Shopify Editions Summer '24

Hey there! 👋

Shopify just released its Summer 2024 Edition — and the new features & unifications are just as hot as the season ⛱️

From unifying features lost all over the Shopify admin and creating a center of command to grow your business, to completely remaking the Analytics dashboard & AI-ifying your commerce — there’s so much to be excited about.

Grab the first drink that comes to mind, and let’s cover the most important updates you need to know about.

1. Markets 📊

Millions of merchants rely on Shopify to grow their businesses, whether it’s selling to new regions, scaling into wholesale, or running a global network of retail stores.

And up until now, all of this work has been scattered all over the Shopify admin, — you’d even have to split one store into many to create different setups. 

So they’ve added a new & unified “center of command” section called Markets.

Now, you can expand cross-border, B2B, and retail – all from a single screen, in one store. No need to split inventory or keep data in sync between multiple stores. 

Markets also give a birds-eye view of your entire business, showing exactly the markets you operate within, how each is configured, and how they all fit together.

Before this update, you’d need a PhD in the Shopify Admin to work with it 😂

2. Analytics 📈 

Stats & numbers show us the reasons why our store is or isn’t performing, which is why the analytics dashboard is something we stare at daily.

And it’s been completely revamped — you can now explore very specific data to get the insights you need. This is even better thanks to the pre-built reports made for commerce.

You can access your most important performance metrics at a glance – add, remove, drag & drop metric cards to customize your dashboard to be just the way you want it!

If you’d like the flexibility to build a report from scratch, you can create a new data exploration, save it as a custom report with the exact data you want to monitor & voila – you can get insights from specific data, it’s never been this easy!

And you won’t believe this – you don’t have to wait 24 hours for your store’s analytics to update anymore!

It all updates in real-time. This feature was way overdue 🙄

Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Ecommerce & Unicorns! Subscribe now:

3. Shopify Magic (AI) ✨

Running a store isn’t easy – that’s why Shopify built Sidekick, an AI partner that will help you make smarter decisions & provide useful information directly applicable to the tasks at hand.

You can ask Sidekick any question, and it will instantly give you the context you need. Sidekick is also trained on your store & business data, which makes the responses relevant to your specific needs!

And here’s the kicker – it’s not just a resourceful AI bot for you to manage your store better. Sidekick can also generate customer segments.

For example, if you want to launch a marketing campaign that targets only your most valuable recent shoppers, with Sidekick’s help you can create a new segment & launch a targeted email campaign to those customers, and even generate a discount code for those emails specifically.

It doesn’t stop there — Shopify Inbox has also been greatly improved with AI suggestions. Shopify Magic can now provide suggestions to customer questions, using data specific to your store, which means quick responses & massively increased conversion rates.

But only time will tell just how good Sidekick is — I really hope it won’t be another cookie-cutter AI helper that gives general tips we already know 😭

Shopify also added seamless image generation & editing within the online store editor, email editor and anywhere else you can access media in the Shopify Admin — you can even generate and edit AI images for your products on your phone, too! 🤳

4. Managed Markets 📦

They really didn’t take their foot off the pedal this summer — converting more international buyers & expanding your store worldwide just got a lot easier. 

Shopify streamlined the Catalog Restrictions user experience –  you can now trust Shopify to auto-restrict certain products that would be denied at customs, plus you can view in which countries said products were restricted & why.

Duties & import taxes can now also be included directly near product prices — and this change means the CR% of your international buyers will improve.

Who even asked for an extra “Duties” cost at checkout? It’s much better to sum it all up in the total cost.

Shopify also expanded its carrier options to include UPS Standard shipping, and finally – if changes happen to an order post-purchase, you can now edit, and change international orders and not have to worry about the duties, taxes & currency changes.

They’ll all update automatically! Shopify is on an absolute roll with the quality of life updates 🔥

5. Hydrogen Visual Editor & New Theme Style Settings 🎨

Shopify launched the Hydrogen Visual Editor, a new product that allows your entire team to create, build, and make changes to your store’s layout within a visual environment.

For non-technical team members — this means you can craft templates, annotate components, tag specific collaborators, and comment on any changes & design elements.

And for the tech-savvy devs, this means you can make changes and see them in real-time, visually debug designs, and always jump straight to the source.

Along with the Hydrogen Visual Editor, Shopify also integrated Style Settings, which gives merchants the full freedom to customize the layout of sections & blocks on their storefront.

With these awesome additions, nobody is bound by technical expertise – anyone can make contributions, and everyone can have a say in how your store looks 👀 

We mentioned all the must-know updates & unifications Shopify made this summer.

But of course, it’d be impossible to mention everything, so visit their official site if you want to scroll through the 170 changes.

Is Ecommerce & Unicorns helpful? Share it with friends and don’t forget to subscribe!

Need help with your ecommerce project? Wanna learn more about Shopify in our weekly blog? Just hanging around?

Thanks for reading and supporting E&U (Ecommerce & Unicorns)

Daniil from ECORN