Shopify Unite 2021
Our team shares some of our favorite announcements from Shopify Unite 2021 and we discuss what this means for merchants and the digital experiences we build together on Shopify Plus.
Development Team:
“I’m most excited for ‘Sections Everywhere’. It’s not just that sections can now be referenced anywhere with template specific content, it’s more that it reflects a substantial paradigm shift: Shopify Themes are now component driven, rather than template driven. That’s important, and it’s congruent with where web development is going.”
Online Store 2.0 is a combination of features and improvements that expand our ability to customize your online store. As mentioned above, merchant stores will be able to make use of sections, which can all be custom designed components, on more than just the homepage. This will give our design team more opportunities to personalize every aspect of a store and empower merchants to leverage those sections with less development resources.
“Updates around store content! A core issue in the past has been linking different content and datatypes together. This was helped by metafields, but only to a degree. Now we’re able to link almost any datatype to a completely separate datatype natively in the dashboard. We can link products to blog posts, or upload an alternate image as a metafield for a variant.”
Another improvement in Online Store 2.0 is the ability for developers to use dynamic sources to insert standard metafields as setting defaults. For Verbal+Visual custom theme builds, merchants will be able to add the content they need to a PDP, for example, like including a section for a size chart.
Read more about Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 here.
Production Team:
“Yes, definitely SO excited to see that we can now use components in different templates including PDP and PLP!”
“Editing metafields in the admin page and use those metafields in CMS sound too good to be true.”
Our production / project management team is excited about some of the same Online Store 2.0 features, from a slightly different perspective. Just as important as developing and designing a best-in-class digital experience, is preparing our clients’ commerce teams to manage admin and content responsibilities for their site. These new features will streamline many of the processes outlined in our CMS guides and allow for our project managers to engage more frequently with clients, sans support from developers.
“Checkout upgrades are also very exciting, there will be a lot of opportunity to customize checkout page for upselling!”
As a long-time Shopify Plus partner (since the program’s inception) we have been asked by prospective merchants and current clients alike for more flexibility and greater customization on the checkout experience.
Shopify’s latest announcement for checkout upgrades will extend capabilities for merchants from small customizations to major UI changes. This update includes checkout extensions, new integrations with payment partners, and a new payments platform.
Extension APIs (still under development) will allow us to customize checkout line items, discounts, customer information, metafields, and cart attributes. More importantly, we’ll be able to roll out the solutions we build to multiple clients.
Sales & Marketing:
“Shopify continues to demonstrate its commitment to strengthening the partner ecosystem and provide opportunities for agency and technology partners to collaborate and innovate on Shopify’s existing framework.”
Shopify announced that app developers making less than $1 million USD per year in the Shopify App Store can register to no longer pay revenue share. The implications of this are far reaching and we’re thrilled for the many developers and businesses this will impact. Holding onto that rev share money will mean investing more in product solutions and partner program support.
We often hear from potential partners that one of the biggest hurdles they face is lack of resources to create proper partner programs that help to facilitate agency relationships and lead to valuable new business opportunities.
In addition to this announcement, our partnerships team has begun discussing with our technology partners how we can leverage the new Online Store 2.0, checkout extension, and payment platform features.
While many of these features will roll out over the next year, we are strategizing around the changes we can make for our current merchants and the opportunity to build new experiences for prospective merchants.
Have questions about how these Shopify Unite announcements will affect your business? Talk to us.
