Twice a year, Shopify announces a plethora of product updates in an event called Shopify Editions. The intent of Shopify Editions is to equip Shopify store owners, Shopify development agencies, and other Shopify experts with a new set of tools and features that’ll enhance their Shopify websites to drive bottom-line growth and customer engagement. This year’s Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 update included 177 new features.

In this resource, we’ve curated 17 of the most important updates that we feel most Shopify store owners can benefit from and should make plans to start implementing in the future. To make it easier to navigate, we’ve organized these updates around three pillars – Shopper Experiences, B2B & Wholesale Offerings, and Data-Backed Insights.

Also, if you own or manage a Shopify store and any of these new updates have piqued your interest (but you're unsure how to implement them), please schedule a call with us here. H1 Web Development is a custom website development agency that specializes in creating bespoke and beautiful Shopify websites for clients across a range of industries, and we’d love to help you make your Shopify store flourish.

Shopper Experiences

From product discovery to the checkout to rewarding customer loyalty, Shopify has heard their users’ concerns and made strides in making the shopper experience more robust. In this section, we’ll cover the updates that directly impact how shoppers navigate and make purchases, showcasing what store owners can do to enhance the shopping experience on their Shopify store.

Split Shipping 

In the past, when Shopify customers placed an order that needed to be broken up into multiple shipments, they were limited to seeing just one shipping option and delivery date. Shopify is now giving customers more choice at checkout by showing them when an order will be split into multiple shipments. Customers can toggle between different shipping options for each shipment, choosing from options like lowest price, fastest delivery, or custom shipping options. Overall, this gives customers more clarity and control over when their shipments will arrive.

Checkout Customization

Shopify is giving store owners the ability to customize their checkout and post-purchase pages to further engage their customers. All plans can now use the Checkout Blocks app to add functionality to their checkout, Thank You page and the Order Status page. Whether implementing things like surveys or product upsells, this makes customer engagement post-purchase much more streamlined.

Shopify Plus store owners gain enhanced functionality with the Checkout Blocks app, including custom content blocks, custom fields, and options to hide, rename, and reorder delivery and payment methods. Other features include the ability to create tailored order and shipping discounts and validate address format requirements, all within the checkout experience.

Combined Listings App

A combined listing is a special product type created by connecting separate products from your store into a single parent product listing. These listings may share qualities such as color, model, or dimension, but with the combined listing, each product variant can show additional product details that weren’t available at the variant level before.

This makes it easier to manage multiple product variants under one parent listing, while allowing customers to access unique media galleries, titles, descriptions, and URLs for each variant they click through on that parent listing. This is exclusive to Shopify Plus users and can be enabled with the Combined Listings app.

Product Discovery Updates

When customers visit your store, you want them to locate the product they’re looking for with ease. Shopify has unveiled a few different features that remove friction from the product discovery process.

Filter By Image

By enabling the Search & Discovery app, store owners can now empower customers to filter their searches by logos, icons, or other images. This visually-enhanced search feature makes it simpler for customers to find the product they need.

Built-in Taxonomy

When customers use the store search bar, they don’t always have the right language to match the tags or categories within a store’s product settings. Shopify has created the Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy with 10K+ categories and 2K+ attributes to supercharge discovery across store, search, and marketplaces using AI.

By enabling what they call the Semantic Search feature, customers can more intuitively find products, even when they don’t know exactly what terms to use. In other words, for Shopify store owners (especially those with large product catalogs and custom tags numbering in the dozens or hundreds), Shopify makes it easy on their customers to find what they’re looking for with natural language searching.

Bulk Import & Export of Metafields

Shopify has made it easier than ever to manage product metafields in bulk. Product import and export now supports product metafields, which means you can update specialized product info in mass.

Identifying Repeat Customers 

Store owners can now place Sign In With Shop widgets anywhere on their store, giving repeat customers the option to sign in with a custom avatar and a secure, one-click passkey. This enables store owners to identify their customers sooner in the buyer’s journey and build experiences that delight them.

Issue Store Credit

Directly in the admin dashboard, store owners can now issue store credit that customers can spend at checkout. This is a huge upgrade to ensuring customer satisfaction and rewarding customer loyalty. (This pairs well with the Sign In With Shop widget mentioned above.)

According to Shopify data, while repeat customers account for only 21% of customers, they generate 44% of revenue and 46% of orders. And they cost less to acquire too. Acquiring new customers costs five times as much as it costs to retain existing customers. Therefore, issuing store credit is a great way for owners to maximize and retain their existing customer base.

Bundle (and Reserve) Products in Draft Orders

There are times when a store owner may need to draft an order for a customer and send them an invoice of the items. While this feature existed before, now store owners can add product bundles in draft and showcase the discount of bundling multiple items. This is a great way to increase average order value (AOV) and thus maximize revenue.

Additionally, there’s a new option to put these products from a draft order on Reserve, which places an inventory hold on those products for the customer. That way, other site visitors don’t deplete the inventory while an invoice is waiting to be fulfilled.

B2B & Wholesale Offerings

In the past, adding a Wholesale/B2B offering to a B2C Shopify site was anything but intuitive. It required using cumbersome apps like Faire or B2B Wholesale Club, and then managing wholesale inventory and orders in an entirely different Shopify dashboard. Shopify has brought this in-house with their latest update.

Out-of-the-Box Wholesale Store

Shopify has launched Trade, which is a readymade wholesale theme that store owners can start using today. For those looking to process high-volume orders and/or offer wholesale prices to members-only, then this makes it easy to plug in and start offering wholesale instantly.

Furthermore, Shopify has unified the sales dashboard for retail, B2B, and international expansion under one roof with Markets. With Markets, businesses can customize everything from their catalog to their store’s theme, currency, and domains all within a single shop. This will make managing inventory and orders across multiple sales channels simpler.

Collect Deposits at Checkout

To accommodate B2B customers, store owners can set payment terms such as a net period or ‘due on fulfillment’. Additionally, for store owners with Shopify Plus, they can collect a percentage-based deposit at checkout. And since every customer is unique and requires a different level of care, these terms can be configured individually for each B2B customer.

Payment Terms (and Discounts) in Draft Order Invoices 

Not only can store owners set payment terms for B2B customers at checkout, but also in Draft Orders. This allows wholesale customers to review their invoice’s payment terms, and pay when that total is due. In addition, store owners can now enable discounts for their B2B customers directly in the draft order invoice. This includes adding existing discount codes, enabling automatic and eligible discounts, or creating a custom amount-off discount to the entire order or for individual line items.

Manual Payment Methods Available

Shopify has expanded their accepted payment methods for B2B at checkout, now allowing wholesale customers to pay with bank transfers, checks, and international wires. This increased payment optionality bolsters Shopify’s B2B offering and caters to more traditional ways that wholesale transactions operate around the world.

Headless B2B storefronts 

Perhaps the most encouraging B2B update is that store owners can now build headless B2B storefronts using the Storefront API and Customer Account API. Exclusive to Shopify Plus users, this update allows for much greater customization in design and functionality of B2B sites, without the headaches of worrying about servers, security, or scaling.

If you own or manage a Shopify website and are interested in building a B2B storefront, then please feel free to schedule a call with us here. At H1 Web Development, we specialize in crafting bespoke designs and functionality that fits your brand’s needs. When you work with us, you don’t have to worry about catering your dreams to a specific theme, since we design and build everything from the ground-up to match your vision.

Data-Backed Insights

When it comes time to make critical decisions about one’s business, data plays a vital role in determining what products to develop and which markets to pursue. Shopify has unveiled a few new updates to help their store owners make data-informed decisions and get more from their Analytics dashboard.

All New Analytics Dashboard

Shopify has brought greater customization to Analytics. They now offer a Dashboard Builder Mode where store owners can edit their dashboard view to show the metrics they care most about. Featuring a drag and drop interface, this makes it intuitive to create the dashboard layout that delivers the insights Shopify users need. This functionality carries over into generating clean and custom reports based on a store’s desires.

Shopify Sidekick (and AI Imagery)

The Help Center has received a much-needed AI boost in the form of a tool they call Sidekick. Available to thousands of stores by request, owners can access Sidekick anywhere in their dashboard and get help in the form of jumpstating creativity with generative AI, tackling time-consuming tasks, and asking questions tailored to their store.

Sidekick is particularly effective when it comes to data-informed decision-making. Store owners can get answers from Sidekick to complex questions like “What is my highest grossing product over the last month?” or “What product is abandoned in the cart the most?”

Furthermore, Sidekick is great at creating customer marketing segments, a task that once took a lot of effort. Now, store owners can prompt Sidekick to create these marketing segments through simple, natural language requests like “Create a customer segment of customers who have spent more than $200 with us in the last 45 days” or “Create a customer segment of customers that have purchased the same product with us more than once.”

It’s worth noting that Shopify is bringing AI into many other commerce-related tasks such as suggesting product categories & attributes, generating replies to customer inquiries in Inbox, and even editing product photos with new colors, backgrounds, shading, and more.

Track How Events Impact Store Performance

Tracking the three Core Web Vitals – loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability – in the Web Performance dashboard has received an upgrade. Store owners can now identify how changes made to their store (i.e. app uninstalls, theme updates, and new code) impact its performance in the Core Web Vitals.

For Shopify Agencies such as ourselves at H1, this allows us to iterate on the changes we make to our clients’ stores and receive clear data as to how these changes have impacted their performance.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of information in this resource, and it only represents 10% of the 177 updates Shopify has introduced in their Summer ‘24 Shopify Editions. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by this resource and want to go back to the way you’ve been operating since it’s comfortable. But these changes are for the betterment of ecommerce on Shopify.

If you’re lost and don’t know where to start, then we recommend that you schedule a Shopify Website Audit with us. Our team of Shopify experts will analyze your store across four critical domains: Customer Behavior, Site Performance & Code Quality, SEO, and Accessibility. We identify the underlying issues with your Shopify site, thus empowering you to improve your customer conversion rate and overall site performance.

On the other hand, if this resource ignited you to take action and take advantage of some of these new Shopify features (but you could use a little help), please feel free to schedule a consultation with us here. We want to see your Shopify store flourish and are eager to explore how to best help.