If you’ve been keeping an eye on the ecommerce landscape, you’re probably already aware that Shopify Winter Editions 2024 launched last week. While some of these enhancements are already at your fingertips, others are only available in early access, and the rest will be gradually rolling out over the year. Keep this in mind as we explore the latest enhancements.
Here’s everything you need to know for Shopify and Shopify Plus Winter Editions 2024:
Increased Variants
If you run an online store, you know how important it is to offer products with different options, such as colours or sizes. But until recently, there was a limitation: you could only have 100 variants per product. This was a challenge for merchants managing medium to large product catalogues. Fortunately, Shopify has listened to its community and taken a step forward. They have released new product APIs in developer preview and to select merchants that increase the limit from a mere 100 to 2000 variants per product. This means you can sell more complex products with ease.
Combined Listings
For merchants who haven’t been able to access the above APIs, Shopify has launched Combined Listings: your all-in-one solution for managing product variations. With this app, you can seamlessly merge all your product variations into a single, centralised product listing. Each variant has its own unique description, media carousel, and dedicated URL. Say goodbye to complex workarounds and custom solutions - it’s a win-win situation for both you and your customers. Exclusively available to Shopify Plus Plan users.
Semantic Search
Powered by cutting-edge AI technology, Semantic Search transforms the way your customers discover products. Unlike existing keyword-based searches, Semantic Search analyses natural words and phrases to better understand your customer’s intent. For example, if a customer searches for cosy winter attire, Semantic Search will serve results that match the intent, such as woolly sweaters, insulated coats, hats, and scarves. To activate Semantic Search, all you need to do is download and open the Shopify Search and Discovery app, then turn on Search relevance. Exclusively available to Shopify Plus Plan users.
Checkout Extensibility
Shopify offers the best checkout experience on the internet, and it just got better. With new APIs and UI components, you can tailor the look and feel of your checkout to suit your brand. No more hassles with coding, instead Shopify uses an app-based approach that guarantees security and integrates smoothly with Shop Pay.
What does this mean for your business? It means speed and flexibility. With the new checkout, you can customise the process to your unique business needs swiftly and efficiently. This also extends to the Thank You and Order Status pages, ensuring a cohesive and delightful post-purchase experience for your customers. Checkout.liquid will be turned off starting from August 13th, so start planning your upgrade today.
Shopify Subscriptions
Shopify Subscriptions is a powerful feature that allows you to transform your products into recurring revenue streams. By offering your products as subscriptions, you can increase your customer lifetime value (CVL) and generate more predictable revenue for your business. With it, you can easily set up and manage subscriptions right from the Shopify admin dashboard, and customise them with different billing options, trial periods, and discounts. You can also give your customers more control over their subscription orders, by enabling them to modify, pause, resume, or skip their orders directly from their own account. To get started with Shopify Subscriptions, all you need to do is install the Shopify Subscriptions app from the Shopify App Store and set up your subscription plans.
Web Performance Dashboard
Shopify has significantly improved its storefront performance by enhancing insights across three Core Web Vitals - namely, page loading speed, stability, and interactivity. These metrics are crucial for ensuring an exceptional user experience, as they measure how fast, smooth, and responsive a website is for the visitors. Over the past year, Shopify has expanded its infrastructure, resulting in a 35% improvement in performance. You can learn more about how to use the new performance dashboard by checking out Shopify’s help docs.
B2B Sales Enhancements
The introduction of new staff permissions allows B2B users to assign different roles and permissions to their sales reps. They can also specify which clients and companies each sales rep can manage, creating a clear division of work and accountability. This feature is designed to help larger B2B businesses with larger sales teams. By enabling them to tailor the staff permissions according to their needs, improving the efficiency and productivity of their sales teams. It can also enhance their customer relationship management (CRM) by providing consistent service to their B2B buyers. You can learn more about Shopify’s new B2B features in our latest blog.
Theme Blocks
While primarily targeted at developers, the ‘Reusable Theme Blocks’ feature also brings benefits to merchants. With this new feature, developers can define blocks once and reuse them across different sections of your website. This means that you can have consistent and coherent design elements throughout your online store, without having to repeat the same code. But that’s not all! These blocks can also be nested together making it easier to create custom sections without having to use code. Essentially, this gives you more flexibility and control over how your storefront looks and feels.
Customer Account Extensibility
Lastly, Shopify has introduced a new feature that allows developers to seamlessly integrate extensions into new customer accounts using the same UI components from Shopify Checkout. These extensions can extend the functionality of existing customer account pages, as well as create new pages for custom use cases. By using customer account UI extensions, developers can provide a more seamless and integrated experience for customers who use third-party apps to view their order history, edit their profile, request returns, and more.
Read more 👉 Checkout Extensibility on Shopify Plus.
Conclusion
At Rainy City, we’re thrilled to guide you through these game-changing enhancements in the Shopify Winter ‘24 Editions. While we’ve only scratched the surface here, there’s so much more to explore! Be sure to visit the Winter Editions 2024 site for a full list of announcements.
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If you have any further questions or need assistance with Shopify website design and development, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’re here to help!