Shopify’s Exciting Announcements & How They’ll Benefit Your Online Business
By: Ayla Prater
Tags: Shopify, Shopify Unite, Ecommerce, Website Development, Website Design

The leading eCommerce platform revealed a range of new capabilities that will help business owners drive future sales.

Photo by Christiann Koepke on Unsplash

Shopify is a complete commerce platform that enables you to start, grow and manage a business. It lets you create and customise your online store and sell in multiple places. The platform also allows you to manage your products, inventory, payment and shipping in a concise and easy to control manner. For us, it comes as no surprise that Shopify has more than 800,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries using their platform.

Every year, they host a conference ‘Shopify Unite’ where they announce the biggest changes coming to the platform for the year ahead. Shopify Unite 2019 was a ground breaking year with numerous changes on the horizon for the platform that will provide significant benefit to current and future Shopify store owners.

We thought we’d save you a 40-minute read by highlighting the key points that we believe will provide the most value to merchants:

Improvements to Your Online Shopify Store Design

Shopify announced a major upgrade to the online store, which will allow access to more powerful tools to help merchants express their brand and delight their customers.

The main and much anticipated feature will allow store owners more control over designing pages on their store by using sections on every page. This feature has previously been available on the home page, but now it’s rolling out on all pages — which we believe will give some relief to store owners long-standing concerns about design control. You can also save time by setting content that you want to appear on multiple pages with the new master pages feature.

The Power of Video & 3D Models

We all know by now that leveraging eCommerce videos is a great strategy to grow and promote your business online. Forbes revealed that 90% of customers say that videos of products help them make a purchasing decision and that 64% of people are more likely to purchase a product on the web after watching a video.

Drum roll for the good news…

Shopify announced that they’re updating their no-code-required design tools to allow for video and 3D model marketing — This is a real game changer! The user interface update is geared towards making the lives of merchants easier and allowing merchants to market products in a much more sophisticated manner.

As a Shopify store owner, you will have access to these updates later this year.

Selling Subscriptions from The Shopify Checkout

For those merchants currently selling subscriptions, you will know that the user experience is somewhat cumbersome, where users are directed to a third-party cart to process their subscription payments. A new update coming later this year will allow your subscription apps to utilise the Shopify checkout, which will massively improve the user experience and help back-office procedures for merchants.

Online Store: Advanced

The above mentioned ‘Core’ online store changes will be available for all merchants to leverage. The following ‘Advanced’ online store changes will benefit the innovative merchants who have unique requirements and emphasise the importance of creating a truly special customer experience.

Sell in Multiple Languages

Shopify wants to make selling globally as simple as selling domestically. That’s why they’ve invested in enabling merchants to provide quick, complete, and reliable multilingual experiences on their online stores. Merchants will now have access to a more powerful set of translation apps that improve selling in international markets.

We recommend that you make sure your apps are up to date and compliant with these new APIs and consider all the new translation possibilities (or that you call us).

Selling in Multiple Currencies with Shopify Payments

Previously, merchants could display foreign currencies on their site — but once a user reaches the checkout, the price would convert the ‘base’ currency of the store. With this new multiple currencies feature — prices in the customer’s local currency will now carry through to the checkout. This pricing automatically adjusts based on foreign-exchange rates and displays buyer-friendly prices with simple rounding rules. This feature currently supports 10 key currencies: GBP, AUD, CAD, EUR, HKD, JPY, NZD, DKK, SGD, and USD.

If you’re interested in utilising this upgrade, please ensure you have the information you need to adjust your apps to account for this new feature (or call us).

Shopify POS

In the past year, Shopify POS has grown to power over 100,000 merchants and is driving sales in the billions.

There were two significant changes to Shopify POS that were announced at Shopify Unite. These are:

1. POS cart app extensions: Loyalty and promotions

The POS cart app extensions for Shopify POS surfaces the loyalty and promotion app functionality merchants want, where they need it: within the customer cart.

This makes for a seamless retail checkout experience that includes:

· Speed: Improved discoverability in the cart during checkout reduces the number of clicks from four to one, and decreases the time it takes to apply a discount from roughly 15 seconds down to five

· Visibility: Important information is surfaced automatically and in-context, meaning store staff don’t have to remember to navigate to the apps section of POS

· Appreciation: Customers feel appreciated wherever purchases are made, online and in-store

2. The all new Shopify POS

The brand new Shopify POS has had a ground-up redesign, where apps get first-class treatment. The goal of the upgrade is to create an updated POS app that prioritises quick and seamless workflows, helping store staff focus on what’s most important to them: human-to-human customer interactions and making each sale a positive experience. In addition, retail merchants can expect:

· Faster checkout, refunds and exchanges, and global search

· Simple redesign for retail staff, large tap areas, and smart grids

· Scalable with unlimited products, multiple location search, staff permissions, and quick access to apps

· A unified backoffice to sync customers, inventory, and orders across all locations

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Do you agree with us that these changes are super exciting? Excitement aside, we understand that some of these updates are complex and may be intimidating to implement. Drive Digital are here to help you upgrade your current Shopify store or create a new Shopify store that incorporates these innovative additions.

We look forward to working with you and helping your business grow.