Shopify Editions Winter ’24 release: highlights for partners and merchants
Shopify Editions Winter 24 features an impressive array of innovative capabilities and enhancements, all aimed at empowering Shopify partners and merchants with the advanced tools needed to thrive in today's competitive ecommerce landscape. With these latest releases, Shopify is reinforcing its position as the leader in ecommerce technology.
So what was announced in the Shopify Editions Winter 24 release, and how can these features benefit merchants? Here are the most noteworthy Shopify Editions Winter 24 features we believe will have the greatest impact on your business.
Increased Product Variants: A Long-Awaited Enhancement
Shopify has enhanced the core structure of its product model, addressing a longstanding limitation for brands with extensive variant options. The 100 product variant limit has been a notable restriction on the platform, creating frustration and even becoming a slightly farcical topic among the ecommerce community. In the Shopify Editions Winter 24 release, Shopify has finally addressed this challenge by announcing the expansion to a 2000 product variant limit, which will be gradually rolled out throughout 2024.
What Shopify says:
"Our new GraphQL APIs increase Shopify's variant limit from 100 to 2,000 per product. This will help those of you with complex product catalogues and lots of colourways, sizing, and SKU options."
Combined Listings: Enhanced Product Presentation
Customers want to see the specific colour and variant image of the product they're considering purchasing on hover. Currently, Shopify allows for this by applying an image to each of the variant options; however, it's not possible to apply a different product description or media carousel to these variants. At Multivitamin, we've found suitable workarounds, but native solutions are always preferable.
Shopify's Combined Listings app, one of the most anticipated Shopify Editions Winter 24 features, will provide merchants with a parent product featuring multiple options. Each option serves as a child product with its own individual description, media carousel, and dedicated URL consolidated into a single product page, with a unified listing for the most streamlined customer shopping experience. Although it's not out yet, you can sign up for early release access through Shopify.
When combined with the new 2,000 variant limit, merchants will have significantly more flexibility when dealing with complex product combinations.
What Shopify says:
"Merchants that use Shopify Combined Listings can offer a more compelling and higher-converting customer experience. One that matches customer expectations to have the full confidence they need to purchase."
Semantic Search: AI-Powered Product Discovery
Among the most innovative Shopify Editions Winter 24 features is what we might call "search on AI steroids." Helping shoppers find the products they're looking for, Shopify has launched a new AI-powered search called Semantic Search. This search capability goes beyond keyword matching and instead understands the buyer's intent by giving them the ability to formulate search queries in a more intuitive way, providing richer, more relevant results.
The feature uses both text and image data of your products to serve more relevant results. For example, if a customer searches for "christmas party shoes," Semantic Search can associate the search term to colours green or red for christmas, and pumps for party shoes. This is currently available to Plus merchants with English storefronts and fewer than 200,000 products. While this may be the logical next step in the AI revolution, it represents a significant advancement for ecommerce search capabilities.
How did Shopify put it?
"Semantic Search lets your customers search for products in a way that is more intuitive to them. Semantic Search, one of Shopify's AI-powered storefront search features, goes beyond keyword matching and better understands your customer's intent, returning more relevant search results."
Checkout Extensibility: Customisation Without Compromise
This Shopify Editions Winter 24 feature is something our clients at Multivitamin are requesting constantly. Checkout extensibility makes it easier to customise your store's checkout experience through apps that are upgrade-safe, higher converting, and integrated with Shop Pay. It offers enhanced options for customising delivery, checkout extensions, and advanced settings, providing merchants with more control over their checkout process. It allows merchants to tailor every step of the buying journey, through checkout and thank you pages.
There are 90+ new apps specifically designed to work with checkout extensibility. Some of our favourite apps to customise your checkout experience include Checkout Blocks, Rebuy, ReCharge, and Smile.io.
What's Shopify saying?
"We're proud to have the best-converting checkout on the internet, and we're dedicated to continuously enhancing its security, speed, and global interoperability."
If you'd like to learn how other merchants have used checkout extensibility to drive more sales, Shopify recommends reading about Monos's checkout extension user experience.
Subscriptions: Native Recurring Revenue Options
With Shopify's new subscription app, highlighted in the Shopify Editions Winter 24 features, customers can receive products they love on a regular basis. Merchants can easily configure and manage subscriptions directly from Shopify's admin dashboard, and customers can manage their subscriptions through an intuitive account portal to update delivery details, skip orders, access discounts, and more.
While it doesn't currently deliver the same level of functionality offered by third-party subscription integrations like Recharge, Shopify's native subscription functionality is offered at no extra cost. This gives smaller merchants the opportunity to open up an entirely new revenue stream which may previously have been out of reach.
Beyond the Highlights: More Shopify Editions Winter 24 Features
There are over 100+ new feature updates that were announced as part of Shopify's Editions Winter 24 release, all of which can be viewed on the Shopify website. It's worth noting that not all features are available immediately, as many will be released throughout the year, and some are only available to Shopify Plus merchants currently.
If you are interested in finding out how your store can benefit from any of these Shopify Editions Winter 24 features, or if you need alternative solutions, please get in touch with Multivitamin Studio's specialist Shopify commerce team. We would be excited to provide guidance and expertise to help you maximise your store's potential.