Shopify is constantly growing, evolving and changing; just like your ecommerce business. This article will walk through the latest Shopify updates in the Winter Edition ‘24 to explain what’s new, what’s different and provide you with insights into how these features might complement your brand and Shopify strategy. 

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From updated product merchandising features to new semantic search technology and native subscription capabilities, the Winter Edition ‘24 is ripe with fresh new ways to make Shopify work for you. As Shopify experts, we at H1 Web Development are eager to help you understand this rollout and the practical applications they could have for your store. 

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Product Merchandising

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Among the many updates Shopify launched in their Winter Edition ‘24 are a variety of product merchandising enhancements. 

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Product management just got easier than ever with Shopify's latest variant updates. Available to all Shopify users, the revamped variants card now enables you to efficiently view and bulk edit variants grouped by options, simplifying the process of updating product details. You can also enhance the visual appeal of your online store by incorporating color or pattern swatches directly onto product listings to facilitate a more intuitive and visually engaging shopping experience for your customers

Shopify Plus customers will enjoy even greater variant control with Shopify’s new Combined Listings app, which allows you to showcase all variants under a single parent listing. Each variant is given its own distinct description, media gallery, and URL so you can display more information and visuals for each individual variant, which creates an organized shopping experience for your customers and increases conversion potential.

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Also, Shopify’s latest product APIs will soon be capable of accommodating up to 2,000 variants per product. Previously limited to only 100 variants per product, this new functionality is designed to support more intricate catalogs and are built for flexibility. Currently in developer preview, this feature will soon be available to select businesses in 2024, providing a cutting-edge solution for those with diverse and complex product offerings.

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A single file picker system will now be accessible on both the Products and Variants pages. This feature allows easy access to images, videos, and 3D models, eliminating the redundancy of re-uploading existing media files. You can also take advantage of metaobject-powered pages directly from the online store editor, enabling smooth addition or editing of metaobjects for enhanced customization. With these updates, Shopify empowers you to navigate and customize your e-commerce presence with ease, ensuring a seamless experience for both you and your customers.

Finally, Shopify is also updating their taxonomy, the collection of categories they use to categorize products within your store. The updated taxonomy maps each standard product category to a rich set of associated product attributes. This makes it easier to create, classify and organize products within your store, as well as automatically generate new variants. 

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With all these updates to product merchandising, organizing, showcasing and selling the products you worked so hard to perfect has never been more efficient or effective. In addition to offering custom Shopify development services, H1 Web Development clients also benefit from our digital strategy expertise and Shopify support. If you’re curious about implementing these new features, feel free to set a meeting with one of our Shopify experts, who will be happy to help you define a product merchandising strategy that works best for your business. 

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Semantic Search

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Shopify Plus users will enjoy exclusive access to a revolutionary customer search experience with Semantic Search, an AI-powered storefront feature. Unlike traditional keyword matching, Semantic Search understands the intent behind a customer's search, allowing for more natural language queries and delivering more relevant results.

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The Search & Discovery app enhances product discovery with visual swatch filters for Collections and search result pages. Customers can easily filter products based on specific colors, patterns, or materials. Additionally, businesses can customize filter logic to enable searches for products that meet multiple criteria and decide how filters are displayed in scenarios with no results. 

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Shopify Subscriptions

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The Shopify Subscriptions app is now fully released, allowing you to effortlessly offer product subscriptions in your shop. Subscriptions add to your lifetime customer value by making recurring purchases as easy as possible. This not only keeps your customers happy and stocked up on your product, but also creates a much more consistent stream of revenue for your business. With the Shopify Subscriptions app, you can easily set up and manage subscriptions directly from your Shopify Admin and grant your customers the ability to modify or skip their subscription orders from their own account. This combination of features makes offering and managing product subscriptions easier than ever before. 

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New Discount Functionality

You’ll enjoy new sales potential with support for discount codes, automatic discounts, and the ability to combine discounts. Metafields from draft orders now seamlessly carry over to completed orders for smoother order management. Drive conversions with enticing new discount options, such as free automatic shipping and fixed amounts off in Buy X get Y promotions. These tools are built to help you expand your capabilities as an ecommerce business owner, offering your customers special deals like the best Shopify experts do. 

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Shopify Bundles

Shopify has increased the maximum number of products that you can offer in a bundle from ten to thirty. This increase allows you to boost your average order value by offering complementary products together as a set or at a discounted price. By bundling products together in a way that makes sense for your target market, you also have the opportunity to clear out old stock you’re hoping to get rid of, provide value in the form of curated recommendations, or increase visibility on new products. 

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When offering bundles in your Shopify store, the options are truly endless. You can offer fixed bundles of set products and allow your customer to choose the variants, like a set of skincare or hair products. Multipacks are another useful bundle option where you can offer more than one of the same product, like a pack of t-shirts in different colors. Lastly, you can offer a fully customizable mix-and-match bundle where you can combine an endless number of products and variants to suit the unique needs of your customer base. By increasing the bundle limit to thirty products, your options to curate product bundles for your customers are truly limitless. 

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Shopify Checkout

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Enhance your Shopify experience with the newly fortified Checkout Extensibility. Exclusively available to Shopify Plus users, this feature allows you to customize the highest-converting checkout on the internet. With 14 additional APIs and UI components, now extending to the Thank You and Order Status pages, you have the power to customize your checkout experience like never before.

Make the switch from checkout.liquid and kickstart your personalized customizations with a comprehensive report. Experience the efficiency of the new one-page design, reducing buyer completion times by 4 seconds and accelerating loading speeds by up to 95%. Upgrade to Checkout Extensibility for a faster, upsell-capable, and easily maintainable checkout across multiple stores. These features are built to make completing a purchase in your shop a quick and seamless experience, reducing abandoned carts and building on your bottom line. 

Furthermore, explore over 90 new apps within Shopify's expansive ecosystem, adding to the existing 400+. These apps offer a range of features, from upsells and loyalty programs to post-purchase surveys, conversion tracking, and custom content. Elevate your checkout experience with these enhancements, supported by Shopify experts, providing unparalleled benefits for your business success. As your knowledgeable Shopify partners, H1 Web Development is happy to help you find and integrate the best apps for your business, to ensure that your store always functions to serve you in the best way possible. 

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Storefront Performance

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Shopify is set to introduce a new web performance dashboard for Liquid storefronts in the upcoming weeks. This tool, accessible on the Online Store > Themes page, allows merchants to optimize real user experience by delving into speed, stability, and interactivity, all aligned with Google's Core Web Vitals and replacing the older Speed Score.

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With a commitment to making the platform lightning fast, Shopify has expanded its infrastructure, resulting in an impressive 35% faster performance in the past year. The new dashboard reflects a joint effort between Shopify and merchants to enhance front-end performance, providing insights and opportunities to improve conversions and reduce bounce rates. These increased speeds work hand in hand with H1’s custom shopify development services and clean-coding practices to ensure that your store functions like a dream and increases your SEO rankability. 

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Recognizing the significance of good user experience, Shopify embraces Google's Core Web Vitals, offering a standard way to measure and optimize performance based on real user data. Unlike the previous Speed Score, which had limitations in representing real-world experiences, the new web performance dashboard captures actual interactions and experiences from users across various connection types, devices, locations, and browsers. This comprehensive approach aims to provide a fuller understanding of website performance in the real world.

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Conclusion

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H1 Web Development, as industry leading Shopify experts, work in collaboration with the global leading ecommerce platform to create storefronts that sell. With all these new features rolling out this year, now is a better time than ever to seek out experienced Shopify partners and discover the benefits custom Shopify development could have in building the ecommerce store of your dreams. If you’re interested in a custom storefront, or even just some Shopify support in understanding how to implement these updates, schedule a meeting today to meet with one of our Shopify experts. Your success is our priority and we are here to guide you every step of the way.

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