Shopify Editions—a semiannual announcement of new products and updates across the Shopify platform—is a helpful resource for merchants looking to maximize their eCommerce experience. In the Summer 2022 edition, you’ll find a collection of exciting, innovative tools and features designed to help your business improve customer engagement, extend its sales and marketing reach, streamline internal workflows, and boost revenue.
As a direct Shopify Plus partner, Codal has years of experience building cutting-edge eCommerce solutions on the Shopify platform. We regularly communicate with the Shopify leadership team, attend events, participate in beta testing, and contribute feedback to make the platform better for our clients.
Excited about the potential of these new products and updates, we decided to put together a list of highlights from this summer’s Shopify Editions. So if you’re a current user seeking an upgrade, or are considering migrating your business from a different platform, keep reading to learn about Shopify’s most innovative offerings to date!
Connecting with consumers
Shopify recently coined the term C2C, or Connect to Consumer, to help describe the intent of its new features and functionality. The goal is to provide businesses with tools that enable them to find new customers and engage with them on a deeper level. Here are some platform updates aimed at helping Shopify merchants compete in the “era of C2C”:
- Shopify Audiences: Shopify Audiences is a new prospecting tool that allows businesses to identify and target high-intent buyers. Leveraging an advanced machine-learning algorithm that automatically collects and stores user data, merchants can create specific audiences for different products, then target them via Facebook and Instagram ads in a few simple clicks.
- Shop Cash: Customers that use the Shop app—Shopify’s own online shopping assistant—can now receive rewards points for purchases made on the app, then redeem those points on Shopify merchant stores. This gives businesses the ability to attract and engage with the Shop app’s 100 million+ users, and potentially convert them into paying customers.
- Twitter Shopping: With the new Twitter Shopping release, Shopify merchants can sell products directly from their business' Twitter page—leading to higher audience exposure and a faster, simpler customer experience.
Converting digital and in-person shoppers
Shopify’s modern checkout can now be leveraged in a wide range of environments, helping businesses get closer to their customers. Here are some important new updates:
- B2B on Shopify: Shopify’s wholesales features can now be accessed via the admin dashboard, giving merchants the ability to manage both B2C and B2B eCommerce operations under one roof. B2B on Shopify makes it easy to set wholesale prices and net terms, as well as customize storefronts with various themes and discounts.
- Shopify Point of Sale: Shopify POS hardware enables merchants to sell products and accept payments—via any device—in person, in various retail locations, and in many different countries. This update helps businesses expand to new markets and target audiences by going to where people shop, rather than waiting for buyers to visit their website.
- Shopify Markets: With Shopify Markets, merchants have the ability to manage various international storefronts from a centralized dashboard. This involves creating and managing unique prices, taxes, languages, content, and promotions for different territories across the world.
Telling your brand’s story
With new development tools and frameworks, Shopify is helping merchants deploy new content, features, and functionality on eCommerce websites more efficiently than ever before. Here are some exciting new features to keep in mind:
- Hydrogen + Oxygen: Hydrogen is a new Shopify tech stack with pre-built components, hooks, and utilities that allow developers to build headless storefronts—where the front-end customer experience is decoupled from its back-end eCommerce functionality. The headless site can then be deployed with a single click using Oxygen, Shopify’s own globally distributed hosting solution.
- Online Store editor and theme updates: Shopify released a bevy of fresh storefront themes that are designed to convert, along with additional ways to customize those themes via a new and improved editing tool.
Getting to know your customers
From data analytics to customer engagement tools, Shopify merchants have access to built-in features and functionality that help them better understand their customers. Let’s take a look:
- ShopifyQL Notebooks: This tool allows sales and marketing teams to uncover insights and business opportunities through eCommerce data. From a single dashboard, admins can run queries with an SQL-like language that delivers user data, relevant to specific business objectives.
- Email automations: Automating the email marketing process helps save time while increasing engagement with current and potential buyers.
- Customer segmentation: After collecting user data from various sources, merchants can use Shopify’s customer segmentation tool to group those users into different categories—leading to sharper, more personalized sales strategies, marketing campaigns, and customer experiences.
Driving internal efficiencies
Shopify has released dozens of enhancements to the admin experience, enabling merchants to deliver faster, smarter customer experiences. Here are a few key upgrades:
- Shopify Fulfillment Network: The Shopify Fulfillment Network provides eCommerce storefronts with verified two-day delivery and a seamless, highly automated returns system. With Shopify doing the heavy lifting on fulfillment, brands can spend more time on sales, marketing, customer relationships, new product launches, and so on.
- Inventory management: Shopify’s updated inventory management solutions make it easy for admins to track items, print shipping labels in bulk, expedite fulfillment, and automate repetitive tasks such as data entry.
- Shopify Flow: With Shopify Flow, merchants can customize internal workflows to their liking, and automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks in domains like email marketing, inventory tracking, and fraud detection.
Scaling your business
Shopify offers solutions that help companies compete and grow in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Some of the newest products and updates for building and scaling eCommerce operations include:
- Shopify Functions: Shopify Functions gives developers complete control over the apps that power their eCommerce experience. Developers can build custom apps for shipping, payment processing, promotions, and so on—then manage and configure those apps within their admin dashboard.
- Shopify Capital: This resource provides a quick, hassle-free way for Shopify merchants to receive funding to accelerate business growth.
- Planet: Shopify’s new Planet app is designed to help businesses adopt carbon-neutral shipping and support carbon removal projects, as well as communicate their sustainability efforts via storefront icons.
Maximizing the value of your business’ Shopify experience
By implementing the newest, most innovative features and functionality that Shopify has to offer, your business can better connect with its customers, drive operational efficiencies, increase scalability, and boost revenue. However—since every organization has its own unique goals and technical requirements—integrating the right tools and workflows can be a challenge, which is why it’s so important to team up with a trusted Shopify partner like Codal.
With Codal by your side, you can maximize the ROI of your business’ eCommerce experience on Shopify. From powerful system integrations, to intuitive admin dashboards, to customizable themes, and everything in between, our team will set your organization up with an eCommerce infrastructure built for success.
Interested in learning more about how the Shopify platform—along with Codal’s team of eCommerce experts—can help enhance your business? Get in touch with a member of our team today!
