At the end of January, Shopify published their latest issue of Shopify Editions, where they announce new features they are adding to their platform over the next few months.
Over 100 new features and improvements were announced, but we have listed our top five updates that we think will be the most useful for our clients.
Shopify Magic
Shopify have been introducing AI-powered features to their platform recently, known as Shopify Magic, and they have just announced their AI-enabled image editing which allows you to instantly generate, match or remove the background of your existing product images.
Not only this, but Magic can help write better product descriptions, generate answers for FAQs and improve email effectiveness by sending at the best times, amongst other things.
Shopify Subscriptions
Subscriptions have been possible in Shopify using a third-party app for a while, but the official Shopify solution is coming early 2024. Adding subscriptions to your store allows you to sell products on a recurring basis. The Shopify Subscriptions app gives you the flexibility to create your own frequencies, discounts for subscribing and options to modify, pause, skip and cancel subscriptions.
Shopify Subscriptions only support a small number of payment gateways and your store needs to be using an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme.
App Store Comparison
When you are looking on the Shopify App Store to find an app to fulfil your needs for your store, do you struggle to find the best app? Well Shopify has added a comparison feature to the App Store which makes it easier to compare the pricing, features, reviews and more from a single page.
You can now compare up to four different apps at one time and save time finding the solution to your problems.
Shopify Combined Listings
This one is exclusive to those on the Shopify Plus tier, but it could be incredibly useful for merchants.
Currently, if you want to have different product information for your different variants of the same product, you need to create them as separate products, or develop some custom functionality to provide this. If you want to have different URLs for each variant, then you definitely need to use different products. However, this all changes with the Shopify Combined Listings app.
Instead, you will be able to create a parent product which can have different variations, but each variation has its own images, URL, description and publishing controls.
Not only does this make it easy to manage your products, but you no longer have to develop custom functionality to display the different variations on your product page!
New Web Performance Dashboard
Shopify has updated the performance dashboard to replace their speed score to use Google’s Core Web Vitals scores instead. Previous scores used a single Lighthouse score to assess scoring criteria, but this is a test done in isolation so the Core Web Vitals scores should be more useful as this should represent your users and their experience using your store.
Core Web Vitals are important because they represent a good experience on your website. Scoring well in Core Web Vitals is also important for improving your SEO and rankings in Google and other search engines.
This is just the surface of what Shopify has announced. There are many more features becoming available on the platform in 2024, improving aspects of all business areas such as marketing, operations and web development.
Looking to implement some of these new features to an existing Shopify store or are you wanting to kickstart your Shopify journey and don’t know where to begin? Get in touch to start your digital project with Wonder and let us help you navigate these new features and updates to bring you ecommerce success.
