Shopify mobile app will also now feature AI functionality, allowing professional media edits on the go.
Meanwhile, AI communication assistant Shopify Magic will use your specific store data suggest responses to customer questions in your Shopify inbox. You can edit these suggestions or send them as they are, reducing your workload and enhancing customer experience.
Faster, more agile analytics
Shopify’s rebuilt analytics tech stack is faster, more flexible, and more intuitive. It means you no longer need to trawl through your store’s data for vital insights.
Redesigned real-time displays provide immediate access to your most crucial performance metrics. Metric cards can be added, moved, and removed, allowing you to shape your dashboard based on your preferences.
Each card is powered by a pre-built Shopify report. Each of these provide detailed answers to frequent commerce queries. These reports can also be edited to layer on further metrics and dimensions. This means you can view metrics like conversion rate and sessions in a single view.
There is also the capability to build a report from scratch. A ‘new exploration’ can be saved as a custom report and offers you full control over how the data is presented.
New Style Settings for themes
Merchants now have more opportunities to create the exact look and feel they want for their brand thanks to Style Settings.
Style Settings essentially make it easier and quicker to build storefronts and create advanced layouts. They mean theme developers can give merchants the ability to customise the layout of sections and blocks.
For example, image gallery sections within a theme can be uniquely customised using settings like direction, alignment, or the gap between images. Style Settings extend to different devices, so you can edit the appearance of your site for mobile without requiring a separate setting.
Blocks can be statically rendered by developers so merchants can’t reorder or delete them. This means more complex layouts can be built, unlocking capabilities like conditional logic for collections.
Reusable Blocks can pass resources like products, collections, and metaobjects to their children, meaning data can be easily hooked up for custom layouts with lots of nesting.
Hydrogen Visual Editor simplifies headless storefronts
Powered by Utopia, the Hydrogen Visual Editor enables your full team to design, merchandise, and build in a shared store view.
The flexibility that comes with headless commerce can also mean designs changes take substantial time and require a developer.
Hydrogen Visual Editor unifies the design process in a single visual environment – all while keeping developers in control by syncing changes to GitHub with small and straightforward diffs.
This means your non-technical team members can independently craft templates and create new pages with one click. Components can be annotated to allow fast and intuitive use, and code changes can be pushed to team members in real time.
The shared store view also allows you to handle comments, tag collaborators, and streamline workflows.
It’s easy to bring data such as metaobjects or Shopify Storefront API into your pages too. You can visually add content or generate lists – and for any Shopify-supported CMS, content can be updated from inside the editor.
Developers benefit just as much as non-technical team members, as they can make changes and debug their designs in real time – all while continuing to use existing code tools like GitHub, VS Code, and CI/CD.
Markets Pro becomes Managed Markets
Managed Markets has replaced Markets Pro, allowing merchants to easily implement a more international buyer-friendly experience.
Managed Markets handles all the operational complexities that come with selling globally, such as tax filing, duties, pre-paid shipping labels, duties, customs documentation, and fraud protection. It can also help support post Brexit UK-EU exporting.
The catalog restrictions feature has been streamlined. Shopify will automatically restrict specific products that will be denied at customs, and you can see which products have been restricted and why.
Duties and import taxes can be directly included in product prices in regions where customers would expect to see one all-inclusive price at checkout. This will improve conversion rates for international buyers, as will expanded shipping options including standard shipping from UPS.
When changes happen post purchase and an international order is edited, duties, taxes, and currency changes will be updated automatically.
New POS features for easy in-person selling
For stores using Shopify POS, there is now greater flexibility for how customers want to receive their orders. Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 features two major updates to better connect online orders with in-store fulfillment.
Given more and more customers want to buy online and pick up in store, there can often be situations where the product they’re buying isn’t available to pick up from their chosen store. However, merchants can now enable and configure store transfers, meaning the products customers want are moved to their chosen pickup location.
This feature, which is now available for all Shopify plans, utilises a merchant’s network of retail stores and distribution centres to add more pickup locations and improve user experience.
It’s also much simpler for retail staff to ship orders to customers using the ‘Ship from Store’ fulfillment workflow. Order routing eases the pressure on any single store by allowing each of your retail locations to assist with fulfilling orders.
Shipping costs will be reduced, and customers will get their orders quicker – if a store is too busy to handle an order, it can be rerouted to the next most suitable store.
Smoother transactions = happy customers
Retail has been streamlined with a range of new features for Shopify POS that focus on achieving smoother transactions and happier customers.
There is now automatic detection of whether products can be returned or not, with staff provided context as to why that is. Returns out of policy are blocked, but a manager can override these polices if required.
With one-tap digital receipts, an in-store customer can be recognised as a Shop Pay user and their email will be shown at checkout. When these customers select digital receipts, they can also opt into marketing updates.
It’s easier to automatically capture customer information at checkout too. Via admin settings, staff can be prompted to obtain customer emails at checkout, and the retail staff who made the sale can be recorded. This also allows top performing staff to be identified and paid commissions.
Discover all the updates included in Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 here.
If you’re considering migrating to Shopify or need support with your existing Shopify store from a Shopify Plus Partner, get in touch with our performance development experts.
