Shopify Editions Winter '24 Release: Highlights for Partners and Merchants
Shopify Editions Winter '24 is packed with innovative features and enhancements, all of which are aimed to empower Shopify partners and merchants with enhanced tools needed to thrive in the increasingly competitive ecommerce landscape. With the latest releases from Shopify, they’re reinforcing themselves as the leader in ecommerce tech.
So what was announced, and how can it benefit merchants? Here are some of the most noteworthy features we think will have the most impact.
Increased Product Variants
Shopify has enhanced the core structure of its product model, addressing a long standing limitation for brands with a high number of variants. The 100 product variant limit has long been a notable restriction on the platform, creating frustration and even becoming a slightly farcical topic among the ecommerce community. Shopify has finally addressed this, 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 colorways, sizing, and SKU options.”
Combined Listings
Customers want to see the specific colour and variant image of the product they are looking to buy 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 there is nothing like a native solution, and combined listings is just that. Shopify’s Combined Listings app 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 here.
When combined with the new 2,000 variant limit, merchants will have so much more flexibility when dealing with complex product combinations.
What Shopify say:
“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
Or 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 goes beyond keyword matching, instead understands the buyer’s intent by giving them the ability to formulate search queries in a more intuitive way giving 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. This may be the obvious step in the AI revolution but it’s a biggie.
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
This is something our clients at Multivitamin are asking for constantly so it gave us tingles in places we shouldn’t mention. 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. Yup. It’s ruddy great.
There are 90+ new apps specifically designed to work with checkout extensibility, but here are some of our favourite apps to customise your checkout experience, 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, read this article about Monos’s checkout extension user experience.
Subscriptions
With Shopify's new subscription app, customers are able to 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 directly 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 our old friends at Recharge, Shopify’s native subscription functionality is offered at no extra cost, giving smaller merchants the opportunity to open up an entirely new revenue stream which may previously have been out of reach. Yessir.
There are over 100+ new feature updates that were announced as part of Shopify’s Editions Winter 24’, all of which can be viewed here. Not all are available immediately as many will be released throughout the year and equally are only available to Shopify Plus merchants currently.
If you are interested in finding out how your store can benefit from any of these features, or find alternative solutions, please get in touch with Multivitamin Studio’s specialist Shopify commerce team who would be excited to provide guidance and expertise to maximise your store potential. Let’s go!
