Shopify Editions Summer '24: 8 Key Updates for Your Business
by Victoria Garcia
The Shopify Summer '24 Edition is here, bringing over 150 exciting updates to enhance your ecommerce experience. In this article, we'll break down the eight game-changing updates you need to know to elevate your Shopify store.
Shopify is constantly evolving, adding new features and expanding its capabilities to meet the ever-changing demands of the ecommerce landscape. Millions of merchants rely on Shopify to grow their businesses, whether entering new markets, scaling up wholesale, or managing a global network of retail stores.
With the Summer '24 Edition, Shopify introduces over 150 updates that unify key workflows and infrastructure, making the platform faster, more reliable, and better integrated than ever. These enhancements are designed to help you manage and grow your business more efficiently from a single, unified commerce platform.
Read on to discover the top 8 updates that will streamline your operations and open up new opportunities for business growth.
1.The Reimagined Markets
Currently, Shopify merchants adding new retail stores, scaling into B2B, or expanding to new international markets require managing each business configuration in different parts of the platform, creating multiple disjointed experiences, and requiring business owners to be pros in the Shopify admin.
Now, Shopify has introduced a new central command centre for expansion called Markets. With Markets, you can expand internationally, do B2B, or manage retail, all from one screen and one store. This means you can create custom experiences for each market without dealing with multiple stores or scattered workflows.
Markets give you a complete overview of your operations, showing all the markets you're in, how each one is set up, and how they all work together. In the next few months, if you're already selling cross-border, B2B, or retail with Shopify, you'll see your existing markets in the new Markets interface.
2. Rebuilt Unified Analytics
As a business owner, you can only uncover the power of your data when you use it to answer your unique and specific business questions. That's why Shopify has completely rebuilt and unified its analytics to give you access to relevant, real-time performance data that's comprehensive and easy to explore.
Here's what you can look forward to:
Custom Dashboards: Create a dashboard that fits your needs. Drag, drop, resize, and customise metric cards to focus on what matters most to your business.
Pre-Built Commerce Reports: Access a new library of pre-built reports to answer common questions like, "How did my sales this week compare to last week?" These reports are ready to use, saving you time and effort.
Enhanced Custom Reporting: Take your analysis further with the ability to edit pre-built reports. Combine different metrics and dimensions to dive deeper into your data and get a more detailed view. For instance, you can now see your conversion rate alongside sessions in a single report and take action:
High conversion rate & low sessions: your traffic is high-quality, but you may need to increase your reach.
High sessions & low conversion rate: you’re getting lots of visitors, but they aren’t converting. Focus on improving the user experience.
Increasing sessions & decreasing Conversion Rate: check your marketing strategies and site performance to ensure you’re attracting the right audience.
Advanced Reporting with ShopifyQL: Coming soon, ShopifyQL will allow you to query your data directly within your reports. This powerful tool lets you extract and analyse data in more complex ways and create advanced reports tailored to your business needs.
3. New Style Settings for Themes
Creating your brand's unique look and feel has never been more crucial. As your brand evolves, you might need to adapt and change your style and design seamlessly. With Online Store 2.0, you now have greater control over your store's appearance and functionality without needing constant coding. However, some style limitations persisted. The new style settings for themes are designed to provide enhanced flexibility, making it easier to build distinctive storefronts with advanced layouts.
The new style settings for themes are available only for theme developers, and you’ll soon be able to experience these updates in new and updated Shopify themes that will allow you to customise the layout of sections and blocks fully. The new layout panel lets you adjust settings like direction, alignment, and spacing between images or text blocks, enabling you to create a unique look easily.
Mobile-Specific Settings
Style settings can be tailored for different devices, ensuring your site looks great on mobile without requiring separate settings. This adaptability allows you to maintain a cohesive appearance across all devices effortlessly.
Need help to optimise your Shopify shopping experience? Let’s talk
4.AI Suggested Categories & Attributes
This update will improve and speed up your product creation and classification. Shopify has introduced a new standard product taxonomy designed to enhance product discoverability in your online store and across channels.
Shopify's Standard Product Taxonomy is a giant library of product data across more than 26 business verticals that maps over 10K product categories with over 1K associated product attributes.
When you add a new product to Shopify, Shopify Magic will use AI to suggest categories and attributes by default. This feature will help you classify and store essential, relevant data for each product, ensuring that you provide buyers with what they are looking for when they search for your products.
5. Image Filter for search
For visual shoppers, the free Shopify Search & Discovery app lets customers find the right products by filtering based on logos, icons, or other images.
For instance, if a customer is shopping for a lamp, you can go beyond standard filters like colour, material, and price and let them narrow their search with a visual filter by the shape of the lamps.
6. Split Shipping in Checkout
When it comes to orders with multiple items, you can now give customers flexibility about their shipping options. Customers buying more than one item in a transaction with split checkout can now see if their orders will arrive in multiple shipments upfront at the checkout.
If multiple shipment speeds are available, customers can select options between the lowest price or fastest or even customise for each shipment so that they have more control over speed and cost of delivery.
So, let's say you are shopping at a furniture store and might need a desk lamp delivered quickly to replace a broken one in your home office. The sofa and pre-order chair can both arrive later at different times with standard shipping.
Providing customers with clear expectations about shipping options and delivery dates builds trust and provides peace of mind to your customers, knowing exactly when each item will arrive.
7. Ship To & From Retail Stores
The following two updates unify your online and in-store fulfilment experiences, offering customers more ways to receive their orders.
Transfer to a Pickup Location
What if a customer wants to buy online and pick up in a nearby store, but the product isn't available there? With the pickup in-store feature, you can enable and configure store transfers to get products to the desired pickup location. This leverages your retail stores and distribution centres network, providing more convenient pickup options. Available for all Shopify plans.
Ship from Store Fulfilment Workflow
If you are using Shopify POS, you can now implement the new ship-from-store fulfilment workflow. It will allow all your retail locations to help fulfil orders, reducing pressure on any single store. This helps save on shipping costs and speeds up order fulfilment. If one store is too busy, you can reassign the order to another store for quicker delivery.
8. Fulfillment Automation
If you're on the journey of implementing ecommerce automation in your Shopify store to reduce human error and handle repetitive tasks like order processing, inventory updates, and customer communication, the new fulfilment automation below using Shopify Flow will be very useful:
Move Fulfillment Order: Change the fulfilment location for an order to manage inventory across multiple locations efficiently, learn more.
Mark Fulfillment Order as Fulfilled: Automatically update the order status in Shopify when an order has been shipped, ensuring accurate records and customer notifications, learn more.
Fulfillment Order Merged: Combine multiple fulfilment orders from the same location into one, simplifying the process and potentially reducing shipping costs, learn more.
In conclusion, the Summer '24 updates provide the tools to set your business up for future success. Review your current commerce stack and growth strategy to evaluate which new updates you can take advantage of and whether you can use the new simplified management capabilities to enter new international markets more easily. Look for ways to automate repetitive tasks and use your enhanced analytics to identify growth opportunities.
