Shopify recently launched the Summer 2024 Edition, bringing a series of innovations and improvements designed to help merchants optimize their operations and provide an even better experience for customers.

In celebration of Shopify's 20th anniversary, Editions.dev, an event dedicated to announcing all these changes and bringing together community experts with the Shopify team, took place in Toronto. Alce was present, represented by our partner Igor de Andrade, with the aim of strengthening Brazil and Latin America's presence and needs.

In this edition, 150 new features were presented across various areas of the platform. To help you stay on top of the highlights, we have summarized the top 10 announcements and other important updates for Shopify merchants.

Top 10 Shopify Summer Editions 2024 Updates

1. Global Expansion with Shopify Markets

Shopify Markets simplifies international expansion by centralizing all market settings in a single dashboard. With support for multiple languages, currencies, and payment methods, you can customize the shopping experience according to local preferences. 

• Unified business management: View and manage all your markets and their settings in one place, simplifying administration.
  
  
• Personalized buyer experiences: Customize your product catalog, prices, and store themes for various regions, offering a local and relevant shopping experience.
  
  
• Market Analysis and Insights: Gain detailed insights into performance in different regions, allowing adjustments to marketing and sales strategies according to local trends.
  
  
• B2B Expansion: Customize store themes for different B2B markets, facilitating expansion and sales management for other businesses.
  
  

2. Split Shipping: Checkout Flexibility

"Split Shipping" is an innovation that allows customers to choose different delivery destinations for individual items within a single order. This means a customer can opt to receive part of the order quickly via express delivery, for example, while other items can be sent via standard delivery, resulting in greater flexibility and convenience.

Ideal for gifts, group purchases, or items with different delivery requirements, this option improves the customer experience and can reduce shipping costs and waiting times. In addition to increasing customer satisfaction, this flexibility can help merchants increase sales and manage shipments more efficiently.

• Shipping transparency: Inform customers in advance if orders will arrive in multiple shipments.
  
  
• Flexible shipping options: Allow customers to choose between different shipping speeds for each shipment.
  
  An order is split into multiple shipments when it includes any of the following item types:
• pre-orders
• subscriptions
• Buy with Prime products
• products shipped from different locations
• products from different shipping profiles
  
  
• Subscription control: Customize shipping speeds for subscription orders.

 * Split shipping at checkout is in early access and available only to some stores on Shopify.

3. Shopify Magic: Empowering with AI

 "Shopify Magic" represents a series of artificial intelligence-based tools designed to simplify complex operations. From personalized product recommendations to inventory optimization, these smart tools automate routine tasks, freeing merchants to focus on growth strategies.

The use of AI also brings significant improvements in customer service, with smart chatbots capable of resolving queries and problems faster and more efficiently. This not only improves the user experience but also reduces the support team's workload, resulting in a leaner and more focused operation.

Key Highlights:

• AI image generation: Effortlessly edit your media across the platform, including the mobile app.
  
  
• Enhanced customer engagement: AI-suggested responses to customer queries directly in the Shopify inbox. 

4. Rebuilt Analytics: Real-Time Intelligence

The analytics section has been completely revamped, now providing detailed insights into your store's performance in real-time. This makes it easier to make quick and precise adjustments based on concrete data. With real-time data and more accurate reports, you can make smart decisions to increase your business's efficiency and profitability.

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 Key Highlights:

• Customizable dashboard: Drag, drop, resize, add, or remove metric cards.
  
  
• Detailed reports: Edit pre-built reports to combine metrics and dimensions according to your needs.
  
  
• Custom reports: Create reports from scratch, having full control over data presentation.
  
  
• Real-time data: Access updated insights instantly, without waiting 24 hours.

5. Theme Style Settings: Unleash your creative freedom

Theme style settings offer merchants the flexibility to customize storefront layouts to match their evolving brand appearance, allowing intuitive and rich personalization without the need for technical intervention. Merchants can now adapt their page designs to reflect their brands' unique identity with ease.

This customization capability not only improves the aesthetics of online stores but also the user experience, creating a more engaging and personalized shopping environment. 

 Key Highlights:

• Customizable layouts: Adjust settings like direction, alignment, and spacing between image blocks, creating a unique aesthetic for your store.
  
  
• Mobile-friendly adjustments: Customize the website's appearance for mobile phones and tablets without needing separate settings, ensuring a consistent experience across all platforms.
  
  
• Functional and optimized layouts: Create complex layouts with static blocks and conditional logic, providing a richer and more interactive user experience.

6.  Hydrogen Visual Editor

The Hydrogen Visual Editor is an innovative tool introduced by Shopify to facilitate the creation and editing of personalized online stores. It is part of Hydrogen, a framework for building stores with advanced functionalities. This visual editor allows developers and designers to work together more efficiently, creating rich and responsive interfaces without the complexity of traditional code.

With this tool, store customization becomes more accessible and less dependent on specialized development resources. This allows merchants to quickly implement changes and adaptations to their sites, maintaining high design quality and functionality.

 Key Highlights:

• Visual collaboration: allow your entire team to work together in a visual environment.
  
  
• Real-time changes: sync changes to GitHub with small, direct differences.
  
  
• Integrated data management: easily bring data from various sources to your pages.
  
  
• Developer-friendly: maintain familiar workflows with tools like VS Code and GitHub.

7. Managed Markets: Simplifying Global Expansion

"Managed Markets" is a solution for merchants operating in multiple regions, offering managed services that handle aspects such as compliance, translation, and cultural adaptation. This service simplifies the complexity of managing international operations, allowing merchants to focus on growing their sales and engaging customers.

The managed services offering also includes technical support and consulting, ensuring that merchants can successfully navigate the challenges of market expansion without compromising operational effectiveness or customer service quality.

Shopify's managed markets tool handles the complexities of international sales, including tax declarations, fees, and more.

Key Highlights:

• Simplified product restrictions: Automatically block products prohibited at customs.
  
  
• Simplified International Management: Include import duties and taxes directly in product prices.
  
  
• Expanded shipping options: Offer more shipping options at checkout.
  
  
• Automatic order editing: Edit and update international orders after purchase with automatic updates.

8. Ship to and from retail stores: increasing omnichannel flexibility

9. Easy Retail Checkout: Improving the in-store experience

"Easy Retail Checkout" is a new approach to the checkout process in physical stores, designed to integrate seamlessly with the e-commerce system. This streamlined system facilitates quick and secure transactions, improving the customer experience and reducing queues at the point of sale.

Furthermore, this solution helps unify customer data across online and physical platforms, providing a holistic view of customer interactions that can be used to improve service and personalize product offerings. With the integration of Easy Retail Checkout, merchants can offer a cohesive shopping experience, regardless of the channel chosen by the customer.

Key Highlights:

• Checkout with More Fields: Allow customers to provide more relevant information during checkout, such as additional contact details or delivery preferences, improving data collection and personalizing the shopping experience.
• Automatic customer information capture: collect customer details and track team performance at checkout.
• Simplified return rules: automatically determine return eligibility and provide context for the team.
  
  

10. Shopify Audiences and Shop Campaigns: Increasing conversions

Shopify Audiences creates personalized audience lists using advanced algorithms to identify potential buyers, doubling conversion rates by focusing on consumers who have already shown interest in similar products.

Shop Campaigns allows merchants to launch advertising campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google, paying only for completed conversions. Integrated with Shopify Audiences, these campaigns are highly segmented, increasing the efficiency and ROI of marketing strategies.

Together, these tools optimize marketing resources and maximize sales, targeting campaigns to specific and potentially more profitable audiences.

Key Highlights:

• Personalized audience lists: leverage algorithms and commerce signals to find interested buyers.
• Increased retargeting: generate up to double the retargeting conversions.
• Shop campaigns: promote on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google, paying only for conversions. 
  
  

Other important features of Shopify Summer Editions '24

Now that we've explored the top 10 updates from Shopify Summer Editions 2024, let's look at some other exciting additions to keep an eye on: 

Online selling features: 

• Product Taxonomy Update: 10,000 categories and 2,000 attributes have been added. 
• Shopify Search & Discovery App: Filter products based on images. 
• Shopify Combined Listings App: Create 1 listing for a product and each product variation 
• Issue in-store credit via Shopify: Early access for this feature has just begun

In-person selling features:

• Require certain information at checkout (customer/employee information)
• Set more specific rules for returns
• Add a Buy X Get Y discount code to your POS
• Discount combinations: accumulated discounts (e.g., a product + total order discount)

Wholesale selling features:

• New B2B theme: Trade
• Marketplaces - but for B2B : This feature will be available soon, but only for Plus merchants. 
• Require deposits during checkout : Add a percentage-based deposit to your payment terms. 
• Shopify Collective : Connect and source products from brands

Selling globally features:

• Add duties and taxes to product price : You can request access to try this feature
• Control which items are restricted/prohibited in certain markets

These innovations reflect Shopify's commitment to offering powerful and flexible tools for merchants. They facilitate global expansion, improve customer experience, and optimize operations management.

For a complete analysis of all the new features and to understand how they can benefit your business, check out the full Shopify Editions Summer 2024 document here.
 

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