Shopify Summer Editions: Raising the Water Level
Glen Coates, in his introduction to Shopify Summer Editions used the word "Unified" as a way to describe what is going on in these editions. I would give it another analogy: Raising the Water Level.
If anything, I think "unification" is underselling what Shopify has done in a lot of this release.
Let's dive in. There are 3 parts to what Shopify has done:
More Defaults. Make available new features that merchants and buyers think are just "normal" available in Shopify. Sometimes to the detriment of key partners (hello Klaviyo, Loop, and Rebuy).
Competitive Checks. Removing a slew of gaps to both BigCommerce and Salesforce.
Refactoring and Convenience. Make possible and easier a lot of things that while they might have been technically possible before, they were somewhat broken as to be unusable a large merchant.
The normal caveats: Your feature may not be available yet. Shopify often buries a bit if something is available now immediately, you have to apply for a preview, or might be available later. YMMV. This is what happens when a company tries to freeze the market in an area, Microsoft did this kind of stuff for years.
Summary
This section describes some of the biggest items in the release.
Markets
If there was one crown jewel of the release I would pick, it would be the work done to unify inventory. In short, if you have a B2B store, POS, additional market, brand, or storefront, there no longer seems to be any limitation-based need to split inventory in Shopify. (link)
There is a new "central command center" called markets where you can see across every country what brands and selling formats you support -- all tied to the same inventory.
Essentially this means you can create unique buying experiences without creating multiple stores.
This is also true for multiple business entities. Shopify Payments used to require a single corporation per account. This has been released, and hallelujah.
Markets Pro -> Managed Markets. Global-E and Shopify seem to have rebuilt Markets Pro within the new Shopify Markets admin and catalog. Still seems like work to be done here for the merchant of record model. Customs and catalog restrictions now integrated into catalog. VAT inclusive pricing. A little yawn here. (link)
Bottom line: Storefronts that are global by default and omnichannel by default are going to be the standard going forward. Shopify doesn't like to be caught behind the times, and their willingness to make major changes to their functionality is admirable, given how difficult these changes must have been. Put another way, one of the final BigCommerce advantages. I have an entire section on BigCommerce and other competitors below.
Analytics
Shopify seems to be taking aim at reporting apps, as well as the fact that a lot of people have been thrown off by all the new Google Analytics . The true experts I know really love GA4, but that is like less than 1% of people I speak with. The average person was quite frustrated by the GA to GA4 transition. Shopify Analytics could be helpful here. (link)
Here are a few items that are included:
Standard commerce reports out of the box, that are customizable / draggable by default.
Reports are customizable by ShopifyQL which is a nice feature for advanced users. This is something you can do in Google Reporting.
Real-time streamed analytics are now available, versus waiting a day. I mean, finally we are out of the Stone Age. The old reports were actually a very bad look for Shopify on this point.
Bottom line: I'm not going to review point by point here, but this is definitely interesting. It might even be the most underappreciated update in the entire list. I wonder if this could enable merchants setting their own retail calendar? One can dream right?
Shopify gets a lot of grief for reporting, but most veterans would recognize that historically all eCommerce platforms have had terrible or almost no reporting at all out of the box. Let's hope this keeps improving.
POS
For years, it felt like there was a battle between the POS team and the Shopify core team. They were on different islands hurling cannonballs at each other. This seems to be the release they have buried the hatchet and all teams are singing from the same sheet of music. (link)
UI Extensions. There is now only one way to customize the Shopfy admin, checkout, or POS.
Promotions. There were a slew of what I considered broken promotion use cases which now seemed fixed with Discounts and Discount Functions which appear to work the same for POS now as normal checkout. (Buy X get Y, Stack Discounts).
Payment Customizations and Product Bundles. See above.
Custom Pricing or Catalog by Store. Seems like this should have already been in the tin already, no? Better late than never I suppose!
Pickup in Store. Automatically transfer item from another store when out of stock. If I didn't know better, this was starting to sound like an ERP. (link)
Ship from Store. Powered by Shopify order routing. Good that this is standard now. (link)
Sales Staff Attribution. OK finally. This wasn't in there before, truly?
Streamlined Email Collection. Nice touch to use Shop Pay to help merchants collect email addresses. Truly insidious and thoughtful at the same time. (link)
Bottom line: These are much needed changes from POS and look forward to these products staying in sync more in the future. I know many integrators struggled with the differences between these product lines, including knowledge and functionality gaps between internal Shopify teams. Shopify seems to be trying to reduce the effects of Conway's law here.
POS still growing up from my point of view. It will take until 2025 before they enter into the realm of being worrisome for NewStore, PredictSpring, and others.
Also. Also. Shopify is building a lightweight OMS here. While connector-oriented solutions like Pipe17 don't seem to have much to worry about, and Manhattan has no concern.... It does appear that basic omnichannel (BOPIS, BORIS, blahhh) is now in the box in all plans + POS. Water level rising.
Wholesale and B2B
Some of the new features that I noticed, among others are:
Headless Storefront. This closes a gap between Shopify and BigCommerce. It's unclear how many people will want to access this given the nature of headless, ya know.. but it's a notable inclusion.
Bottom line: Shopify carefully looks at items reported from sales reps and agencies and closes gaps relentlessly over time. This fits into that bucket.
Headless Storefronts
Shopify has introduced a visual editor called Utopia for developers to be able to build templates with associated settings that can be used by non-technical users to build pages. (link)
Sorry I just have to. Really, it's a requirement to bring in humor here. Sorry to the PM on headless, but I'm sorry his section sounds like a Metamucil commercial. (link)
"Headless Commerce gives you a lot of great flexibility, but it can also slow you down. Add some Utopia to your diet and get your GI system regular again!"
Bottom line: Most still not gonna need it. Why are you rebuilding a CMS you could get off the shelf on top of Hydrogen? Seriously, send up a signal flare. You need help.
In other news, this is Shopify's answer to MakeSwift which was recently acquired from BigCommerce. I'll admit to not being technical enough to determine the feature gaps between one and the other -- my suspicion is Shopify is still well behind here given MakeSwift was its own company prior -- but still....
Artificial Intelligence
It wouldn't be an update from Shopify if we don't talk about AI. Let me just say, still work to do. I asked Shopify a very simple question - when did a specific feature release? It pointed me at the announcements page. That link 404'd. (link)
Sidekick linking to the announcements page
404 doh
But what did they try to do?
AI Visual Editing enabled in the platform. You can make AI-based edits to imagery from the Shopify platform natively. It's on mobile too.
Shopify Magic in Core Product Creation Flow. Auto-creating titles, descriptions, etc. This also ties into their new Shopify Category stuff.
Bottom line: More to do here as evidenced by the above. However, I do expect for some of these items to be truly useful for Enterprises, they need to move them upstream. Shopify has a Salsify or Bynder competitor buried in here long-term, if they ever choose to go in this direction. Challenge for larger merchants - Shopify is not going to be the center of their universe (think about someone like Mattel's workflow, for example).
If Shopify believes it is truly a leader here AND wants to make AI truly useful for Enterprises for products and imagery, it needs to build additional, AI-powered composable applications. Outside of Core. MACH much?
These features are not factored properly for large merchants. In the same way that Organization and Markets setup was previously not factored properly for large merchants.
Shopify continutes to expand its checkout solution with new updates. Many of them they probably should have had before, or you could do before if you used checkout.liquid.
Checkout Blocks Free in Plus. Boom-shaka-laka. Hello free upsells? Sorry, Rebuy, I didn't see you sitting there. You can now use apps to customize thank you and order status pages also. (link)
Split Shipping in Checkout. If items are coming from multiple warehouses, buyers see different shipping methods in checkout. Shop Promise got a brief mention. (link)
Bottom line: If you wanted to build a marketplace, you would need split shipping wouldn't you? Asking for a friend.
Also, can we have subscription upgrades in upsell? Please?
Top Marketing Items
Obligatory mention of Shopify Audiences and Shop Campaigns. Shop Campaigns in particular is developing nicely, but I still think it needs more tooling to apply to larger merchants. (link)
Bottom line: the pitch is compelling for Shop campaigns. Even though you can only redeem Shop Cash in Shop App. Still feels like this is building....
Top Marketplace Items
Target+ joins Marketplace Connect: While every other marketplace connectivity solution already has Target+, Shopify did not. (link)
Bottom line: Let's be clear. Shopify is deeply integrating marketplace connectivity into its Admin. Will BigCommerce regret not more fully integrating Feedonomics sooner?
Developer Items
Upgraded Admin Extensions. More places you can add pages or customize blocks and actions in the Shopify UI. These are always features appreciated by developers that users won't notice until you take advantage of them. Demandware has had an Admin extensibility framework for 10+ years. (link)
GraphQL updates. They mention this is now "almost" on parity with REST APIs. (link)
Bottom line: There's more than this, but these are two that seemed interesting to me. Which is what this update is all about :)
Top Items for Plus
Here are a few nice items I noticed that might be useful for larger merchants. Even though many of them seem to be catch-up items, they are still very much appreciated.
Role-Based Access. Coming soon. Ability to define permissions in groups to sets of users, and then define / modify roles in bulk. (link)
Organizational Access Across Stores. Although officially coming soon, it deserves a mention. Previously, most of Shopify's admin and permissioning controls where store-based. If you have a dozen stores this is a serious maintenance issue and security risk. Similar to how Markets allows a unified inventory across multiple storefronts, you might say this allows unified permissioning across multiple storefronts. (link)
Create Stores from Other Stores: If you aren't going to give us a staging environment, at least make it a little easier to clone a store for testing. Better than a kick in the head, right? (link)
Markets. One of the biggest disadvantages Shopify had in the market was a unified inventory across storefronts. The multiple business entity issue is particularly appreciated. Shopify has finally closed that gap. Danke.
Analytics. While most larger merchants will still want Looker Studio, Domo, or other reporting suites, Shopify could remove the reason for a large swath of smaller Plus merchants to try and find or figure out a third-party reporting application.
Checkout Blocks Free. This could have a devastating impact on the business of some third-parties.
Bottom line: Most of these items are catch-up to larger players like Salesforce Commerce Cloud. That said, they will be appreciated by a lot of merchants.
Milk Carton Notice: What I Didn't See (Enough)
Dear features, I am worried about you. As Pink Floyd says, "Is There Anybody In There / Just Nod If You Can Hear Me."
Any explicit mention of Commerce Components by Shopify. This is still thing, right? Right? Headless was mentioned (which I guess is a component), but it seems to me like Shopify might be moving away from this terminology based on how I see this messaging.
Shop Promise badge. Still a thing? I saw a brief mention about you on split shipping. Seemed like an afterhought. Asking as a concerned friend. You got a mention, yeah, but you seem stuck in the mud. (link)
Bottom line: Mr and Mrs features, when I go over to visit your house, I don't want to find that you took a nasty fall and have been unable to get up for a few months. (Wow that got morbid fast, dinnit?)
Should You Worry?
Returns Applications
Yes you worry. Shopify seems determined to make this free. Return rules seem to be getting more embedded as a core feature of Shopify checkout and tied into POS too.
Customer Segments and Marketing Actions
It's a shot across the bow of Klaviyo and the entire (stupid) idea of a CDP from my point of view that Shopify wants to own customer segments and associated marketing actions based on those segments with Shopify Flow.
Checkout Extensibility And Upsells
Yes this is an issue for many. Very many.
BigCommerce and Feedonomics
Markets. Shopify's release/improvement in Markets closes one of the final remaining gaps between Shopify and BigCommerce, outside of B2B. BigCommerce sales reps need to update their scripts which from my experience always contained "multi-storefront" as the first thing out of their mouth with regards to Shopify comparison -- even on major investor updates like earnings calls.
Headless B2B. While Shopify's headless has not traditionally been thought of as extremely mature relative to best-in-class, unlocking Headless for B2B was nonetheless a gap that needed to be closed.
Headless Visual Editor With Utopia. Appears to be Shopify's answer to MakeSwift. I am quite certain there are gaps, but the fact that Shopify built their own visual editor for headless is telling. Especially given that how many people are going to use it? Not millions of storefronts, I will tell you that.
Bottom line: Shopify is noticing all the missing things, BigCommerce. Which should somewhat validate at least some of your product decisions right? Now if Travis Hess and Thom Armstrong can fix their GTM they might have something.
Salesforce
See Markets above. Salesforce has this stuff by default. Shopify playing catch-up here.
Analytics. Salesforce doesn't have anything to worry about here, as their Data Studio is aimed at Enterprises. But the fact that Shopify is expanding into Analytics even at the low-end should give Salesforce some idea that Shopify considers it in scope, even beyond basic functions.
Order Management and Omni. More scenarios coming to Shopify. Still not advanced, but the level of basic is rising and sufficient for many. Functions make it more customizable too. Another brick in the wall. Salesforce built a native OMS. It appears Shopify is doing the same.
Bottom line: Salesforce should be in full-on panic mode at this point. Their marketing actions seem to indicate as much.
What I Expect to See Next Time... or Sometime
Surely they have to ship these sometime right?
Staging. 2024 came and went. It was nice to know you, but we will clock in 2025 before we get our staging environment.
Catalog as a Stand-Alone Component. The ability to adopt Catalog and Promotions independently of Shopify seems like a no-brainer if Shopify is serious about its Commerce Components strategy. The refactoring / unified inventory improvements made this time seem to have set it up for this kind of launch. You could call this feature: watch out Salsify. They won't call it a PIM however, similar to how they did not call Collective "Dropship". It will be like "Collaborative Items" or some shit.
Digital Asset Management as Standalone. See previous Catalog item. If Shopify is truly commited to AI, they need to unleash it.
Wrapping Up
Shopify called this unification. I call it quite a bit more than unification. Some of it is omnichannel glow-up. A lot of ticking off competitor gaps. Raising the water level based on merchant and buyer expectations.
And yes, Glen, also a lot of unification, which is another Tobi code word for ....
REFACTORING
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