Shopify Unite 2019 Announcements - New Features on the Platform

We are here! Attending the first Shopify Unite for us in the 4th edition of the event. We are reporting live from the event, to get you all the new announcements. 

Shopify Unite is the annual partner and developer conference. Partners and developers come together to celebrate shared accomplishments, forge new connections, and ignite the future of commerce technology.  

During the last versions, Shopify Unite has been the platform in which Shopify founders and directors make all the new announcements. So we are sitting here now, second row to the left, right at the time when the first speaker should start talking. To let you know about all the announcements we are going to learn about. 

Online Store

  • Major upgrade to the online store - Master Pages
    • Sections will be across the online store, to control content on every page, on every screen type. 
    • Edit multiple pages at the same time while working on “Master Pages” 
    • Apps will be able to be integrated within sections in the online store
      • Adding app to a page will be as easy as adding text to the online store
  • Scalability
    • Content portability
      • Merchants can switch themes, and all the content will follow, seamlessly! That’s BRILLIANT! 
        • Merchants never have to move their content when moving from one theme to another
    • Drafts
      • Merchants can have larger changes in drafts before going live, and schedule going live.

Shopping Behaviour:

  • Support for new media types
    • Online store will support: (not only images as of now in the product pages)
      • Video
      • Native 3D support
        • Customers are twice more likely to purchase when they interact with a 3D purchase
        • Customers can zoom in and out, and see the product from any side, and also use the AR experience to see it in real life size
    • Shopify is literally pushing the industry forward by being the first platform to offer native 3D support.

Checkout:

  • After Shopify Pay and Quick Checkout, this year there will be:
  • Checkout App extensions:
    • Partners will be able to build apps that integrates in the checkout experience, that was never there before
    • Buyers will never have to exist the checkout flow to 3rd party apps like what used to happen before with some apps like the subscriptions apps.
  • The ability to up-sell to customers directly through checkout

Crossborder Shopping: 

  •  Multicurrency:
    • Multi currency is available on ALL MERCHANTS ON SHOPIFY! It will start with the merchants using Shopify Payments.
    • Shopify Payments will start in Netherlands and Denmark
    • (Will this be available to third party payment gateways? That's a question we have in Egypt)
  • New Multi Language API
    • You can translate everything through Shopify, to serve localized content to every country and make it easier for brands to do cross border Shopping.
    • It is available now for the developers to start working on

Shopify POS:

  • The new Tap & Chip Case, no more big POS sets for the stores (images will follow) - shipping later this year.
  • Updates to POS App:
    • Store staff can recommend products based on pervious purchases
    • Merchants can see a bird live view to see sales by locations and by employees
    • Store staff can still make a sale if the locations they are working from is out of stock by selling from stock of another location
  • New Cart App Extension for POS App
    • Apps/Extensions can be integrated now to POS app (like loyalty) to be able to use them seamlessly within the POS app.
  • Reimagining Point of Sale:
    • Completely new Shopify POS app
    • A new app with new experience:
      • Smart grid features for the staff
      • Dynamic tiles for merchants to customize their own Shopify POS apps
      • Global Search within the app
      • Adding new retail staff model:
        • access levels according to roles
        • sales targets
        • more personalized experience per sales person
    • Introducing Buy Online, Pick up in Store! THIS IS AWESOME! 
    • It will allow much more open APIs to developers to modify on.

Backend (Dashboard) Updates: 

  • Shipping Profiles:
    • Merchants can setting shipping profiles according to: 
      • Types of products (t-shirts vs CDs vs furniture vs food, etc)
      • Locations where the products are shipped from
    • API is also available for developers to do more in this
  • Fulfillments:
    • New fulfillment API announcement available to developers to avail more visibility, flexibility and control over every step between the merchant --> 3rd party shipping company --> and customers.
  • Order editing:
    • Now, finally, you can edit an order after a customer submitted it. That's a huge change in the Shopify platform and it has always been a problem to merchants. 
    • So, when customers change their opinion, you don't have to cancel the whole order and re-do it again. 
    • Order edited API is also available to create some apps and automations around this
  • Shopify has expanded from 6 languages to 11 more languages, Arabic is still not one of them :( :( :( 

Shopify Plus: 

  • All new Shopify Plus:
    • Single merchant identity account to manage all the sub-stores for merchants running multiple sub brands or multiple stores.
    • 1 central place to manage stores and manage users
  • Multi store tools:
    • Customers will be synced to the central dashboard of the business. So customer information is not fragmented across stores. 
  • Global Workflows across all the stores

 Developers: 

  • Making apps easier to build:
    • Introducing Shopify App Command Line Interface_<CLI>
      • This will have ready made shopify commands that are already written there, would make it much easier for developers to focus on the new things they're building instead of reinventing the wheel.
    • App CLI can setup a new development store while you're building the app that has the app installed on it
      • App CLI will have your app automatically installed inside of your development store
      • New commands are coming to App CLI
      • App CLI will be open sourced for new commands to be added everyday
      • It's a single tool to build a world class app on Shopify
  • Making apps more embedded on Shopify:
    • Introducing the new App Bridge script, to be able to use your app on all tools 
    • 4x faster on mobile
    • Available on all development tools 
    • App bridge will support all mobile functions too
  • Introducing new features to GraphQL
    • One API call 
    • Future releasing for APIs will be only in GraphQL API 
    • New documentation for GraphQL to make it easier for everyone to adopt it

Shopify Fulfillment Networks:

  • Shopify setup warehouses and warehouse systems across the US to help merchants in the logistics process
    • Fulfillment network will help merchants send their products to Shopify fulfillment networks
    • Once setup, merchants don't need to worry about fulfillment or delivery. Shopify takes care of it all. 
    • It will take less than 1 day to fulfill, 2 days to deliver, 99.9% order accuracy
  • Supports Multichannel
  • Custom packaging 
  • Returns/exchanges
  • Supports merchants of every size (10 to 10000 packages per day)
  • For early access it's through shopify.com/fulfillment
  • They're currently accepting new fulfillment network partners to expand their network worldwide!!!!

        We see all of this are opportunities to developers to work more on Shopify APIs and customize localized apps for us in Egypt to do more and more with these capabilities.

        We are reporting live, so we apologize for any typos or being high level, more details will come. 

        "The opportunity ahead was never been bigger"Harley Finkelstein, Shopify Chief Operating Officer

        Join Shopify now

        The official blog is here

         

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