HANS HARRIS

Marketer

Inside Shopify Editions: Winter ’24

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by

Hans Harris

I combed through the latest Shopify Editions release so you don’t have to.

If you’d rather read through 100+ “foundational product updates,” check out all the details of this Shopify Editions.

Here are ten product updates that caught my eye:

Now, let’s try and keep this brief…

Increasing maximum variants from 100 to 2,000

Without a doubt, this is the biggest feature release to come out of this Editions release. Take it from the big man Harley himself:

Some sweeping updates to Shopify’s GraphQL product APIs now support complex products with up to 2,000 variants. This is up 20X from the measly 100-variant limit that had many, many Shopify merchants searching for answers for years.

For now, this feature is only available in developer preview but is expected to roll out in early 2024.

Google popularized the term “semantic search” shortly before their 2013 Hummingbird update. Better late than never for Shopify, I guess.

I’ve always felt Shopify’s store search functionality was painfully rudimentary and inelastic. I hope this update vastly improves the usefulness of search results.

Semantic search and a couple other nifty features can be managed from the Search & Discovery app.

Shopify Subscriptions

Subscription apps like Recharge and Loop should be very, very concerned. (although I’d expect that they have seen this coming from a mile away, as Shopify’s free subscription app has been available to select merchants for some time).

The keyword here is “free.” While I don’t expect the Shopify Subscriptions app to be the best solution for every merchant, it costs nothing and eliminates potentially buggy integration.

Discounts supported in draft orders

As a marketer, I frequently use discount codes to attribute promotions, campaigns, and hard-to-track channels.

I think this one stood out to me because I’m all too used to seeing wacky discount “reasons” sloppily added to draft orders by internal folks when I’m combing through discount codes.

Hopefully, being able to add already-active discount codes to draft orders will trim the number of unique discount codes and make my life just a *bit* easier.

Part of this release is the ability to combine discounts in draft orders, which is also a great feature.

New types of discounts

This one is big. I’ve always felt like Shopify was lagging in the discount capabilities department, and this release is a big, but not massive, step forward.

Discount options are now:

  • Code-based and automatic “Buy X, get Y”
  • Code-based and automatic free shipping
  • Code-based and automatic amount off

I’d like to see Shopify get even more creative with discount options to enable to more innovative merchants to experiment with unique combinations of discounts to drive conversion.

Carbon-neutral shipping with the Planet app

Merchants can now offer carbon-neutral shipping to customers through Shopify’s Planet app, and choose whether to pay for the carbon-neutral shipping themselves or give customers the option to pay at checkout.

There are plenty of other Shopify apps that unlock this feature– many combined with shipping insurance– but I’m always for tech consolidation wherever possible.

Unfortunately, the reviews of this app so far are not great. The general theme is “good concept, poor execution.” For the sake of our planet, let’s hope it gets better.

Going international with Markets Pro

Shopify has been all-in for awhile on equipping merchants to offer localized international storefronts to scale their businesses beyond their borders.

The general release of Markets Pro gives merchants a very turnkey solution for global expansion should they choose to pursue it.

This announcement comes nearly a year after Shopify upped their stake in cross-border ecommerce specialist Global-E, who provide a lot of the backend that makes Markets Pro tick.

Updates to Shopify Collabs

I was a fan and user of Shopify Collabs before it was Shopify Collabs. Some hipster I am.

Known as Dovetale before their 2022 acquisition by Shopify, this tool is– you free for Shopify merchants and my absolute favorite tool for managing ambassador/ creator/ affiliate/ influencer programs.

Shopify Collabs used to be very bare-bones, but this latest release promises to make it a seriously formidable competitor in the land of $5K/month GRINs.

If you do anything after reading this blog, add Shopify Collabs to your store. Do it.

Shop campaigns

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz on LinkedIn and X around Shop Campaigns’ stellar ability to acquire new customers at a set-it-yourself fixed cost per acquisition. This is one of the tests at the very top of my to-do list.

The power of the Shop app is that it acts like the anti-marketplace marketplace channel, where individual brands can still shine and, unlike Amazon, own the customer data!

Earn interest with Balance account

“Shopify Bank, member FDIC.”

Well, not quite. But I can’t help but notice how aggressively Shopify is building and promoting financial services for merchants. The latest, Shopify Balance, promises to provide merchants an interest-bearing (3.86% APY for now) account to stash some cash. Not a bad deal.

Of course, they’re turning right around and lending on that deposited cash to other merchants through Shopify Lending, where the APY merchants pay is a lot higher than 3.86%.

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