Shopify: 2022 Review and 2023 Outlook

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Commerce Components

A à la carte offering that allows you to avoid using Shopify as a monolith and instead utilize its full range of features as microservices.

For example, you can use only the customer account management and checkout APIs to leverage the platform solely for its transactional capabilities, while using a separate content management system such as Contentful or Prismic for the CMS portion.

See the full list of “à la carte” components.

Shopify Flow

Flow is a system that automates merchandising, inventory management, and notification management tasks. It offers significant convenience for managing an e-commerce business.

This is a fascinating topic because it helps improve the store’s operational management while saving time for e-commerce operators.

It is now possible to schedule automations. For example, you can hide products that are no longer in stock, assign loyal customers to a VIP group that will receive automatic discounts, or manage the sending of notifications to various departments within the company, such as accounting, sales, or logistics.

Group sections

The front-office editor is already extremely powerful and allows you to manage all of the site’s templates.

Until now, we could only manage blocks. Now, we can assemble these blocks into sections that allow us to create CMS pages or even landing pages natively, based on components defined during integration.

This is another step toward building pages without relying on third-party systems like Shogun or Storyblok, if we want to stick with a monolithic architecture.

Meta-objects & Shopify Content

Today, we have the ability to extend Shopify’s capabilities using the now-native metafield feature (which is the equivalent of attributes in Magento).

Simply put, for a product page, in addition to standard fields such as “description” or “price,” metafields allow you to add information about shoe size, heel height, or sole thickness. The possibilities are endless.

There are no limits to the use of these metafields, which are already proving to be very useful—even indispensable—for the efficient and optimized creation of product listings, faceted filters in product lists, or any other use of product information.

A major development is currently being rolled out with metaobjects, which can be defined by grouping multiple metafields. This integration allows us to create a front-office layer composed of multiple metafields and, for example, call it from a page on the site (homepage, listing, product detail page, CMS, etc.).