The Shopify Winter Editions this 2024 introduced a lot of new features that positively impact both new and seasoned merchants. These changes all result in enhanced customer experience, and of course, higher chances of sales conversions.
In this article, we’ll briefly look back on the previous Shopify Editions and we will be discussing all the massive improvements in this Winter Edition of Shopify.
Update: Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 has just released on June 24, 2024. We’ve included some information about this new update within this article. Stay tuned for our upcoming article which covers the latest Shopify Editions in detail.
What Are Shopify Editions?
Shopify is currently the largest and most popular online store builder. Compared to other platforms like Squarespace and Wix, which have 290,000+ and 670,000+ active stores respectively, Shopify has more than 2.3 million merchants that are actively using the ecommerce platform (Store Leads). Undeniably, the difference in user base is more than substantial.
But despite sitting at the top of the food chain, Shopify continuously introduces innovations and improvements to its platform so that merchants can get access to the latest of what the ecommerce world could offer.
Shopify Editions first started in the summer of 2022, and since then, they release new platform updates twice a year. Here is the complete list of Shopify Editions as well as the major improvements introduced on each one of them.
Shopify Editions Summer ‘22 - “Connect to Consumer”
The Shopify Editions Summer ‘22 mainly focused on making the Shopify platform more accessible to customers. This involved introducing more features to better understand the audience, additional sales channels, and more.
These new features include Shopify Audience, Admin Enhancements, Shop Promise, Shop Pay, Built For Shopify Badge for apps, and improvements to existing platform functionalities geared towards customer experiences.
Read the full report: Shopify Editions Summer ‘22
Shopify Editions Winter ‘23 - “Built to Last”
The introduction of the Shopify Editions Winter ‘23 was focused on boosting the sales conversions of Shopify merchants. Firstly, Shopify enhanced their physical infrastructures in order to better reroute online traffic to improve page speed when customers are shopping.
They also streamlined the checkout process by reducing the friction. This was done by phasing out the three-page checkout and introducing their higher converting checkout, the one-page checkout..
Another notable new feature in this edition was their effort to push omnichannel selling. That’s why they enabled integration between Shopify and YouTube so merchants can also use their YouTube channels to sell their products.
Read the full report: Shopify Editions Winter ‘ 23
Shopify Editions Summer ‘23 - “Imagine My Business”
The Shopify Editions Summer ‘23 shocked the ecommerce world in its introduction because of its significant strides towards integrating AI with its platform.
First of its new AI features is called Sidekick. This AI assistant was trained to know all of Shopify’s features. As such, users no longer have to go through the Shopify admin menus to find what they’re looking for. Instead, they could simply ask Sidekick and it will return a very useful response to help answer queries.
Secondly, Shopify Magic. This feature changed the way merchants write their web copy. Shopify Magic can generate marketing copy for any page in your website. New stores also benefited from this as it can also be used to generate its own description on any product when provided with the right prompt.
Aside from AI integration, Shopify Editions Summer ‘23 introduced a lot of new features that are geared towards sales conversions, user experience (for both online store owner and customer), and partner developers.
Read the full report: Shopify Editions Summer ‘ 23
Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 - “Unified”
The latest addition to Shopify’s twice-a-year updates is the Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 that was launched on June 24, 2024 pushing more than 150 new updates to the platform.
Appropriately named as Unified, this new update has new features that makes multi-channel marketing easier – hence creating a centralized or unified experience.
First notable update with this edition is Shopify Markets. This feature will be the new central command center for expansion that makes managing store management easier for global brands. It allows businesses to expand to several markets based on regions, point of sale, and business model without having the need to create multiple stores.
Shopify Analytics also gets a major overhaul with this latest update. Featuring more dashboard customization to get the insights that you value most and some added reports that are built to amplify store management and tracking. Moreover, a code editor within the Analytics menu will be launched soon as well to allow merchants to create tailored reporting experience for their individual businesses.
More unification in terms of merchandising were also added to make the experience easier for store owners.
To those wanting to build a headless ecommerce store, they will get a new Hydrogen Visual Editor by Utopia which allows editors to visualize changes as they happen. Thus, creating an experience similar to that of the theme editor.
The list of updates goes on.
Read the full report: Shopify Editions Summer ’24
Shopify Winter Editions 2024: Features
The Shopify Winter Editions called “Foundations” is the newest addition to Shopify long-list of bi-yearly platform revamps.
For this one, Shopify employed a multi-faceted approach as it covered conversions, channels, operations, and developer improvements. As such, it has a very broad coverage. Let’s tackle them all one by one.
Conversions
The first ones in the long list of new Shopify Winter Editions features are the platform improvements to further boost conversion rates for online store owners.
Product Merchandising
For product merchandising, the new Shopify combined listing allows products that come in various colors to be merchandised from one parent listing while having their own attributes such as descriptions, media gallery, etc.
They have also updated their taxonomy maps for easier product classification. In addition to that, they released a new API to allow merchants to add up to 2000 variants per product.
Semantic Search
Semantic search is one of Shopify’s new AI-powered storefront search features. In the past, product search for customers heavily relied on using the exact keywords to match the right products. Semantic search understands the intent behind every customer search query. As such customers can now use natural language and the online store will still return relevant results.
Shopify Subscriptions
Shopify Subscriptions increases customer lifetime value by maximizing customer accounts and subscription deals on individual and bundled products. This boosts sales revenues each month because of the recurring payments from customers.
Shopify Checkout
Shopify has taken checkout extensibility to new heights with 14 new APIs and UI components to the thank you and order status pages of Shopify Plus merchants - improving customer checkout experience.
With their continuous efforts to amp up checkout extensibility, they welcomed 90 new apps to elevate customer checkout experience.
Addinally, they introduced Shop Pay Installments to entice customers to buy products on installment. The customer account API also allows merchants to enable customers to save their preferred payment methods to your store for easier future repurchase.
Storefront Performance
Shopify introduced new reporting tools so online store owners could track the vitality of their website. In case you don’t know, web load speed directly affects customer experience. As such, fast load speed could lead to higher conversions. Slow loading speed, on the other hand, negatively impacts sales.
For those reasons, performance reporting tools for loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability were added
Channels
In terms of expanding the sales channels of online store owners to unlock global growth opportunities.
Shopify POS
Shopify enhanced in-store buying experience by making their POS terminals more customizable. This allows merchants to adjust the layouts of POS terminals according to what’s more important for them. Also, the receipts can now be modified to include brand logos instead of the common payment gateway logo.
Aside from the visuals, Shopify POS was also improved to make it easier for in-store sales reps to fulfill online orders. This was made possible by making fulfillment tasks visible right into the POS terminals.
Moreover, Shopify Tax is now supported in POS so that retail sales are accurately taxed at the same rate as your online store.
B2B On Shopify
To further unlock global growth opportunities, Shopify enhanced its B2B features to allow wholesale businesses to more bulk customers. B2B merchants can now create promotional discounts that are exclusive to their customers. This can be done using the third-party or custom apps powered by Shopify functions.
The new sta permissions in this update allows admins to restrict access to other back-end users so that only the accredited sales reps are allowed to place orders and view customer information. This improves in-organization security and reduces the risks of internal conflicts.
Advanced users can now build headless B2B storefronts and add other UX-related features using the Storefront API, Customer Accounts API, and a multitude of developer tools. This feature is exclusive to Shopify Plus users only but it can also be accessed via the developer preview.
Furthermore, the Faire Wholesale feature was launched in the Shopify Winter Editions. Faire is the leading online wholesale marketplace, and now, merchants can simply install the Faire: Sell Wholesale App to effortlessly sync their product to the other platform.
Shopify Markets Pro
All businesses within the United States will be delighted to know the Shopify Markets Pro is not at their disposal. This feature comes with all the localization tools of Shopify markets as well as a rich collection of automation tools to globalize their businesses.
Additionally, new standard options with DHL ecommerce (inclusive of USPS first mile) including delivered duty paid or DDP shipping labels were added. Furthermore, users can now access market-specific reports from the markets page.
And to truly unlock worldwide growth, the Translate & Adapt app now supports global search across all languages. Thus, breaking language barriers between merchants and customers.
Marketing
The Shopify Winter Editions 2024 added a bunch of substantial features and improvements in the marketing aspect of their ecommerce platform.
You might want to learn how to build a Shopify landing page for your marketing strategy.
Shopify Audiences
Shopify Audiences introduced new features that would allow merchants to retarget twice as many customers as they had before. Moreover, new benchmarks for measuring performance were added. This will allow merchants to measure the efficacy of their advertisements by comparing them to similar stores or industry groupings.
Furthermore, Shopify Audiences makes influencer marketing way easier with this latest update. Through Shopify Collabs, merchants can now easily discover popular creators and influencers in their niche and they can automatically pay commissions with Shopify Billing.
Moreover, consolidated creator profiles enable merchants to see detailed stats of their current affiliate offers and sales.
Shop
The previous Shop Cash was renamed to Shop Campaigns in the Shopify Winter Editions. With this improved feature, online store owners can now attract buyers on the Shop app, the web, and in the future, Meta and Google.
Shop Campaigns also promises to lower the ad costs by implementing a fixed cost per acquisition (compared to the bidding type ad platforms of Meta and Google which are becoming more and more expensive).
Also in this newest Shopify Editions are features geared towards enhancing user engagement. Some examples are shoppable videos, post purchase surveys, and product recommendation quizzes. This can be achieved using apps like Shop Minis, Tolstoy, Videowise, and Showday.
Furthermore, the Shop app is now used to automatically apply customer discounts when they sign in to your lead capture form, making the shopping experience more delightful to your customers.
Operations
In terms of business operations, the Shopify Winter Editions 2024 introduced AI-powered improvements to enhance merchandising as well as shipping and finance-related features to improve efficiency.
Shopify Magic
The Shopify Magic was introduced in the Summer Editions 2023. For this new update, Shopify supercharged their proprietary feature with more powerful features to enhance platform usage.
With the improved Shopify Magic, Shopify store owners no longer have to use third-party software like Canva when removing backgrounds from product images. With just a few clicks, you can now do this within your admin using Shopify Magic.
Additionally, Shopify Magic just got some SEO updates so users can easily write optimized product descriptions and pages.
Data Privacy
Data Privacy is a serious matter nowadays. That’s why Shopify Winter Editions put great emphasis in making their platform more secure than ever.
Data Privacy compliance is also needed when expanding to new regions such as the strict EU standards and other US standards. The requirements for these are also ever-changing. Thus, the need to improve platform security as well.
Shopify Lending
Shopify lending is the new addition to the vast features of Shopify Capital. With more customizable financing solutions, Shopify lending helps scaling businesses to thrive in the ecommerce space.
To qualified merchants, the Shopify Line of Credit is a great way to increase cash flow or to grow their capital to purchase more inventory or to hire more talents.
Shopify Term Loans allows Shopify store owners to pick the right payment terms according to their operational capability.
Shopify Tax
With the Shopify US sales tax report, annual, quarterly, and monthly filing just got easier. The Shopify Tax Platform allows merchants to integrate their preferred tax service with Shopify’s suite of commercial tools.
This new feature includes added benefits if you are operating in the United States. Shopify Tax can help you determine where you may be liable for taxes so you can save time filing.
On the other hand, merchants in France, Germany, and the UK will get comprehensive guidance on VAT registration to help them stay compliant and meet the requirements for cross-platform selling on Meta and Pinterest.
Shopify Flow
Shopify Flow is the platform’s proprietary tool for automating business processes. You can now use JavaScript code to execute custom logic, aggregate data, calculate dates, and more with the “run code” action.
With its new centralized search, you can now easily find new task automation templates to alleviate your management tasks. And for failed workflows, the app automatically sends notifications so you can perform prompt actions to avoid interruptions.
Shipping & Fulfillment
The Shopify Editions Winter ‘24 introduced new improvements in shipping and fulfillment. With proper implementation, you can now save on shipping costs while retaining timely delivery arrivals.
Firstly, this is achieved with the simple yet effective address validation feature. This automatically validates the customers’ entered address to minimize missed deliveries.
Secondly, this new feature also prevents merchants from overselling their products by limiting the available products on the storefront based on their fulfillment configuration.
Moreover, merchants can now outsource their fulfillment with Shopify fulfillment network, Flexport. To put more icing on the cake, merchants can now save up to 86% on shipping with the introduction of USPS Ground Advantage on Shopify Shipping
Shopify App Store
The Shopify App store also gets the AI treatment. With AI powered app search, you can now find the best app for the needs of your business.
This feature is made possible by Shopify's AI machine that understands natural language – just like the one used in the improved product search. As such, you don’t have to know the specific name of the app that you want. You just have to type in the function that you want and Shopify will recommend the best apps for your specific need.
Developer Foundations
Finally, Shopify Winter Editions also improved the developer tools so merchants and partner developers can enjoy better store design and development experience.
Storefronts
Storefronts introduces new theme blocks in developer preview to make designing a website easier. Now, web designers no longer have to create similar sections repetitively. Instead, they can reuse sections or block presets.
Developing new storefronts got easier and more secure with Hydrogen. Now, you can test your storefronts without giving access to anyone. Instead, you simply send tokenized links for previewing.
The improved Customer Account API enhances customer experience to allow them to stay authenticated across storefronts and checkouts to avoid customer journey friction.
Extensibility
The new customer accounts and checkout extensibility amps up the user experience by allowing merchants to directly customize user accounts using the same UI components. The extensibility improvements are also available for the thank you page and the order status page.
Additionally, the Checkout Branding API now supports 50+ new color properties, schemes, customizations, and more to enable merchants to build a truly personalized customer experience.
They have also released more APIs to include add-on products with custom pricing, modify titles, images, and so on. Additionally, merchants can also implement automatic discounts on subscription products.
Furthermore, the new Store Credit Primitive and API gets an improvement and Shopify Flow got more developer-friendly.
Developer Experience
The Shopify Winter Editions 2024 did not just focus on customer and merchant experiences. As the developer partners are the backbone of this successful ecommerce platform, Shopify made developing ecommerce solutions easier and more attainable.
For example, GraphQL Codegen autocomplete is now supported in the JS libraries. Thereby making code-writing faster and more accurate.
Substantial improvements to Shopify CLI, Shopify Functions, and Metafields were also introduced. Additionally, GraphQL no longer needs a separate tool as it now has the same data and scopes as your app.
Interestingly, Shopify released a physical product for the Winter Editions 2024. This is their new low-latency, low profile, and high performance keyboard.
App Growth
With the new App Growth features, partner developers can now enhance their campaigns to acquire new users (Shopify store owners).
Their apps are no longer just discoverable by search. Instead, they can now advertise in the homepage of the Shopify app store for relevant user queries.
The new app comparison gives outstanding developers a chance to outsmart other similar apps. In turn, Shopify store owners can now find the best apps that provide the solutions that they need.
Note: We were only able to give a general view of the new features of the Shopify Winter Editions. There are hundreds of them in their official report. Therefore, we recommend reading the official documentation.
Read the full report: Shopify Editions Winter 2024
The 2024 Winter Editions Shopify Is Great News For All
Shopify is a continuously evolving ecommerce platform. As advanced as it is right now, consecutive efforts are taken in order to make it better year on year.
Case in point is this Shopify Winter Editions 2024 that didn’t just revamped the platform for customers, but also for Shopify store owners and developers.
This approach is the best logical solution to continue expanding the brand in terms of global merchandising and expanding its user base.
Since the summer season is fast approaching, we can expect to be greeted with yet another Shopify Summer Editions 2024 with some explosive features. Impressive is an understatement to describe Shopify’s push to make its platform the most advanced in the business.
With all this in mind, whether you’re a Shopify store owner or a Shopify developer, you can expect the platform to continue its strides towards improvement.
