Merchants, as the warmer months approach, it's time to start planning for the busy summer season. Shopify is constantly evolving their platform to provide merchants like you with the best tools and features to grow your business. In this guide, we will cover the most important updates and changes coming to Shopify this summer that you'll want to be aware of as a Shopify user.
Shopify Magic - Powerful AI Tools to Automate and Scale Your Business
Shopify Magic is a suite of artificial intelligence-enabled features integrated throughout the Shopify platform. Its goal is to make it easier for merchants to start, run, and grow their businesses using the latest advancements in AI technology. Shopify Magic provides personalized, contextually relevant support across store building, marketing, customer support, and back office management.
Key Features of Shopify Magic
Shopify Magic gives merchants a suite of new tools that can help automate tasks, drive sales, and free up time to focus on growth. These features can be outstanding notes that you should try:
Sidekick
Sidekick is an AI-enabled commerce assistant that merchants can use to handle tasks, improve their stores, and get strategic advice. Powered by natural language, Sidekick aims to help merchants achieve more.
Sidekick understands plain language prompts and can tackle anything from repetitive work to customer support inquiries. This allows merchants to achieve more in less time by offloading work to an intelligent virtual assistant.
Notes: The beta version of Sidekick is accessible with early access. Register HERE for the Sidekick beta.
Automatic Text Generation for Online Store
Merchants can generate suggested text for product descriptions, emails, blog posts, and onsite content just by providing basic inputs. This helps speed up the writing and content creation process.
For marketing, merchants can leverage AI to create optimized product descriptions, email content, and subject lines customized for their brand voice and products.
Note: The automatic text generation feature is enabled in many sections like product description fields, email marketing, and blog post creation. You just need to find the AI icon in each section to use this feature.
App Review Summaries
App review summaries analyze feedback to help merchants quickly identify the best apps for their business needs from the Shopify App Store.
Shopify Inbox
Shopify Magic powers other features within the Shopify platform. Merchants can use AI to automatically generate smart replies for live chat, answering customer questions instantly. Shopify Magic can also suggest personalized FAQs tailored to each individual store.
Note: Only particular firms are allowed to use the feature. Register HERE to apply for early access.
Benefits of Shopify Magic to Merchants
All of Shopify Magic's capabilities are designed to feel seamless to merchants. The AI aims to understand a merchant's needs and style and then generate high-quality, on-brand content to simplify tasks and drive results. Best of all, Shopify Magic is available at no additional cost to all merchants on Shopify plans.
With the introduction of Shopify Magic, merchants now have an AI assistant and suite of powerful tools built directly into their Shopify admin. This allows them to scale more efficiently, freeing time up to focus on growth instead of busy work. Shopify Magic looks to reshape commerce by placing advanced AI directly in merchants' hands.
The World’s Best Checkout
Shopify announced significant enhancements to checkout in their summer 2023 update, cementing it as the world's best shopping cart and checkout experience. Shopify's first priority is still checkout. They unveiled 17 new developer APIs as well as a highly appealing product roadmap for checkout functions, both of which are accessible to all Shopify plans via open-source apps.
- Advanced checkout customization: Developers can now build sophisticated extensions directly into checkout thanks to new UI components, APIs, and extension points added. This includes functionality like discounts, payment options, shipping options, custom fields, validation, and more.
- Updated UI Kit: Shopify has enhanced their design toolkit with new components like tooltips, popovers, modals, text fields, and even maps. These offer merchants highly customizable, performant patterns following Shopify's design best practices.
- Roadmap for continued innovation: The product roadmap shows Shopify is committed to iterative updates. Features on the deck include hiding/locking address fields, additional fees, flexible product display, conditional mobile rendering, delivery option customization, and integrated apps.
B2B on Shopify
Shopify is significantly improving the way retailers sell wholesale beginning on June 27. With new primitives like company profiles, pricing lists, and net payment conditions, B2B on Shopify is integrated into the core and offers improved methods to engage with wholesale customers.
With access to our most configurable tools for their B2B business (such as themes, discounts, and Functions), merchants can now fully utilize Shopify's capabilities and tailor the shopping experience for their wholesale clients.
Sell Everywhere with Shopify Marketplace Connect
The number of platforms that merchants utilize to sell their goods increases along with the size of their company.
It becomes more difficult to manage these extra sales channels, and retailers frequently need different business procedures or applications for each marketplace to manage orders, delivery, inventory, and product listings.
For this reason, we're introducing Shopify Marketplace Connect. This single app enables retailers to sell on all the major marketplaces, including Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, while establishing connections with, controlling, and processing orders all inside of Shopify.
Better Options for Every Customer
In this update, Shopify brought more options for merchants in the subscriptions and free features:
- Shopify Flow is an app that lets store owners create up effective automation, and it is available for Basic plans. similar to welcoming new customers or taking a sold-out item off the market.
- Shopify Subscriptions, a new app with limited early access: In e-commerce, the subscription economy is still quite popular. On the App Store, there are dozens of third-party subscription options, the majority of which make use of the Shopify native API. But the majority of them are also paid.
- Shopify Bundles is a new app that enables native product bundle creation. Custom bundles can be made from of already-listed products in your catalog, and when customers buy them, the inventory of the bundles is instantly updated.
Final Words
The 2023 Shopify Summer Editions mark another significant leap forward for the platform. Merchants and developers have been granted an array of powerful updates that, combined, represent some of the most impactful changes Shopify has released. The 2023 Summer Editions will pay dividends for the Shopify community for years to come.