Shopify Updates You Need To Know For Q3 2021

On June 29, Shopify Unite announced upcoming changes to the platform that mostly are centered around its infrastructure, tooling, and technologies. While some may hear ‘Shopify conference’ and think that’s as nerdy as it gets, ad buyers, brand/shop owners, and marketers alike are all eyes and ears right now. 👀👂

Instead of making you read through hundreds of pages of content, and thousands of tweets, we’ve combed through and created this nice TL;DR for both marketers and shop owners to get you back to whatever you were doing before you found this blog.

Shopify Unite 2021 Announcements - for Marketers

• Shopify Audiences (‼️) is an upcoming data exchange network, which uses aggregated conversion data across ALL opted-in merchants on Shopify to generate a custom audience (like for FB/IG ads) for any given product.

  • When merchants opt-in to Shopify Audiences, they are sharing their store data with other opted-in merchants so that Shopify can create custom audiences for people who purchase not just one store’s products, but ALL opted-in Shopify stores’ products. For example, it can create a custom audience of not just your shirt company’s white T-Shirt purchasers, but all opted-in Shopify merchants purchasers of similar white T-Shirts, or even other neutral-colored shirts. Make sense?

  • Once that custom audience is created, marketers can use lookalike audiences in FB/IG to find prospecting audiences of people like those who like not just your own products, but other brands and products similar to yours.

  • While some merchants won’t opt-in because they won’t want to share their data, opted-out merchants won’t be able to utilize other audiences aside from their own, either. This is especially important (and likely a great idea) for small shops/merchants to opt-in to, especially if owned audiences are on the smaller side.

• New cart capabilities in the Storefront API, with a focus on performance, reliability, and scale. This is important for marketers because features like estimated totals with taxes, discounts, duties, and more are being added, which significantly improves the purchasing experience for customers, which is a HUGE part of customers converting (or not) from marketing/ads.

Shopify Unite 2021 Announcements - for Brand Owners

• Online Store 2.0: This is mostly impactful for developers, but allows for new themes, better sections, better (and more) templates, different ways to customize the look of your website user experience, and impacts app updates some. It also allows for open-source themes for the first time.

• Shopify checkout now available through apps, and available to customize more than before

• Shopify app improvements (also mostly for developers), including better documentation, a developer console, Google Cloud availability, and more.

• For app developers: Zero percent revenue share annually on your first million dollars in the Shopify App Store (for reference, it previously was 20%)