Last week marked a significant milestone in the e-commerce landscape with the launch of Shopify's Summer Editions 2024 with more than 150+ exciting e-commerce features. This release, like previous ones, comes packed with a mix of immediately available enhancements, others accessible through early access, and more set to roll out progressively throughout the year. Here we have outlined major top 10 updates category-wise that are coming with the introduction of new summer editions.

Top 10 Updates in Shopify Summer '24 Editions

Markets: A Unified Home For Business Expansion

For any online merchant, growth is crucial whether it is international or through other channels like B2B (B2B is only available on plus plans), or retail. Recognizing this, Shopify has made a major upgrade by introducing markets. With markets, you can customize everything including catalog, store theme, currency and domains all within a single shop itself.

Think of markets as a central place of growth among all of your available markets, where you can see performance for each channel, compare performances, expand the business to new countries or experience new business models.

Markets centralize all your growth efforts within the Shopify admin. Whether you're looking to enter a new country, expand into a B2B market, or establish a retail market, the procedure remains straightforward: just create a new market, customize it to your needs, and you're all set.

Split Shipping In Checkout

Shopify has introduced more clarification and options for customers. Provide customers with greater transparency and options during checkout by informing them if an order will be divided into multiple shipments. They can select from the lowest price, the quickest delivery, or personalized shipping preferences.

Note: Split shipping in checkout is in early access, and is available to only some Shopify stores.

When a cart includes items that cannot be shipped together in one package, the order is split into multiple shipments. For example, if a customer adds a preorder item to their cart, the checkout will indicate that the preorder item will ship separately from available items. The customer can choose a shipping option for each separate shipment.

The shipping method section of the checkout will show how many shipments the order has been split into and the available shipping methods for each shipment. The customer can then select from the available shipping options for each shipment.

Example of a Split Shipment from Different Locations

Suppose your store sells shirts and you have two locations: Location A and Location B. A customer wants to buy a green shirt and a red shirt. Location A has the green shirt in stock, while Location B has the red shirt. At checkout, each shirt is split into a different shipment with the following options:

• Standard shipping (5–8 days) for $10 USD
• Express shipping (same day) for $20 USD

By default, the lowest price standard shipping method is selected for both shipments. If the red shirt is needed urgently for a birthday party, the customer can select the express shipping method for that shipment. The green shirt, needed later, can remain with the standard shipping method. Consequently, the red shirt will be delivered that day, and the green shirt will arrive in 5–8 days.

Incompatibility Considerations for Split Shipping at Checkout

• Split shipping cannot be applied to checkouts from draft orders or B2B draft orders.
• Shopify Shipping Scripts cannot access split shipping at checkout.
• If the entire cart can be shipped by local delivery, the checkout will not display multiple shipments.
• Customers cannot choose how products in their cart are split. Ensure your shipping profiles and location fulfilment settings are correctly configured so products that can ship together aren’t split.
• By default, split shipping at checkout selects the lowest total shipping cost for all shipments.

Shopify Magic: Get More Done by AI

With the rise of e-commerce, Shopify has introduced some powerful AI tools to help you grow fast with minimal effort. Shopify Magic makes it easier to start, run and grow your business. With this recent update, Shopify introduced a new AI assistant "Sidekick", with the featured outline in the image below.

with using Sidekick you can easily convert the live chat box into checkouts giving you the growth in sales you always dreamed of. This is still in early access but this will definitely change the way customers will interact with your site, as they will be able to find the answers to their questions easily, whether it be a product FAQ or related to shipping and delivery.

There are also some features with Shopify Magic which is available right away in the admin. The first is to write Product descriptions using Generative AI. You can give some context about your product to the product description field in admin and use the magic button to generate the description the way you want. The great thing with this is you have the flexibility of tone on how you want your product description to sound.

Another useful Shopify Magic feature is to edit the product media automatically using AI. With an AI-enabled image editing tool built right into the admin, you can generate professionally generated product photos right away. Say goodbye to time-consuming editors.

Rebuilt Analytics

You get the most value from your data when using it to answer business questions—but those questions can be highly unique and specific, and hard to answer within rigid data frameworks. So Shopify has redesigned its built-for-commerce analytics platform to help you explore your data without constraints.

Now, you’ll be able to configure all pre-built Shopify reports to layer on any combination of metrics or dimensions you’re interested in seeing together like sales, sessions, average order value, conversion rate, country, etc. Once in a report, you can add or remove metrics and dimensions, change the visualization type, and specify a date range from the configuration panel. You’ll see the various selections populate in the report and from there you can save it to return to in the future.

Imagine you’d like to understand the success of a recent promotion you ran. You want to see sales side-by-side with sessions and understand how many visitors converted to new customers as a result. You likely also want to see the top products sold during the promotion to get insight into your top products driving sales, or whether the promotion was successful in moving specific inventory. Now, you’ll be able to see all that data and more in a single view. You can continue building on top of that analysis until you’ve found the answers to your business questions.

With the new analytics experience, you’ll be able to see a unified view of multiple intersections of your data, like sales and sessions over time, giving you the precise answers you need about the many facets of your business. Soon, you’ll also be able to query your data in real-time with the same degree of flexibility using ShopifyQL, all from the convenience of your admin.

Another critical need for businesses is access to quick, easily consumable data for the most important and common performance metrics. The new analytics has a dashboard experience designed for quick and easy use right when you land on the analytics section in Shopify. If you’re short on time, or before diving into deeper analysis, you can view your most important metrics like sales, orders, or sessions at a glance and get a pulse on the real-time health of your store—no digging around in reports required.

Shopify has made the dashboard completely customizable so that you can select which metrics you want to see appear there, in what order, and how visible you want them. You can drag & drop, resize, add, or remove any metric card—including custom cards for reports you create—to tailor your dashboard to your needs and make it that much easier to find what you’re looking for in your data.

With fresh, up-to-the-minute data and new UI enhancements, Shopify’s analytics is gearing up to be more powerful than ever. The new experience, which will be available to all Shopify merchants in the coming months, will take the heavy lifting out of analyzing your data so you can focus on optimizing your store and meeting your customers’ needs.

New Shopify Theme Style Settings

Shopify has introduced new theme-style settings. Developers can now use them in the preview stores to continue building the latest and most efficient experiences for merchants. These style settings map directly to CSS Properties and allow merchants to adopt different values for different viewport breakpoints. Hence, merchants can easily customize the appearance of the mobile version without needing separate settings for each breakpoint. Shopify is set to offer a wide range of style settings via style panels, starting with layout, size and spacing with more coming soon. Developers won't have to manually code each individual setting themselves, making it easier to provide more styling flexibility to merchants to better express their brand.

Block targeting is a new feature that gives theme developers the ability to dictate which theme blocks can be placed in specific sections or parent blocks. For instance, a slideshow section may be designed to only accept slide blocks. This enhances the control developers have over the placement of blocks while preserving the flexibility and reusability that make theme blocks so valuable.

For example, a slideshow section is configured to exclusively accommodate slide blocks, streamlining the design process and ensuring consistency.

Furthermore, these blocks can now be statically rendered, meaning they can’t be moved or removed by merchants. This capability allows developers to create layouts with fixed functionalities that cannot be altered by the merchant. An example of this is a "view all" button that appears only when the number of products exceeds those displayed, or ensures that certain elements, such as search filters on a collections page, are permanently visible. These features provide developers with more design stability and merchants with a more consistent user experience.

Hydrogen Customizer with Utopia

Hydrogen has consistently aimed to simplify the development of top-tier headless storefronts by streamlining the most cumbersome tasks, enabling you to concentrate on the aspects of your work you enjoy most.

At this edition of our conference, we are thrilled to introduce a significant enhancement to the Hydrogen toolkit—the Hydrogen Visual Editor.

Leveraging Utopia, an open-source platform now part of Shopify, we are setting the stage for a revolutionary collaborative environment within Hydrogen.

We have created a unified space where your entire team can collaborate effectively using a WYSIWYG editor that allows real-time manipulation of every facet of your storefront. This includes reordering sections on a template, modifying content, fine-tuning design elements like the border radius of buttons, or simply adding comments for team members.

Importantly, this integration does not disrupt your existing workflows.

The Hydrogen Visual Editor maintains your code as the primary source of truth. Any modifications to components are pushed back as pull requests on GitHub for review, while changes made locally in tools like VS Code can also be pulled into the editor for visual adjustments. We are developing a direct integration with Shopify's APIs, ensuring that your edits are not only saved but also synchronized back to Shopify. Additionally, the editor supports integration with third-party content sources, enhancing its versatility and utility in your development process.

Managed Markets: Markets Pro

Markets Pro is now managed markets with the latest release from Shopify, providing you with all the success with no stress. Using managed markets is like instantly activating a team to successfully manage all the challenges that come while selling in different geographies.

Managed Markets combines Shopify's international sales features with a Merchant of Record service (powered by Global-e). The additional features assume many of the operational elements of global sales, allowing merchants to not only sell easily around the world but also keep their workload and overhead low. This is currently available to merchants located in the United States on any Shopify plan and Shopify is planning to add more regions. To use it, merchants must first need to apply the upgrade in admin. Shopify then approves the request to use the managed markets based on the types of products available in the store. This model uses the pay-as-you-go approach so you can use this for as much as you want and you can deactivate any time you want.

Also, Managed Markets has partnered with multiple shipping carriers to offer affordable shipping rates for all international shipping. With that now Express shipping in the world can deliver in around 1-5 days.

Hence, the increasing workload doesn't block your global growth instead with managed markets you can focus on your business while it handles your operations and infrastructure. For more information on Shopify-managed markets, you can read here .

Ship To & From Retail Stores

Another exciting update includes setting up store transfers so that customers can have greater flexibility and convenience in how they receive their orders. By setting up store transfer customer can pick up the order from their preferred store. Also, it allows shipping the products directly from a store using Shopify POS.

By default, pickup in-store is available only when the entire order is in stock at the pickup location. If you have multiple locations, then you can set up store transfers that let you automatically transfer inventory from one location to your in-store pickup location when an item is out of stock or when an item isn't in stock at all. You can also set up different processing times for orders that require a store transfer. The closest location with stock to the pickup location is prioritized. After you activate pickup in-store, your customers can choose between Ship and Pick up options in the Delivery section of your checkout. When they select the Pickup option, they can choose the location where they want to pick up their order. Customers can view pickup locations only in their country. They can change their country by clicking Change location. The processing time that you select in the in-store pickup settings is displayed at checkout.

Easy Retail Checkout

While online data offers critical insights, traditionally, obtaining a comprehensive understanding of your in-store customers has posed significant challenges. This lack of information hampers your ability to personalize the in-store experience, target marketing initiatives effectively, and build stronger customer relationships.

Shopify POS's email capture at checkout is designed to bridge this informational gap. This feature streamlines the process of connecting brands with consumers, enhancing your retail operations and fostering deeper connections with your clientele.

Capturing customer information at the point of sale can be intrusive and often creates friction during checkout. Customers might hesitate to share their details, and staff may be reluctant to ask. However, Shopify POS integrates seamlessly with the Shop Pay buyer network—including Shop Pay's accelerated checkout and the Shop app, where users can track orders and discover new brands. This integration allows for a smoother transaction process.

When a customer makes a purchase using a Shopify card reader, such as POS Terminal or POS Go, Shopify POS can identify if the customer has a Shop Pay account. If a match is found, the customer’s email and phone number automatically appear at checkout, enabling them to:

• Receive their receipt digitally via the Shop app, email, or SMS, which simplifies future purchases and returns.
• Opt-in to marketing communications effortlessly, enhancing brand loyalty.

Customers not yet using Shop can quickly input their email at checkout to receive a digital receipt and opt into marketing communications, ensuring a streamlined and positive experience.

As with all Shopify solutions, we prioritize data privacy and compliance. Customers maintain full control over their data within the Shop app settings, and all email capture mechanisms comply with local privacy regulations.

For businesses operating both online and in-store, the disparity in data availability is stark. Online, every interaction provides valuable insights, whereas in brick-and-mortar settings, capturing similar data is more challenging. Email capture effectively bridges this gap, addressing key business concerns such as:

• Inaccurate data capture: Ensures precise data collection at checkout, avoiding errors like typos or the reluctance of customers to provide details, which can lead to missed opportunities.
• Unclear sales performance across locations: Help identify which stores are most effective at driving customer acquisition and repeat sales, whether in-store or online.

By automating the capture of customer data, you gain valuable insights that lead to enhanced customer visibility, an expanded customer base, and an improved purchasing experience for all.

All in all, Shopify's Summer Editions 2024 represents a strategic advancement in the e-commerce space, introducing over 150 innovative features designed to enhance the merchant and customer experience alike. By focusing on scalable growth opportunities through Markets, enhancing customer interaction with AI-driven tools like Shopify Magic, and expanding analytical capabilities, Shopify continues to empower merchants to streamline their operations and tailor their offerings more precisely. Furthermore, the introduction of features like Managed Markets and flexible shipping options underscores Shopify's commitment to providing robust, adaptable solutions that cater to the dynamic needs of modern businesses. As the landscape of e-commerce evolves, these enhancements are poised to equip Shopify merchants with the tools necessary for sustained success and adaptability in a competitive market.

Contact us if you have any questions or are looking to upgrade your online store to the best of the world.