Last week, Shopify rolled out Editions Winter ‘24. Once again, there are over 100 new product updates and features created to help DTC and B2B businesses scale on the Shopify platform.
As leaders in the Shopify Plus sphere, we’re discussing some of the features that are especially relevant to our clients.
It’s about B2B, baby
This is very huge news. Here at PIVOT, we’ve been first-movers in supporting the B2B commerce space, and we know Shopify shares our view on the preeminence of B2B in 2024. As Shopify continues doubling on B2B, Shopify Plus now supports sales reps in the admin, allowing customized access control and streamlined management of customer accounts. This means MUCH better efficiency for your internal sales team management and more time to focus on customer relationships. This feature has been a long-time ask for our B2B clients, and we’re thrilled to see this functionality here!
They’ve also launched promotional discounts for B2B, which are possible through custom apps powered by Shopify functions and third-party apps. Like supporting sales reps in the admin, we see this feature as a key enabler of efficiency and deal-closing, as it allows you to create bespoke, promotional discounts for your B2B customers on top of your wholesale prices.
We’re also glad to see Shopify Plus making it possible for B2B clients to build headless storefronts. While this won’t be needed by all, it’s important to have this option to accommodate nuanced tech stacks and unique experience needs.
Checking in to Checkout
You’ve heard us talk about it on our social posts before, but we just can’t stop saying the word extensibility! Shopify Plus Checkout Extensibility is a robust feature that takes what is already the best-converting checkout experience on the internet and makes it more customizable and upgrade-safe. But what does this actually mean? For one, it introduces 14 new APIs and UI components so that our dev team can achieve more of the bespoke, branded experience you are looking to deliver to customers in a more compatible way with future Shopify updates. This means each time Shopify rolls out an update, there will be less manual retrofitting of your custom checkout. It also supports 90+ checkout apps reducing the need for custom code. Checkout Extensibility also supports the Thank you and Order status pages, making it simpler to customize these pages to your needs.
Accommodating Complex Catalogs
There felt like many moments for confetti during the Winter ‘24 Editions announcement, and this is a big one: Shopify Plus’s Variant Limit Increase! Yes, that’s right! The long-awaited increase in product variant limits is here. Say goodbye to the 100 variant limit! What was once a hurdle we had to satisfy by splitting and linking multiple products – now, you can expand to 2,000 variants per product. This is a game-changer for businesses with diverse product ranges. Think of the possibilities with colors, sizes, materials, and more.
But wait! There’s more cause for confetti regarding product catalogs. Now, product merchandising becomes MUCH more manageable with the Combined Listings App! With this app, Shopify Plus merchants can showcase products that have multiple options more effectively. The best part is that each option can have its own description, rich media, and dedicated URL. This feature not only enhances SEO but also provides a more streamlined shopping experience for your customers. Previously, developers had to code the logic for different colors or variations of a product on the backend while setting them up as separate products on the front end to support unique URLs. But with the Combined Listings App, this process becomes much more streamlined for developers and administrators. The result is more efficient code, faster loading pages, better user experiences, and higher conversion rates. Now that this functionality is a core feature for Shopify Plus, merchants save time and money, freeing up resources to work on other features and enhancements.
For the devs in the room
It’s a real coup to see Code Action for Shopify Flow. In their commitment to supporting speed and customization, Shopify now allows us to write code in their Flow app to handle key custom logic, aggregations, and new actions. What does this mean for you? The run code action makes it possible to do many things that simply weren’t possible before. Now, you can pass data from previous steps in the workflow as input to the run code action and return values for use in subsequent steps. Common use cases this capability satisfies:
- Counting the number of certain types of items in a list
- Computing the value for complex metafields like lists
- Transforming data like dates and numbers so that they can be used in conditions
Feature Test Drive brings developer and merchant readiness and enablement to a whole new level. With Feature Test Drive, you can test systems and train staff before the new features roll out to your development or production stores – a godsend in the rare case that a feature update/rollout causes a break
Oh Hi, AI
As if you needed MORE reasons to migrate to Shopify Plus if you’re not already on it…key time-saving AI updates. The fact that you can now generate, match, or remove backgrounds on existing product images with their AI photo-editing tool is a massive productivity unlock for clients of ALL sizes, from emerging brands to enterprises. Seriously - imagine the time saved avoiding background editing in photoshop!
Shopify also announced that more updates are coming for the AI Sidekick app to make doing tasks more efficient for merchants. Lastly, their Semantic Search feature enables the storefront search to return more relevant results based on the intent & context behind customers’ natural language search terms. Better results for customers mean better returns for you.
