Shopify’s New Opportunities

Published in

Aspedan.dev

6 min readJun 18, 2024

Shopify’s Winter Edition hits a hard comeback with lots of new features and added compatibilities. From seamless integration capabilities and cutting-edge tools that streamline operations to newly added features for Marketing, Checkout, Order tracking, Internationalization and so on, Shopify’s Winter Edition is not just an update — it’s a transformative experience that redefines what’s possible in online retail.

Shopify’s developer previews are a game-changer for companies providing solutions for Shopify’s App Store, Since Taxonomy of each developer preview consists of several new features, It offers a sneak peek into the future of e-commerce. When a new feature is accompanied by a backwards-incompatible change to Shopify APIs, or a significant change to the online store or the Shopify admin, it’s included in a developer preview.

By granting early access to upcoming features, these previews are not just a testing ground for compatibility and innovation but also a strategic goldmine. Savvy developers can analyze these insights to craft marketing strategies that align with Shopify’s trajectory, ensuring their apps deliver maximum value upon feature release.

With a generous 9-month window before new API changes hit the market, developers have enough time to adapt and perfect their offerings, making developer previews an indispensable tool in staying ahead in the competitive world of e-commerce.

As a first part for this series we take a look on a bunch of new features shopify has offered on its Winter`24 edition.

Merchandise Wiser

No matter what you’re selling these days, customer always expect to know every details of the product in a way that’s easy, informative, sufficient and categorized. throwing a dirty pile of information towards the customers web-page not only makes the customer confused but also makes it harder to detect and digest the important bits of the data. as Shopify mentioned in its Winter`24 edition:

robust and thorough product descriptions are one way you can convey the most important information about your product and address any questions that may arise.

on top of that, rich media which visually exhibits your products in all its variations is a crucial part of the conversion process. your customers want to view. customers although, expect to view all of the information and rich media from one product details page (PDP).

The Shopify Combined Listings app is a free app built by Shopify exclusively for Shopify Plus merchants. It empowers merchants to create a product listing that combines all the different variations of a product into one centralized product listing. Each variation can have its very own image carousel, descriptive URL, and publishing controls.

before the existance of Shopify Combined Listings app, Shopify owners who wanted to visually showcase all of a product’s variations into one product listing typically chose to create each individual variant as a separate product in Shopify.

Customize checkouts

It’s evident that, Shopify has the best-converting checkout on the internet. Shopify always pays attention to the checkouts security and interoperability. Though in addition, For large businesses to reach their full potential, they must to have their own checkout customized to their needs so that, they can differentiate their brands, drive value, and comply with local businesses regulations.

Shopify’s solution back in the day was checkout.liquid but it had its own limitations. namely, checkout.liquid customizations were hard to test and maintain and required periodic and complicated upgrades to access new features. not to mention, it was also incompatible with Shop Pay.

To Address the above mentioned challenges, Shopify built checkout extensibility, which is fast, secure and upgrade-safe. It not only surpassess the limitations of checkout.liquid, but it provides a far more powerful solution for customizing checkout.

Customizations made through Checkout Extensibility work seamlessly with Shop Pay, which converts up to 50% better than guest checkout. New features like one-page checkout, Shopify’s bundles offering, discount stacking, and more are instantly available, and they’ll work consistently across all buying surfaces. Our ever-expanding app ecosystem offers a wide variety of additional app-based customization options. As we are constantly launching new APIs and UI components, the possibilities are endless.

For Winter`24 forecast Shopify has introduced 14 new APIs, UI Components, and features to elevate your checkout.

Branding API

The Branding API which has been introduced recently empowers developers to change and transform the look and feel of checkout drastically, by changing and customizing color settings, schemes, header and footer and container styling in the main body and order summary sections.

Cart and Checkout Validation API

With the latest update, developers now have the capability to utilize the Cart and Checkout Validation Function API for both public and custom app development. This expansion allows developers to implement bespoke validation logic within public apps, enabling a robust configuration interface suitable for a variety of applications. For instance, developers can set up rules that limit certain items to specific customers or enforce compulsory fields.

The Validation API allows developers to provide their own validation of a cart and checkout, including express checkouts, such as PayPal, Shop Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.

Privacy & Policy

Additionally, Shopify’s introducing support for privacy consent, enabling apps to gather consent seamlessly during the checkout phase, ensuring adherence to regulatory standards in various regions.

UI Components

Shopify has introduced new UI Components in order to customize checkout page including

Map

Use the Map component to provide visual representation of geographic data such as verifying address, package or pickup locations.
Please note that the merchant or partner has to provide an API key and a set of allowed domains where the map would render.

ChoiceList

Use choice lists to present a list of choices where buyers can make a single selection or multiple selections.

ToggleButtonGroup

ToggleButtonGroup allows you to make a single choice out of the number of options provided. This is similar to the ChoiceList component, but without controls such as checkbox or radio button.