Back to the Shopify Summer Edition 2024: boost your e-commerce!
Top 10 Shopify innovations by DATASOLUTION experts
Shopify continues to revolutionise the e-commerce experience with its bi-annual updates.
Summer Edition 2024 is no exception, introducing a host of new features and enhancements designed to boost your sales.
New integrations, increased customisation options and a renewed focus on the user experience, thanks to artificial intelligence, are at the heart of this edition. These innovations aim to simplify the management of online shops, improve customer engagement and boost sales.
Shopify Summer Edition 2024 not only delivers incremental improvements, but also introduces ground-breaking features that meet the evolving needs of e-tailers. Shopify reaffirms its leadership position by offering even more powerful and intuitive tools for all e-tailers.
In this article, our Shopify experts present the 10 most eagerly awaited features.
1. Markets
A new unified interface for markets
Unveiled at Shopify Summer Edition 2024, the publisher has unveiled a new way to manage international business, with an interface that allows markets to be centralised in the Shopify back office.
This innovation is specifically designed to help e-merchants develop and manage their international business more easily and quickly with Shopify.
Markets enables growth not only through international expansion, but also retail and B2B.
Businesses can now customise everything from the catalogue to the shop theme, including currency and domains… all within a single shop!
Ideal for creating personalised shopping experiences for each of the markets addressed. Management of the various markets is centralised in a single interface, simplifying product localisation, multi-currency payment options and global shipping strategies.
With Shopify Markets, e-tailers can also configure local storefronts optimised for different markets, benefit from optimal automatic translations and receive business recommendations tailored to the region.
This new feature promises to transform cross-border commerce, making international expansion more accessible and efficient than ever!
2. Split shipment
Have you ever missed a sale because one of your customers needed items shipped to different addresses? Or because the delivery took too long, depending on one item being larger than another?
The second innovative feature announced at Shopify Summer Edition 2024 is “Split Shipping in Checkout“. This feature allows customers to split their order into several shipments, which is particularly useful for orders containing items from different warehouses or with different delivery times.
The long-awaited Split Shipping then offers greater flexibility and a personalised shopping experience.
Give your customers greater clarity and choice at checkout by letting them know when an order will be split into several shipments. They can choose the lowest price, fastest delivery or personalised shipping options.
- Shipping transparency: let your customers know upfront if orders will be shipped in instalments
- Flexible shipping options: allow your customers to choose between different options for each shipment
- Shop Promise integration: display a badge for items eligible for Shop Promise, boosting customer confidence
- Subscription control
Imagine that your customer Paul wants to buy gifts for his entire family, who live in different places. Previously, Paul had to place several orders, which led to inconvenience and a risk of basket abandonment. With Shopify’s split shipping, this is no longer a problem!
Paul can send items from a single order to multiple locations, making his shopping experience simple and easy. Paul is happy and saves time – he’ll definitely be thinking of you again next year!
This new feature improves customer satisfaction and the shopping experience by enabling faster delivery of immediately available items, while optimising logistics management for merchants. By integrating this feature, Shopify continues to strengthen its position as a leader in e-commerce innovation.
3. Shopify Magic
Shopify Magic leverages AI to simplify the management of your business, with features such as Sidekick, an AI-driven assistant, and advanced image generation tools.
Shopify Magic incorporates AI-powered tools to help merchants create high-quality content. Sidekick, available on many Shopify shops, offers AI-powered multimedia generation, and AI-suggested replies in Inbox to improve communication with customers.
Sidekick can assist with tasks such as setting up automated email responses, writing product descriptions and answering customer questions.
Shopify Magic, which began with text generation, now includes image enhancement.
E-retailers can now edit product images directly in their back office by describing the desired background or setting.
Key features:
- Sidekick: provides personalised sales advice and automates tasks
- AI image generation: instantly modify your product images using AI. Modify, harmonise or delete backgrounds in just a few clicks
- Automatic and intelligent generation of product descriptions: supply a few keywords and AI will create eye-catching, SEO-friendly product descriptions for you.
- Customise FAQs and get personalised answers for your shop. Quickly add them to your Shopify inbox to help your customers and increase sales.
- Plain language segmentation: ShopifyQL code is translated into easy-to-understand text
- Suggested categories and attributes
- Optimise your emails: let AI determine the best times to send emails and generate compelling subject lines and content to make your email marketing more effective.
4. Unified analysis: smarter, faster, in real time
Shopify’s new analytics tech stack offers greater flexibility and speed. E-merchants can get real-time insights into their shop’s performance and integrate their data directly into reports via ShopifyQL. Data is analysed in real time via customisable dashboards for a better understanding of performance and trends.
It is now possible to customise your dashboard, creating dynamic data tables similar to Excel’s pivot tables, compiling the KPIs that interest you to monitor your e-commerce business.
This new analytics module designed by Shopify to provide real-time data and intuitive reporting, helps you make informed and timely business decisions.
Key features:
- Customisable dashboard: drag, drop, resize, add or remove metric cards
- Detailed reports: modify predefined reports to combine metrics and dimensions
- Custom reports: create reports from scratch with complete control over data presentation
- Real-time data feedback: eliminate the 24-hour wait for up-to-date information.
5. Shopify style settings: unleash your creativity
More good news: new theme style settings offer more layout flexibility.
Shopify has introduced flexible theme sections, offering enhanced editing capabilities through a simple drag & drop method.
Liquid theme developers can now offer merchants greater layout flexibility with new style settings, and create more branded sections with static blocks and block targeting. A preview for developers.
E-merchants can now change alignments, add elements and resize sections, enabling quick adjustments to website layouts in response to market changes, seasonal events or new product catalogues.
Key features:
- Customisable layouts: adjust parameters such as direction, alignment and spacing between image blocks
- Device-specific adaptation: customise the appearance of the site for mobile devices without the need for separate settings.
- Enhanced functional layouts: create complex layouts with static blocks and conditional logic.
6. Hydrogen for headless commerce
Hydrogen, Shopify’s framework for headless commerce, now includes a visual editor powered by Utopia.
Let your whole team design, merchandise and build headless e-commerce with a shared view thanks to the Hydrogen visual editor. Your code remains the source and changes are synchronised on GitHub, ideal for smooth collaboration! The tool provides a real-time view of changes, making collaboration easier and speeding up the implementation of front-end updates.
This feature simplifies headlessness for e-retailers by providing a unified working environment with team collaboration and content management features.
Content updates and design adjustments can now be managed more easily, without specific technical or coding requirements.
Developers can create templates that team members can modify as they wish, using the new visual editor.
A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool that therefore allows non-technical users to easily create and modify the front end of your e-commerce, while optimising developer resources.
Key features :
- Visual collaboration: let your whole team work together in a visual environment.Real-time changes: synchronise changes on GitHub with small, simple differences.
- Integrated data management: easily introduce data from various sources into your pages.
- Developer-friendliness: maintain familiar workflows with tools such as VS Code and GitHub.
7. Managed Markets: simplifying global expansion
Managed Markets manages all the complexities associated with international sales, including tax declarations, customs duties, etc.
Managed Markets simplifies the management of international sales by integrating customs duties and taxes directly into the prices quoted by region. E-merchants can avoid selling restricted products and obtain better shipping rates.
This optimises the international shopping experience with easy stock and product synchronisation and centralised sales management across all your channels.
Key features:
- Simplified catalogue restrictions: Automatically limits products refused at customs.
- Inclusive pricing: Include import duties and taxes directly in product prices.
- Extended shipping options: Offer more shipping choices at checkout.
Automatic editing: Modify and update international orders after purchase with automatic updates.
8. Shipping to and from the shop: improve your omnichannel flexibility
Shopify has introduced a number of logistics features to streamline operations.
These include the option for your customers to collect their order in-store or have products shipped directly from a shop.
Offer your customers greater flexibility and convenience when receiving their orders. Transfer online orders to the shop of their choice for in-store collection, or ship products directly from a shop using Shopify POS.
The ‘Ship to Store‘ option allows products to be transferred between shops for collection by customers, improving stock management.
Similarly, the ‘Ship from Store‘ option allows local shops to fulfil orders online, reducing shipping times and costs.
Two major updates that therefore link online orders to in-store processing, offering customers greater convenience and flexibility.
Key features:
- In-store pick-up: enable and configure inter-store transfers for in-store pick-ups.
- Shop dispatch workflow: simplify the dispatch of orders directly to customers from the point of sale.
9. Facilitate receipts, returns to improve in-store experience
Shopify POS continues to innovate with features that simplify in-store tasks and improve connectivity with customers.
Retail is more streamlined with simplified data attribution, including the ability to sign your customers up for newsletters and clearer in-store returns rules on Shopify POS.
Key features:
- Digitised receipts in a single gesture: offer receipts and marketing services for recognised Shop Pay users.
- Automatic customer information capture: collect customer information and track checkout staff performance.
- Simplified returns rules: automatically determine returns eligibility and provide context for staff.
10. Shopify Audiences and Shop Campaigns: boost conversions
Shopify Audiences and Shop Campaigns help you convert more customers and maximise your marketing spend.
Key features:
- Custom Audience Lists: Leverage algorithms and marketing signals to find interested buyers.
- Boost Retargeting: Double your conversions with retargeting.
- Shop Campaigns: Promote on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google, paying only for conversions.
- YouTube Shopping: A YouTube Shopify affiliate programme will soon be available, allowing creators to tag products in their videos.
The new features announced in Shopify Summer Edition 2024 offer powerful tools to boost your e-commerce!
By integrating advanced features such as AI, Shopify POS and new delivery options for example, retailers can improve operational efficiency, enhance the customer and shopping experience while driving sales growth.
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