Shopify set up shop (yes, we know) in Los Angeles this month for their annual Shopify Enterprise Partner Summit, a three day event highlighting the importance of partnerships and growth with agencies who work with the largest and most complex commerce businesses on the platform. With speakers ranging from Shopify leadership to members of the Meta and Google technology teams, the future of commerce is top of mind for Shopify as they push more features and improvements than ever before.
Personalization: Generated and Intentional
With the announcement of Shopify Sidekick (their admin AI tool due to release Q1 of 2024) and international contextualization, Shopify has been leading the charge in creating generative content that works for merchants and their customers. At Enterprise Summit, Shopify demoed their latest updates to personalization and admin tooling, and it was mind-blowing.
Shopify will soon launch context based personalization, allowing merchants to entirely change content based on customer segment, enabling full control over what your customers see and the journey you want them to take. For merchants it will be as simple as merchandising based on Men vs Women’s, Handbags vs Shoes, or other general segments created by base customer metrics. For others, the ability to merchandise based on color and style preferences, dollar spend, or other key performance metrics can take the user journey to heights that in the past were only offered by third party tools and services.
You may have seen that Shopify has launched their generative product description tool, and a handful of other features allowing merchants to skip the small stuff and focus on what matters to their business. Sidekick makes the process of updating and maintaining your site even easier. With just a conversation, you can update your entire site with new fonts, assets, and color schemes based on your promotion, your brand shift, or just your whim. Sidekick can prioritize content based on what products perform well and how your customers shop, removing the guesswork and putting the data you collect to better use for your business and your customers.
Bigger Business, Easier Integrations
As B2B continues to become the new business as usual for Shopify, they’ve begun to roadmap a bevy of features to support one of their fastest growing market segments. Although some of these things are extensions of their existing D2C offerings like discount codes, single page checkout, and discount functions, they have big plans for big business in 2024. Some of these incredible offerings are included below:
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For larger brands in the D2C space, there are an equally exciting array of new features coming in the next 12 to 18 months. You will soon be able to create Staging environments (and feature flags) to test new apps and features, properly manage and extend store and user permissions, and customize the admin interface. We’ll release more on these as more information is available but this is big news for not only merchants but also their development partners!
Inventory Management: Elevated
Shopify has spent the better part of the last 18 months creating a better, more uniform checkout for the purposes of expansion and extension. With the upcoming changes to how a customer pays and how they receive their order, they are showing merchants why the wait was worth it.
Split shipments will be the next big breakthrough in the Shopify Checkout process. The ability to not only split an order by which items are available for pickup and delivery, but also to split them by the same level of granular rulesets as order routing, will forever change fulfillment on the platform. Bundled with UI improvements and the ability to show this in the cart and on the product pages as well, this will create a cohesive and non-frustrating way to help customers get what they want, when they want it. This feature is still currently in development but has been hinted at being released generally as soon as H1 2024. We can’t wait to get access for our merchants and take full advantage of this new and exciting set of offerings!
