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March 14, 2023

Here’s how the Shopify Winter Edition 2023 is going to impact online shopping for the Merchants and customers

Written by Christian Dunbar

Shopify is yet again strengthening their e–commerce platform with a huge product and update release in their newest Shopify Editions Winter 2023. While we won’t go through all 100 updates revealed, we’ve collected a few worth highlighting in this article and separated them into how they’re relevant for merchants and customers.

Shopify Editions is a semiannual publication released by Shopify highlighting all the new features, updates, and improvements to their e-commerce platform. While most of these 100 updates and changes are mainly down to smaller changes and feature additions, some of them have greater impacts on how merchants can do e-commerce and how the customers will shop online. This is why we’ve separated this article into two where we’ll highlight some of the news and how it will affect the future of e-commerce.

For merchants:

Shopify sure remains at the forefront of innovation and enhancement of its e-commerce platform, as evidenced by integrating features based on highly advanced AI, expansion of data centers to futureproof their platform, and simplification of selling internationally. Let’s look at some news mostly affecting the merchants.

AI integration

AI is everywhere and Shopify is now starting to implement in AI features directly into their CMS dashboard starting with writing functions for product descriptions. As new AI technology from especially ChatGPT recently stated the strength and capabilities of AI to the public, it’s a smart move for Shopify to be a firstmover as a bigger corporation to already begin implementing the technology. AI has many use cases for e-commerce owners and product description writing is just the beginning. It’s a safe move however, and this function alone can save Merchants for many hours of work which can now be prioritized for more important tasks. Choose your tone of voice, add some keywords and let Shopify write appealing and persistent product descriptions across your website.

This feature also comes in handy as the AI technology is moderated to this specific task, being specialized only at writing the best product descriptions. The same AI functions can be found on other AI platforms, but most require payment. With Shopify, you’ll now get these features tailored to your needs included in your subscription.

Quantity rules, bundles and B2B benefits

Easily set up quantity rules for your products and sales are now available, which unlocks several benefits. You can sell products in bundles, set up minimum and maximum amounts, create rules for case packs or let the customers unlock discounts when reaching certain amounts or quantities. This used to be a big hassle especially for shops doing B2B sales as the quantity rules and bundle sales weren’t available by default and needed third-party apps or custom coding.

Markets Pro release

Shopify keeps adding features for making it easier to sell internationally and a Pro version of Shopify Markets has now been launched. The Pro version mainly focuses on safety and legal matters for making it less complicated to sell to other Markets as rules and laws vary, but it also adds further customization and price options for each market. Markets Pro takes care of import and tax duties for different product categories in each country supported, you can adjust prices for each market and even change the design and site setup to meet cultural differences or make custom holiday campaigns.

For customers:

While all the new additions directly or indirectly affect both the merchants and customers, some features have greater impact on one over the other. We’ll now go through some updated functionality which may affect the ordinary customers day-to-day shopping habits.

Site speed

First of all, site speed is incredibly important for the good user experience when visiting a site and this is something that Shopify knows and takes seriously. If the site is slow, you might as well shop somewhere else where loading times are faster. Sites based on native Shopify themes are hosted on Shopifys own servers which is why more server locations keep being added to ensure fast loading speeds everywhere in the world. 270 Server locations are now up and running to ensure lightning-fast loading speeds across the world. These continuous server investments seem to be paying off as some sites recently have been recorded loading twice as fast.

Expanded omnichannel selling with YouTube

Selling across different channels and managing everything from Shopify has been expanded with the option of selling directly on YouTube. Shopify has worked together with Google to integrate product selling directly from the streaming app. You can put product information below the video, tag products in live streams, and pin them in the chat. This is a valuable sales channel for the merchants as YouTube has great information about our true interests and a lot of advertising and promotions are done on the platform. For the customers, it may be a convenient and for some a fun way to easily purchase the goods which you anyway are watching a video about. 

New check-out page functions

A uniformly and well-designed website converts well and Shopify now allows for increased customization of their check-out page. Design options are now available for you to match the check-out page with the rest of the site and further powerful check-out page options are available such as a one-page check-out page for increased conversion.

In conclusion, this Shopify Winter Edition brings a range of new features and updates that help merchants improve their online stores, manage and grow their businesses. These are just few mentioned features to highlight but the list is way longer and a more detailed presentation can be found here. Shopify is an ecommerce platform which has been in steady growth since the beginning and with these updates Shopify is sure to remain a popular choice for online retailers in the future.

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