February 22, 2023
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The first-ever Unite conference for Shopify partners took place on the 22nd and 23rd March in the vibrant city of San Francisco.
Our directors, Alex and Piers, were lucky enough to attend (the rest of us weren’t jealous at all!) and have given us the lowdown on everything we missed.
E-commerce has changed rapidly over the last few years and the needs of merchants and their audiences has also changed. At Unite, Shopify unveiled a number of new features to help the partners build better, more immersive online shopping sites.
Here’s what you can look forward to and how it will benefit you.
What is it?
This is a biggie.
A common criticism of Shopify is its limited discount functionality. It’s something that we, as an agency, typically have to work around using apps and hacks to provide merchants with features like tiered-pricing, BOGOF deals and dynamic price changes.
Shopify Scripts is the answer to our prayers, as it gives us the power to write totally custom business logic, providing complete control over the items in the shopping cart. This is a big change and offers huge potential for developers and merchants alike.
Scripts are written in Ruby and hosted on Shopify’s cloud platform, offering incredible flexibility with the peace of mind of stable, performant hosting. Lovely stuff.
Not sure where to start? Shopify have provided script templates here, to get you started.
What are the benefits?
Merchants can use this new feature to apply discounts to the cart such as buy-one-get-one-free, without having the hassle of using a third-party app, struggling with integration and incurring additional costs by paying for another service.
At present, Shopify Scripts are only available for cart manipulation, but are set to roll out for Taxes and Shipping very soon.
Oh, and I almost forgot - it is only available for Shopify Plus merchants (sorry to disappoint).
What is it?
Later on this year we will see the arrival of the Online Store Editor. The new editor will allow us to create more innovative, user-friendly, and creative themes.
The feature, built in Liquid, is be based on re-usable ‘sections’ and ‘blocks’, making customisation of pages much easier for merchants. We’re already itching to get started with new store designs.
What are the benefits?
Rather than having an intimidating panel of theme settings, the new editor breaks things down into smaller, more manageable sections. These can each be re-ordered and individually manipulated allowing merchants to change and re-shape their homepage in minutes.
What is it?
With over 50% of merchants on Shopify selling on multiple sales channels, iit is easy to see where this third new feature has come from. The Sales Channel SDK is a combination of APIs and a UI kit that can be used in conjunction with any app, site or platform.
The technology for integrating with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Amazon, that at one time was limited, is now going to be opened up to all Shopify merchants. Essentially, any platform you are currently promoting your store on can be turn into a new sales channel.
What are the benefits?
The new Sales Channel SDK will make it possible to build checkouts that divert back to Shopify, creating a central hub for you to manage your sales all in one place. The checkout API will also make it easier to customise the checkout and the shiny new account dashboard will show your business growing right before your eyes.
It’s all part of Shopify’s long-term goal to be the backend of your commerce operation – a platform, not an online shop.
What is it?
Have you ever wanted to access products, carts and checkouts from any website? Well thanks to Shopify’s new JavaScript Buy SDK this will now be possible. A simple JavaScript library is included which by inserting a single script will allow users to add e-commerce functionality to any website or javascript application.
New features of the SDK provide a more seamless integration of Shopify into the other websites giving more control over look-and-feel than ever before.
What are the benefits?
This new SDK is a great solution for those of you wanting to integrate Shopify into a CMS-driven site (like Wordpress or Drupal) with minimal effort.
What is it?
Mobile commerce is continually growing. Shopify reported that in 2015 33% of Shopify orders came from a mobile device, so it is unsurprising that changes are being made to facilitate this growing platform.
Merchants need to be wherever their customers are and thanks to enhanced versions of the Shopify iOS and Android Buy SDKs, this will be made much easier. With the new SDKs you will be able to develop better mobile experiences that will enable customers to shop securely using Android Pay as well as the already existing Apple Pay.
What are the benefits?
If you’re reaching out to customers who are constantly glued to their mobiles (like me!), including this payment options will increase conversion and allow customers to have simple and more convenient checkout experiences.
For returning customers, logins will save payment details and allow you to create personalised notifications, as well as product recommendations based on previous purchases.
“Shopify certainly know how to put on a conference!” said Alex and Piers (both now sporting a bit of a tan). “It was great to hear about all the new features launching on the platform, but the most valuable part was spending time with Shopify staff and other Shopify Partners.”
So it looks like we have a lot of things coming our way. Thank you Shopify. Stay tuned.
