July 27, 2023
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16 min read
In 2022 we were introduced to the first Editions, Connect to Consumer, which focused on enabling merchants to create new connections and build on existing touch points with their customers. And then Winter Editions, Built to Last, which was all about product updates that would help businesses and developers create experiences for the long term. So what’s the highlights from this Summer 2023 Editions? And what are the use cases for Shopify merchants? Let’s get into it.
This summer, in their latest Editions drop, Shopify’s focused on the future of commerce and its ever-evolving state. To ensure their merchants, entrepreneurs, to enterprise are ahead of the game, they’ve dropped updates, features, and products that’ll reimagine their business. Here are all the latest updates and whether or not you need to consider implementing them in your store.
While Shopify launched many new features and updates with this Summer Editions launch, there are big-ticket items that we believe will have the most significant impact on our clients and other mid-market / enterprise brands.
Quick summary: Shopify announced they’re upping the variant limit to more than 100.
Detailed breakdown: Previously, Shopify offered merchants a maximum of 100 variants, but with this latest drop, they’ve announced they’re upping this limit. That means brands can incorporate more product combinations without a development workaround.
Use case: This is particularly useful to brands with high SKU counts, for example, lingerie brands with multiple product variations, including band size, cup size, and color.
Quick summary: Merchants can now create custom templates easily with metaobjects.
Detailed breakdown: Communicating key brand and product information on your e-commerce store is essential to secure those sales, so with Shopify’s new custom landing page feature is easier than ever to create unique content templates with the click of a button. Using metaobjects, merchants can build structured design elements for their storefronts such as quizzes, customer highlights, product highlights, and brand specs to create a library of content. Once the metaobject templates are created, you simply add it to the page, input SEO details, and hit publish.
Use case: Good for businesses with a small budget. However, if you want to create something more complex and creative, we recommend you still involve a design / UX team.
*Only the beta version will be available to merchants
Quick summary: A commerce assistant that combines AI technology and Shopify's data to offer support for your day-to-day tasks.
Detailed breakdown: Sidekick is what it says on the tin; it’s your Shopify expert sidekick. There to support you through your tedious tasks like workflows, research, and more. You can ask Sidekick for support with setting up your store and side step Help desk by asking Sidekick to answer any queries quickly. Sidekick acts as your employee, free with any Shopify subscription.
Use case: Again, Sidekick is useful for entrepreneurs, not necessarily enterprise/mid-market brands that have well-established internal teams.
Quick summary: New Shopify Bundles app for fixed bundles and multipacks.
Detailed breakdown: Bundles have been a consistent driver for boosting AOV for a long time, and while the concept isn’t new to e-commerce, Shopify’s latest free first-party bundles app provides a diverse range of bundled product opportunities, including multi-packs and fixed bundles. However, for more advanced requirements like mix-and-match bundles, Shopify still recommends using one of the updated bundle apps in the Shopify App Store or, if you’re on Shopify Plus, build a custom bundle offering using their Shopify Functions APIs.
Use case: The Shopify Bundles App benefits brands of all sizes wanting to increase their Average Order Value, enhance product discovery, or clear inventory by creating bundled offers. The Bundles API also provides flexibility for advanced customization through the opportunity to build unique and tailored bundle offerings that cater to specific market demands.
Quick summary: Shopify Collective allows you to sell products from other Shopify brands that complement yours.
Detailed breakdown: An easy way for businesses to increase sales is by connecting and curating complementary products from quality brands on Shopify that will ship directly to your customers. Merchants can add products to their stores and earn a margin on their sales – it’s a great way to curate new products and grow your business without managing high inventory levels.
Use case: Entrepreneurs with limited product catalogs or whose leader product serves a specific niche may find this feature most helpful. This opens up opportunities for increased cross-selling and up-selling, with the main advantages including potential sales growth, improved customer experience through an expanded product range, and additional earnings on sold items without extra inventory costs.
On the flip side, Shopify Collective allows merchants to expand their distribution by making their products available to other retailers. Enabling merchants to become suppliers, fulfilling orders on behalf of retailers.
Quick summary: Merchants can now provide interest-free payment plans to customers for orders $50-$17,500.
Detailed breakdown: Shopify has recently launched a new premium package for its Shop Pay Installments. This package enables merchants to provide interest-free payments for a maximum of 12 months, as well as monthly installments with interest for up to 24 months, on orders ranging from $50 to $17,500. Offering payment terms of up to 24 months can help merchants draw in more customers who might not be able to pay the total price at once. This allows customers to divide their purchases into smaller, more manageable payments over time while merchants still receive them upfront.
Quick summary: A suite of AI-powered features that can be integrated across Shopify’s products and workflows.
Detailed breakdown: Shopify Magic is an all-encompassing AI tool to support merchants in their content creation. With Shopify Magic, free to all Shopify merchants regardless of their subscription plan, brands can create product, email and brand content as well as automatically generate customer responses to live chat inquiries and FAQs. For brands selling internationally, Shopify Magic supports English predominantly, with some features supporting additional languages such as German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Chinese (simplified).
Use case: This tool will be useful for entrepreneurs and small brands that need extra support but don’t have the funds to hire teams. However, it’s not necessary for enterprise/mid-market brands with well-established internal teams.
Quick summary: Creating unique layouts in the online store is easier than ever, with flexible sections that allow you to drag and drop, re-size, group, edit, and more.
Detailed breakdown: This improved Shopify 2.0 feature allows merchants to effortlessly create unique and engaging store layouts, offering the opportunity to significantly elevate their brand’s online presence. By facilitating quick and easy site modifications, it enables a more dynamic response to market trends, seasonal events, or promotions. Consequently, this feature further improves merchants’ ability to enhance customer engagement, increase shopping convenience, and improve conversion rates.
Use case: Beneficial for merchants of any size, especially those with in-house design or marketing capabilities.
Quick summary: Shopify Subscriptions app that integrates directly with the Shopify admin, allowing business owners to create and manage subscription products all in one place.
Detailed breakdown: With the Shopify Subscriptions app, merchants can select products directly from their catalog that they want to offer as subscriptions, as well as choose delivery frequencies and discounts. On the store front end, customers can select an interval for when they want to receive their subscriptions and proceed to checkout; they’ll also have the ability to skip, pause and edit payment methods of their subscriptions. Merchants can use Shopify Subscriptions default templates to remind customers of subscription payments and delivery info.
Use case: This is for small-sized businesses that want a simplistic subscription option. For those with more complex requirements, we recommend you stick to a subscription app from the Shopify app store, like Recharge.
Quick summary: With Shopify Marketplace Connect, merchants can integrate their Shopify product catalog with marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Etsy.
Detailed breakdown: Shopify Marketplace Connect allows merchants to sell across global marketplaces, including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Etsy, using a single app. The app connects merchants' product catalog with the marketplaces of their choice and allows them to manage and synchronize listings, orders, and inventory and measure performance all from Shopify. For merchants with existing listings, you can link listings, orders, and inventory in Shopify in retrospect. For international brands, with Shopify Marketplace Connect, you can sell in all marketplace regions with built-in currency conversion.
Use case: A helpful tool for brands that want to expand their reach through wholesale. This will apply to entrepreneurs (Etsy) through to mid-market (Walmart).
*exclusive Plus features
Quick summary: New APIs and updates for Shopify Checkout, including one-page checkout.
Detailed breakdown: Shopify’s checkout has quickly become the leading e-commerce checkout boasting stats like a ‘15% higher conversion on average over other leading commerce platforms’, so it comes as no surprise that Shopify have opted to update checkout to take it to the next level. So what’s new for checkout? Well, for starters, Shopify introduced a one-page checkout – a streamlined online checkout that pre-fills customers' billing and shipping information to speed up the checkout process and prevent cart abandonment. Moreover, you can now upsell subscriptions and offer customers pre-orders for out-of-stock items during checkout with new checkout extensions (Shopify Plus only).
Use case: The checkout updates are applicable to merchants of all sizes, even enterprise brands that don’t currently use Shopify Checkout - with Shop Pay now available to enterprise retailers not on Shopify able to integrate it into their existing checkout.
*Shopify Plus only
Quick summary: New B2B features that make it easier for customers to place orders and merchants to manage their B2B offering.
Detailed breakdown: In this Editions Shopify has launched a number of B2B features to enhance the B2B experience including…
Use case: Useful for merchants engaging in B2B sales, especially store owners in wholesale or bulk purchasing sectors. These B2B feature improvements present opportunities to enhance customer experience and streamline transaction processes resulting in increased order sizes due to the conveniences around bulk ordering and improved customer retention owing to more robust business relationships.
Brief summary: Centralize your entire organization faster and more efficiently in Shopify
Detailed breakdown: Before, we had Plus admin – created to help Shopify Plus merchants manage their multi-store organizations easier. Now, these store settings have been moved to store admins to remove the additional step in your day-to-day, so (soon) you can do everything you did in Plus admin all from one central location.
Quick summary: Shop app updates to boost engagement and drive conversions with your mobile customers.
Detailed breakdown: Merchants can now enhance and customize their Shop Store with expressive branding, such as images, slogans, or video headers and showcase inventory with customizable collections, categories, and navigation. The new functionalities allow merchants to create a compelling, visually rich, and personalized mobile shopping experience, improving reach and engagement with the growing number of mobile shoppers.
Use case: Particularly of benefit merchants who are heavily invested in their brand identity and seek to build a robust and loyal customer base through mobile commerce.
One of the most asked-about features when the new checkout was introduced was the ability to validate addresses, the newly released Apply Shipping Address Update API allows app developers to suggest and correct a buyer’s address.
Custom apps that don’t have embedded app pages no longer require a web app, Shopify will host the extension for you.
Allows developers to provide their own validation logic, ex:
With over 100 new product updates, Shopify continues to support brands in building their online presence and increasing their conversion, all while giving developers greater control to push boundaries.
This Editions, the big focus was on reimagining businesses with a strong emphasis on using AI in commerce. The launch of features like Shopify Magic and the introduction of Sidekick will make a huge difference for entrepreneurs to work faster, smarter, and more creatively. However, this Editions lacked necessary improvements to the new Checkout that would bring it on par with the customization available with checkout.liquid. – hopefully, these updates are just around the corner!
Overall, this Editions was a significant leap forward for Shopify and will provide businesses with more tools and resources to succeed in the e-commerce space. As a Shopify Plus agency, we’re excited to leverage these new features to provide our clients with the best possible experience. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about how these latest updates can elevate your business and for expert support in implementing them with your current Shopify store.
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