Shopify's Amazing New Features Revealed!

Shopify just announced the Summer Editions 2023, which is over a hundred different product updates across the Shopify platform.

After going through the list of everything that was announced, it feels like the unofficial theme here is all about "Saving You Time".

So let's talk about my seven favorite updates that they've announced and how it can help you save time every single week in your Shopify store.

Managing your store’s inventory

First off, let's talk about managing inventory.

Bulk Editor

They've made updates to the Bulk editor tool to really streamline the process. They've made it easier for you to customize the columns to make it easier for you to edit, as well as just made it a faster load time.

And as someone who uses the bulk editor tool often, I'm pretty excited about this update.

Shopify Collective App

Another exciting way that they're letting you manage your inventory better in your Shopify store by adding in inventory from other suppliers through the Shopify Collective app.

With this app, you can easily add in products from other suppliers, but the supplier does the fulfillment for you, so it's an upgraded version of doing dropshipping.

Plus it could be a unique opportunity if you hand make your own products to potentially offer it to other Shopify stores for it to be sold on those stores as well.

Offering different ways to sell

Shopify Bundles App

Next, they're saving you time by offering different ways for you to sell your products, so you can use the Shopify bundles app to quickly bundle similar products so that you can increase your average order cart value.

This could already be done through an app, through the Shopify app store, but if you have a simple bundle that you're wanting to do of a few different products, giving a discount for getting multiple products at once, this is a really easy and straightforward way to add this functionality into your store pretty quickly.

Shopify Subscriptions App

The same is true for the Shopify subscriptions app. It makes it really easy to offer monthly subscriptions for your products in your store, and if you don't have a really complicated subscription model that you're trying to set up of mix and matching different products, you don't have to go with a third party subscription app and you can just use the Shopify option.

Increasing Variant Limits

Also, I'm really excited that they've expanded how many variants that you can have for your product.

So a variant is anytime you're offering a one product like a t-shirt in different sizes like small, medium, large, but the numbers add up quickly whenever you add in another option like color or a specific kind of design on the shirt as well.

Those are called variants, and before Shopify capped that at 100 variants per product, which was really frustrating and caused a lot of problems, especially if you were wanting to customize your product.

Now they've announced that they're increasing this to 250 variants, which honestly has been long overdue. I feel like the Shopify community has asked for this for the last decade.

Offering different places to sell

Shopify Marketplace Connect App

Next, they're offering different places for you to sell online all in one place, all with the Shopify Marketplace Connect app.

Now, you could already have different sales channels set up of selling through eBay or Amazon or Walmart, but now it's all streamlined in one place through the Marketplace Connect app. It makes it easier than ever to change your prices and manage your listings all in one central area for your products in different marketplaces.

Again, saving you time for sure.

Making your store a hub

It feels overall like Shopify's just wanting to make your store the hub, and that's where they've announced new B2B or business-to-business features that they have of offering different wholesale options for products.

Wholesale Price Breaks

So you have that under product catalogs where you could have a wholesale catalog. You can also offer price breaks for different quantities after someone's purchasing a wholesale amount.

Website Design Context Selector

You also have the new context selector, and this is in the theme customized features, and you can switch to actually show a page and add in different features for wholesale customers.

There you can just select the B2B feature, and you can do this as well with international. So if you are planning on selling your products internationally as well, you can design the same product page but have different features or different contexts or images for international shoppers as well.

Again, making it really easy to have one Shopify store, you don't have to have all these different sites and different things that you're managing. It's all one central hub for you to manage all of your products in one area.

I definitely feel like this is really helpful as you grow and scale where you may not be doing wholesale or international orders yet, but it lets you really set your store up to scale for the future.

Streamlining design

Okay, so let's talk now about how they're streamlining the design.

Shop App Customization

First off, they're making it really quick and easy for you to customize the Shopify Shop app to add in more designs and functionality.

The shop app is an app through Shopify where your products can be featured and your store can be highlighted, so you can go in and customize this really easily to match your branding and add in different information more about your products and your collections.

New Theme Customization Features

Going into the theme customizer, they've added in some new default features as well, like animations for a little bit more of a pizazz to your store, as well as parallax scrolling for images.

Again, just to add a few little extra details that can really help elevate your brand, and they made it really easy to turn these on and off, which again, just saves you time as well.

Flex Sections

They've got a new feature coming out soon as well called flex sections. This isn't out yet, but it's going to be out shortly and it really takes drag and drop editing to the next level.

You can go in and customize things so much more with this functionality, so if you're not yet subscribed, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you can be the first to see how to use this new design functionality for your store as soon as it's released.

Faster Checkout

They've also upgraded the checkout. They already had a pretty seamless checkout process already, but they've made it even faster by condensing it to just one page for the checkout, so you don't have to go through different screens now of payment and shipping and all of that additional information.

It's all on one central page that's gonna make checkout even faster, and I think probably reduce the amount of abandoned cards as well just because it's making it more streamlined and faster for your customer to check out.

Enhanced AI functionality

Lastly, we have got to talk about the enhanced AI functionality.

We've seen Shopify integrate AI a lot into stores recently with Shopify Magic, which will write different descriptions, product information, all for you.

Chat Support

However, they've taken it up a step with in their Shopify inbox where you can go in and actually set up some instant responses to highlight different FAQs so that way you can offer chat on your site, but have instant answers for customers.

If a customer wants to still ask a question and chat with you though, you can use Shopify Magic to write really quick responses and be able to give all the information needed to your customer.

I think this is gonna be really key, especially the age of e-commerce that we're in now of people really expecting quick responses.

So I think being able to offer chat on your site and tie into Shopify's inbox and all of this functionality that's already built into the platform is going to be really key.

Shopify Sidekick

Of course, they've also recently announced Shopify Sidekick, which is their AI assistant that follows you inside of Shopify.

This can be helpful if you have different questions. It can also set up things like discounts for you or make changes to different collections or areas of your site, plus they demoed how it can easily make changes to your design.

Overall, I'm excited to play around with this more and I've got a video coming out soon all about Shopify Sidekick and how you can use it better for your Shopify store. So again, subscribe to our YouTube channel for that as well.

Okay, so that's the updates that I'm the most excited about with Shopify Summer Editions 2023, and I would love to hear what functionality or features are you the most excited for your store as well?

You can also check out some other videos I have about Shopify and how to grow your Shopify store.