How is Shopify Unifying Commerce Experiences for Retailers

In the latest summer edition, Shopify has removed barriers one at a time, making it the go-to platform for eCommerce merchants no matter their size and complexity of operations.

Whether you are a merchant starting your store from your mom’s kitchen table or a billion dollar enterprise, Shopify has sufficed itself for everyone, quite beautifully. 

Shopify when done right, is not only sufficient for all business needs of all sizes but it also brings tremendous savings to brands that are wasting millions on legacy software and custom solutions that use their resources just on maintenance. 

While there are more than 600 updates rolled out in this edition, we’ll go through some of the major updates that completely changes how we defined Shopify. 

MARKETS: Selling in different markets has never been easier

The biggest highlight of the summer edition is perhaps the feature called MARKETS. 

If we take a step back, one of the objections for Shopify was that it was not good for multi currency and multi location commerce.

The B2B and wholesale channel was limited. Selling instore and online and keeping everything in sync was a real challenge. 

The Markets feature changes all that.

Every acquisition channel is now a different market.

If you are selling in a new country, you can do so via Markets. If you are starting a physical store, the store can be a new market. A wholesale B2B channel is a market. 

What control do you get while selling in different markets?

Well, you can sell different products in different markets for different prices. You can even create a different storefront for different markets and truly personalize your multi location stores to cater to the unique audience of each market.

You can have a different currency and a different domain/subdomain for that market too.  

Better Themes with a ‘block inception’

One of the common problems that merchants face is the reliance on developers and not being able to express themselves and their brands the way they want to. Shopify is now giving more freedom to theme developers to give more freedom to merchants. 

It’s essentially a developer centric feature. But if theme developers implement these new features correctly, Shopify themes are going to be much better than what they are today. What we can expect in new theme upgrades: 

• Merchants can easily customize their site’s appearance for different devices (mobile, tablet, desktop) without needing separate settings for each. This includes adjusting layout, size, and spacing to fit their branding needs​.
• Layout customization by dragging, dropping, resizing, and arranging different components and sections within their themes. This makes it simple to update the design and structure of their storefront without coding skills​.
• Have access to more Style panels covering various CSS properties, including Typography, Background, Border, and Effects. This allows for deeper customization to better align with their brand’s visual identity​.
• Merchants can connect resources like products, collections, and metaobjects more easily within their themes, even in complex nested layouts. This means better data management and display options on their storefronts​.

Headless Becomes More ‘Shopified’

With its Hydrogen and Oxygen stack, Shopify already made headless more doable and practical. 

However, one obstacle still remained: the reliance on developers.

Headless means marrying your developer, which is ok if you are big and have money.

The problem comes, however, when the marketing team gets frustrated and doesn’t want to submit work tickets for developers to do simple content changes.

You are technically forcing marketers to marry the developer too and they don’t like them at all!

This caused the downfall of headless. 

Shopify solves that problem for marketers by giving an official way for headless developers to provide theme settings and a visual editor for marketers so they can make simple changes themselves. 

This, while solves the problem and gives marketers some freedom, they’ll still remain married to their developers.

The new AI Sidekick is good, very good

Shopify simply couldn’t release the summer edition without some big AI features.

It’s become the biggest buzzword of today. 

Shopify released its Shopify Magic earlier this year, which is a good image editing tool, especially useful for small to medium size merchants. 

What is actually exciting in this release is the announcement about Shopify Sidekick. The ability to chat to the sidekick and get useful things done quickly is truly epic.

For example, merchants can chat with the sidekick and ask them to give them customers who bought a particular product in a specific time range. The sidekick creates a customer group for them, which can be plugged into Shopify Audiences and Shopify Marketing. This is just one scenario. Merchants who have been using the sidekick have only good things to say about it. 

No Reason to Look Elsewhere for Wholesale

Wholesale was one area where Shopify was way behind. If you asked me a month ago what was the best platform for wholesale and B2B commerce, I would have recommended another platform like BigCommerce and Salesforce. However, with this new release, Shopify has closed that gap removing another barrier. There is a big list of what you can do with Shopify B2B and what it lets you do now with wholesale: 

• Trade Theme: An out-of-the-box theme designed for B2B stores, facilitating repeat and bulk purchasing.
• Markets for B2B: Allows the creation of multiple B2B markets, each with unique catalogs and storefront customizations, without coding.
• Collect Deposits at Checkout: Merchants can now require percentage-based deposits at checkout, configured for each B2B customer.
• Manage Products from Suppliers in Bulk: Import, manage, and publish thousands of supplier products simultaneously, including syncing more product fields with Shopify Collective.
• Real-time Overselling Protection: Instantly confirms inventory between stores to prevent lost sales and unfulfillable orders through Shopify Collective.
• Instant Price Lists: Share or receive price lists instantly when connecting on Shopify Collective, expediting partnerships.
• Payment Terms in Draft Order Invoices: Send invoices for draft orders with payment terms, allowing B2B customers to review and pay when due.
• Company Profiles Support 10K Locations: Create up to 10,000 ship-to locations per company, catering to large, complex B2B customers.
• Manual Payment Methods for B2B: Offer manual payment methods at checkout, such as bank transfers, checks, and international wires.
• Filtering Support for Companies: Quickly filter company and company location indexes using metafields.
• Headless B2B Storefronts: Build headless B2B storefronts using the Storefront API and Customer Account API.
• Sync Data with Microsoft Business Central: Sync product prices in catalogs, B2B customers into companies, and more with the updated Shopify Connector app.

Complex but still beautiful and elegant

One of the best things about Shopify is that while it adds more complexity to the platform, it’s making sure it’s not deviating from their main USP, which is ease of use. 

Their goal is to make it easy for merchants to manage the admin so they can focus on what they do best: developing their product. 

Keeping it simple isn’t that simple, however. And we have seen that in other software. They either make their admin a complex and confusing interface when they add more functionality or they put a ceiling to the functionality that can be added to it. Beyond that ceiling, it just doesn’t work. 

Being able to do both is just beautiful. 

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