14 Recently Launched Shopify Features You Must Know About

When it comes to setting up an online store, there is no finer eCommerce platform than Shopify. Powering more than 500,000 active online stores worldwide, it is among the most popular and widely used eCommerce platforms today. Ease of use, powerful unique features, and endless customization options are what make Shopify a go-to choice for anyone interested in selling products online.

If you are like many other business owners who have opted for Shopify over other eCommerce software, you would definitely be enjoying a vast array of fantastic features offered by this fully-fledged platform. However, if you want to get the most out of the Shopify, getting familiar with its recent updates and new features is equally as important as using its existing features. Let’s have a look at some new and upcoming features that will change the way how you use Shopify.

New Sales Channel Apps:

While Shopify already allows merchants to sell their products across many popular sales channels like Facebook, Pinterest, and Wanelo, three new channels have been added to help you expose your products to millions of shoppers around the world. These are Kik, Buzzfeed, and Wish. Consequently, now you can sell your products to massive new audiences in brand new ways.

Custom Storefronts:

Leveraging the power of the Custom Storefronts feature, merchants can now sell their products truly anywhere – even outside of Shopify. The Storefront API enables developers to create unique buying experiences for various revenue generating avenues such as websites, mobile and desktop apps, in-game mobile purchases, and much more. In other words, Shopify can now be easily integrated into almost any platform for selling online.

New Chip & Swipe Reader:

Shopify POS is an amazing feature that gives you the ability to sell products and accept cards payments anywhere at any time, right from your smart phone or tablet. The sleek new Chip & Swipe Reader takes in-person selling to a whole new level, making it even easier for merchants to accepts credit and debit cards securely from anywhere they sell their products. Equipped with the latest EMV chip technology, this device is free for businesses new to Shopify POS.

New Developer Tools:

To help merchants get the most out of their marketing endeavors, Shopify has recently introduced four new APIs: Marketing Events API, Reporting API, Resource Feedback API, and Draft Orders API. All these new APIs aim to give you more insights into your marketing efforts, helping you know exactly what’s working and what’s not for your store. Making proper use of these APIs, you can optimize and improve your marketing efforts for the success of your Shopify store.

Shopify Polaris:

In May of this year, Shopify completely revamped the look and feel of admin interface for both desktop and mobile. To bring an exciting design refresh to the whole Shopify’s ecosystem, they updated their UX/design language on a very large scale and named it as a new design system – Polaris. It’s a feature-rich system that is designed to be used not only internally at Shopify but also outside the platform to build user interfaces for applications that integrate via the Shopify API. The main purpose of Polaris is unifying design and user interface to deliver a great experience to all of Shopify’s merchants.

New Theme Settings:

Shopify recently made several updates to its theme editor interface, making it even more flexible, functional and efficient than ever. With the new Shopify theme editor, not only merchants can add their own HTML code without breaking the user interface of the templated theme but also they will be able to directly upload images and edit their ALT text. Additionally, as the result of Shopify’s partnership with the Monotype font library, you can now implement 150 free fonts as web fonts in your Shopify theme. The new theme interface might seem a bit confusing to you at first, however, once you get familiar with the new editor’s capabilities, you’ll be able to use it much more efficiently.

Improved Discounts:

To make discounts easier to create and manage for merchants, Shopify has introduced a new Price Rules API, available to all Shopify app developers. Unlike the old Discounts API, which was being offered to only Shopify Plus merchants with app integrations and limiting merchants to the only percentage based and fixed amount discounts, the new Price Rules API gives merchants the ability to create more sophisticated discounts with two new flexible pricing rules: free shipping and discount code creation. Thus, providing you the adequate flexibility in discounts creation and management, the new Price Rules API helps you find the optimal discount model for your online business.

Multi-Location Inventory:

Given that managing inventory for multiple stores has always been a pain for merchants, Shopify soon (probably in later months this year) will be launching its new multi-location inventory system to help merchants manage multiple inventory locations using a single Shopify account. It would essentially be a complete overhaul of the Shopify’s standard inventory management system, making it easier for merchants to fulfill orders in bulk while also keeping their stock separate between different locations.

Shopify Plus Features

In addition to all the above features that are available for standard users, Shopify also introduced some game-changing features for Shopify Plus merchants and in this section; we’ll take a look at what they are.

Shopify Flow:

Shopify Flow is a time-saving automation tool built to help merchants manage their backend business workflows without the need for hiring costly developers. With Flow, not only you’re able to customize unique backend business workflows but also you can construct, import, and configure various workflow automation processes related to inventory and order management. This feature, however, currently in Beta and is expected to be officially launched later this year.

Payment Scripts:

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could customize the checkout experience for each of your individual customers? Thanks to Shopify Payment Scripts that peek inside the buyer’s information and instantly offer him a highly customized, relevant checkout experience. Using this intuitive yet powerful tool, you can quickly customize your checkout for a smarter, easier and faster shopping experience – and that too without touching your checkout.liquid file.

Shopify Pay:

Designed to simplify and accelerate the entire checkout process, Shopify Pay provides shoppers a safe, secure and lightning-fast way to pay money to the seller. Allowing customers to save their card, shipping and payment information, Shopify Pay turns the cumbersome form filling process of 16 fields into a relatively very faster two-step checkout experience. Next time customers can check out in seconds at any Shopify-powered store by simply typing in their email address, followed by a 6-digit verification code sent to their mobile phone. Isn’t that too fast?

Launchpad:

LaunchPad is a new automation app for Shopify Plus merchants who often run flash sales, sales campaigns, and product launch events. It empowers merchants to schedule, coordinate, and execute potentially complex eCommerce events in advance so they can handle the extra traffic and sales volume with ease. Besides, it also offers a real-time analytics dashboard that lets merchants track a wide range of sale events such as average order value, total sales, and inventory levels.

Wholesale Channel:

Previously, when it came to fulfilling merchants’ wholesale needs, Shopify had no option to provide merchants a dedicated wholesale store. To combat this issue, Shopify created a new B2B platform – the Wholesale Channel. Unlike the standard B2C operation, Shopify’s new Wholesale Channel gives merchants the power to create and run a separate password-protected wholesale store using their existing Shopify account. However, to run all the wholesale operations smoothly, orders and management are put in the same Shopify dashboard.

Mobile Store Builder:

This is really a big one! The brand-new mobile store builder empowers merchants to create native iOS and Android apps for their stores without any technical expertise or coding knowledge. Powered by a sophisticated template system, this new feature comes packed with several beautiful, immersive themes that can be easily customized to match your brand identity. Moreover, you can even publish your apps to both the Google Play and Apple App Store. While this feature may not please everyone, it’s certainly going to be a great option for merchants who are on a tight budget to build a bespoke mobile app.

If you’re looking for a custom Shopify theme development service to give your online store a unique look and feel, we’ll do it for you. Contact us to get a free estimate now!