Shopify has unveiled its “Winter ’23 Shopify Editions,” spelling out more than 100 new product additions and updates for merchants and developers ranging from faster checkouts and deliveries to search improvements.
Many of the new features are geared to enhance the shopping experience on the Shop app, increase engagement with brands, grow e-commerce revenues and provide merchants ways to customize their presence inside Shop.
Shop, Shopify’s consumer-facing app launched in 2020, enables consumers to browse and shop brands and retailers on Shopify.
Editions is Shopify’s biannual unveiling of new functions and features. Merchants have access to the offerings through their Shopify subscriptions, without any extra costs, though there is a separate cost for using the Shopify Fulfillment Network.
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Among the biggest products launched: “Shop Minis,” a set of tools for Shopify’s ecosystem of 8,000 developer partners to integrate functionality from online store websites to the Shop app. For example, one of the first developer partners to use Shop Minis is a company called Stage Ten, a platform for livestream selling online. Stage Ten, through Shop Minis, has extended the livestreaming format from the existing online store app to the Shop app. Shop Minis enabled Stage Ten to put on a hip hop show live on the Shop app. The whole purpose of Shop Minis is to take the functionality that developer partners have built for online stores and extend that to Shop for mobile commerce.
Another tool just announced is “Shop Cash Campaigns, which advances Shopify’s Shop Cash loyalty program by enabling merchants to extend incentives, such as discounts, to their best customers.
In addition, Shopify has simplified and quickened its checkout experience. It was a three-page, slow-moving process; now it’s down to one page. Basically, after all of your credit card and shipping information is recorded, you basically just have to tap “buy.” With less friction in the checkout, there’s less opportunity for shoppers to forgo the purchase.
Shopify has also come up with ways for brands and merchants to better convey their image and aesthetics at checkout. That could be things like tweaking the logo or changing the color palette. According to Shopify, there are approximately 2 million merchants on its platform. The idea is to make their presence on Shop consistent to their own website.
The Shop app has also introduced tools to:
- Highlight bestsellers by automatically syncing them from the online store to the Shop app.
- Initiate upselling and perks early in the buying journey and not just at checkout, which many merchants do.
- Easier sign-ins through biometric pass keys for Android and Apple devices, utilizing facial or fingerprint recognition.
- Listing reviews from customers.
- Better tracking of merchandise through the supply chain.
With Deliverr, a two-day delivery company Shopify acquired last year, merchants have two ways to access the Shopify network: through the Shopify Fulfillment Network app and through the Deliverr portal, both of which feed into one physical network creating “a massive unlock” for merchants because it uses real-time data to move inventory along the supply chain so it’s closest to customers, so orders ship more efficiently, affordably and faster to customers. The intent is also to make fulfillment services accessible to smaller and growing merchants that are typically self-shippers.
“Not even a year ago we launched our first Edition, and now our Winter ‘23 Edition showcases over a hundred more products and features we’ve built in the last six months alone,” said Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify. “We need to be the fastest-moving commerce company in the world because our merchants depend on Shopify’s innovation for their own longevity. So with this edition, we moved quickly to offer tools that help merchants access the promise of mobile commerce, meet customer expectations for seamless checkout and fast delivery, and convert better — it’s the best version of Shopify yet, and will shape the future of entrepreneurship.”
According to Shopify, the Shop app hosts more than 1 million consumers and many are looking for more ways to engage with brands, browse products and shop on mobile. Editions provides merchants with greater control to customize their stores inside Shop, whether that means tweaking the color of a logo or its background, to adding or subtracting categories or switching the order in which they appear.