At the recent Shopify Editions.dev conference, updates and announcements as part of Editions Summer ‘24 have set the stage for exciting developments in the world of ecommerce. The Domaine team was on the ground in Toronto, attending workshops, talks, and events across the conference.
During the after after-party at the Toronto Partner Meetup after Editions.dev, we interviewed leaders in the industry to get a pulse on what releases and announcements have the biggest potential to impact the industry. We captured a variety of perspectives from brands, partners, and competitors alike.
Our Tech Leads Allye Vice, Christina Douzmanian, and Meder Toktosunov, Technical Solutions Architect Sean Dunaway, and Senior Engineer Colin Rabyniuk summarized and analyzed the key highlights, announcements, and implications from Summer ‘24 Editions below, diving into our perspectives on what these changes mean for brands and developers alike.
Managed Markets: Simplifying Global Expansion
While Shopify's journey began with small and medium merchants in North America, they have since expanded into a global platform leader fit for international enterprise brands. As their merchants grew in size and their ecommerce operations became more complex, Shopify has released product update after product update to meet these requirements head on. Many of the updates announced at Editions Summer ‘24 further solidify Shopify’s position in the enterprise space.
Managed Markets is an upgrade to the previous Markets Pro offering, as part of Shopify’s efforts to unify commerce between channels. The new capabilities of Managed Markets have the potential to help merchants enter foreign markets in a matter of days (and not months) while maintaining high conversion rates.
Key Improvements
- Customized & Unified Catalog: Ability to set localized product catalogs and pricing per region, without the need to split inventory between regions.
- Streamlined Product Catalog Restrictions Management: Detailed annotations help merchants comply with local restrictions, avoiding legal or monetary penalties.
- Duties & Taxes: Flexibility to add duties and taxes directly in product prices to reduce the sticker shock at checkout.
- More Shipping Options: Added shipping options for cross-border orders enhance conversion rates.
- Order Editing: International orders can be edited within Shopify admin, along with automatic recalculation of duties, taxes, and currency. Simplified operations allow merchants to spend more time focusing on customers.
- Market-Specific Entities: Ability to associate market-specific legal entities in one Shopify store allows merchants to receive payouts to different entities depending on the market and improves local accounting compliance.
What This Means for Brands
These improvements make it easier for existing Shopify merchants to expand globally and removes barriers for more enterprise brands to migrate to the platform. Managed Markets falls under Shopify’s new Markets product-suite, which includes cross-border, retail, and B2B offerings that all work together to create unified commerce under a single admin. By reducing the complexity of entering new markets, Shopify is positioning itself as the go-to platform for global ecommerce.
Extensibility: Amplifying Shopify’s Checkout Experience
It’s clear Shopify’s checkout is the fastest and highest converting checkout in ecommerce. Shopify has invested deeply in continuously improving their checkout, and the latest announcements made at Editions are no exception. They announced enhanced capabilities that have the potential to have a big impact on how customers interact during both the shopping and checkout processes.
Key Releases:
- Expanded Scope for Checkout and Order Pages: Expanded capabilities for customizing checkout and order pages (Thank You & Order Status) using the checkout and accounts editor, with ability to build custom apps directly on those pages.
- Address Autocomplete API: Ability to replace the default Shopify autocomplete provider for billing and delivery addresses, to offer address autocompletion and formatting for countries not supported by Shopify natively.
- Header and Footer Customizations: Customizing the header and footer sections of storefronts with controls for color and spacing as well as hiding native components to replace them with UI extensions.
- Enhanced Branding API: New branding capabilities, including support for divider styles and color schemes across all sections of the checkout, to ensure that every aspect of the customer experience aligns with the merchant’s brand identity.
- Metadata for Local Pickup Options: Integrating UI extensions with metafields now enables merchants to improve local pickup options in checkout with additional information.
- Customer Privacy API: This API facilitates the collection of privacy consent through a sheet component, ensuring that UI extensions are fully compliant with regional privacy laws and regulations.
- Customizations Report for Migration: To support migration of checkout customizations to UI extensions, Shopify now offers an AI-powered report which identifies customizations and provides direct match app recommendations.
- Split Shipping: Shopify now supports split shipping in checkout, allowing merchants to specify different shipping methods for individual items within a single order.
- Additional Tools and Features: Other notable updates include a switch UI component for easy toggle settings, a pickup points generator function for checkout, and improved management of extensions through enhanced grouping and default placement suggestions in the editor.
What This Means for Brands
These updates provide safe and secure ways for brands to personalize their checkout experience depending on their business and operational requirements. These updates also provide merchants increased ability to extend the brand experience throughout checkout, without compromising on performance and conversion.
Shopify’s Product Data Model: Improving Product Discovery
Another significant announcement from Editions is Shopify's new standardized product taxonomy. This predefined set of product categories, attributes, and attribute values is designed to enhance product management and streamline sales across various channels.
Key Features:
- Standardized Product Taxonomy: Predefined set of product categories, attributes, and attribute values.
- AI-Powered Recommendations: Suggests appropriate product categories and attributes to streamline listings.
- Automatic Product Options: Adds specific options based on product category.
- Cross-Platform Selling: Supports cross-platform selling on Facebook and Google.
- Open-Sourced on GitHub: Developers can add new categories to the taxonomy as needed.
What This Means for Brands
This new product data model can speed up how brands create and classify products, improve cross-channel sales, and most importantly, drive increased discoverability of products, all powered by AI. Not only does it optimize product listings on a merchant’s ecommerce site, it also provides consistency and efficiency in managing extensive product catalogs.
New & Improved Storefront APIs and Functions: Enhancing the Developer Experience
This Editions introduced several new features and improvements to Shopify's APIs and Functions, aimed at creating a more consistent and efficient developer experience.
Key Updates:
- POS Checkout UI Extensions: POS Checkout UI Extensions will now utilize the same packages as Checkout and Admin UI Extensions. This unification reduces friction for developers, providing a consistent experience across different Shopify implementations.
- Customer Account API: This powerful API offers a comprehensive range of personalized, customer-authenticated options, creating more options for customers to manage their orders, profiles, and more. Shopify has also added the ability to write customer metafields, allowing brands to collect unique data from customers, such as size or style preferences, thus enhancing the ability to offer tailored experiences.
- GraphQL & REST APIs: Shopify is committed to achieving complete parity between their GraphQL and REST APIs. GraphQL APIs allow more precise data retrieval in a single query whereas REST APIs typically require multiple calls to gather the required data. Shopify is ensuring that anything possible with the REST API can also be accomplished with the GraphQL API. Additionally, Shopify is working on reducing cost complexities when calling their GraphQL APIs. These changes open the doors for merchants in several ways:
- Improved Efficiency: GraphQL APIs can streamline data fetching, reducing the need for multiple requests and improving performance.
- Greater Flexibility: Merchants can retrieve precisely the data they need, minimizing bandwidth usage and simplifying data handling.
- Cost Savings: By reducing the complexities and costs associated with API calls, merchants can optimize their resources and potentially lower operational expenses.
What This Means for Brands
While these changes may be most exciting for the technical folks, they will have a big impact for merchants. These efficiencies will improve development speed and platform performance, with the potential to reduce operational costs for brands. It’s another example of Shopify’s continued commitment to innovation.
Updates to App Growth: Building Trust with “Built for Shopify”
The "Built for Shopify" badge for apps is not new, but the conference provided more clarity on what it represents within the Shopify ecosystem. It signifies high trust; only apps that meet Shopify’s rigorous criteria for performance, design, and integration are badged, signaling to merchants that they are a good match for their needs.
Standards for “Built with Shopify”
Performance: Apps must perform well for both buyers and merchants, with tools like Lighthouse used for testing.
Design: Apps should be informative, manageable, and intuitive, following guidelines that cover common and critical design patterns.
Integration: Seamless integration to Shopify is crucial, with no need for additional logins and third-party connections outside of the Shopify admin.
What This Means for Brands
For Domaine and our clients, even though we are not directly involved in third-party app development, understanding these standards helps us trust and recommend apps. Aligning our standards with Shopify and expanding upon them helps us propose the best technology for our clients.
Hydrogen Visual Editor: New Possibilities for Headless
Another interesting announcement at Editions.dev was the introduction of the Hydrogen Visual Editor powered by Utopia. This CMS tool has the potential to innovate how headless sites are managed by allowing users to edit the visuals and code of their site simultaneously, while syncing both. This development could open the door for non-technical team members to make certain updates to a headless site without the need for a developer. It’s exciting to see Shopify invest an increasing amount of time and effort into headless, in the way they previously did for Theme Editor.
Key Features:
- Visual Editing: The ability to view and edit the headless site means brands can see changes live before committing the code.
- Github Integration: The Hydrogen Visual Editor can commit changes to the site directly to Github, positioning itself as the new source of truth for projects. However, questions remain about whether all users (including non-technical ones) will need Github accounts and how account types will be managed to ensure security and control.
- Full Project Tree Visibility: Similar to tools like Figma, users will be able to see the entire project tree and how components and pages relate to one another. This makes it easier to locate components and can potentially speed up onboarding for new developers.
What This Means for Brands
Shopify is gearing up to bring key features of Theme Editor to the headless space. With the ability to make changes without a developer, brands can achieve greater agility and autonomy, even with a complex headless site. While the release is slated for the Fall, and there are still some uncertainties, the potential of this tool, particularly for enterprise brands, is undeniable. We’re eager to build demos and explore its capabilities further.
Conclusion: Exciting Prospects Ahead
This summer’s Editions.dev highlights Shopify’s commitment to innovation and empowering both merchants and developers to take full advantage of their platform capabilities. From the Hydrogen Visual Editor, to Managed Markets, and the robust enhancements in APIs and checkout extensibility, these updates promise to shake up the ecommerce landscape.
While some features are still in development and expected to be released later this year, the anticipation is palpable. For brands and developers alike, these updates represent an exciting opportunity to build more dynamic, efficient, and personalized online shopping experiences.
As our CRO Mac King mentioned during his interview, our team has a field day dissecting the announcements and updates when they are released. We look forward to experimenting with these new tools and building demos, and continue to build world-class experiences for our clients.
