The Definitive Guide to Shopify Reunite Announcements

By Deanna Spagnuolo

There is no doubt entrepreneurs are at the heart of everything Shopify does. Every year they host Unite, their annual conference where you can find us and other Shopify partners and developers in the community awaiting product insights and announcements. We at Cleverific wait all year for this event to connect with Shopifolk and trade ideas for improving ecommerce. In the wake of having to cancel Unite, the eCommerce company made sure to bring us together online for Reunite. In case you didn’t have time to watch the hour and a half broadcast, we rounded up all the announcements in this handy guide. Like Shopify, we’re working with future-proofing and building with your business at top-of-mind.

Only the most adaptable make it, but entrepreneurs make the most of what they have. They see opportunity when everyone else sees despair.

— Tobi Lutke

Contributors all across Shopify came together online in their home offices with their quarantine hairdos, to talk about money, the online store experience, marketing and sales channels, the back office, shipping, and site performance.

The self-proclaimed “juiciest” product Shopify is launching is Shopify Balance, a financial service aimed at small-to-medium businesses.

There’s a 45% increase in people buying from stores they’ve never purchased from before.

Shopify announced seventeen product announcements in the short hour and a half broadcast, along with six updates to existing products. Wow! Here is a list of every announcement:

Money

• Shopify Balance (new)
• Shopify Capital (update)
• Shopify Pay Installments (new)

Online store

• Express theme (new)
• Gift cards (new)
• Tipping (new)
• Selling internationally (new)
• Online store design experience (update)
• Checkout and subscriptions (update)

Marketing and channels

• Shopify POS (new)
• Shopify Email (new)
• Free Google Shopping listing (new)
• Facebook shops (new)
• Shopify Ping (update)
• Shop and Shop channel (new)

Back office

• Product states (new)
• Faster product creation (new)
• Purchase Orders (new)
• Orders Index Page (update)

Shipping

• Curbside Pickup and Local Delivery (new)
• Shopify Fulfillment Network (update)

Performance

• Storefront Renderer (new)
• Online Store Performance dashboard (new)

The breakdown

Money

Michelle Tampoya joined from the Payments team to talk about three new features coming to Shopify.

Shopify Balance

Shopify saved this announcement until the end, but we’ll talk about it first. Shopify Balance will fill a significant market gap that COO Harley Finkelstein acknowledged; financial services only really help large corporations. Shopify Balance is a different financial product; it embraces the needs of independent businesses and entrepreneurs. It will allow merchants to:

• Pay bills directly from your account with no minimum balance or banking fees
• Track expenses
• Apply for funding
• Deposit money made from your online store and Shopify POS sales
• Have a business-branded ATM card
• Have the best entrepreneur-focussed rewards program, with perks like cash back and partner discounts on shipping and marketing

You can expect the launch of Shopify Balance later this year, with early access for US merchants.

Shopify Capital

Merchants have been telling Shopify that there’s a crunch on cash, so Shopify is responding with an update to Shopify Capital. COVID has put a significant strain on business finances, and Shopify hopes this update gives merchants more breathing room.

Shopify has awarded one billion dollars of cash advances since 2016 and is committing an additional 200 million dollars in response to COVID. Since Shopify already has an excellent window into your business, they’ve made applying simple. There’s no need to check your personal credit history, Shopify will not own a portion of your business, and merchants can expect to see their cash in a few days. Shopify is putting a megaphone to their mouth and saying that they trust and love their merchants.

Shopify Pay Installments

Shopify Capital addressed the issue of thin wallets on the merchant-side, but they didn’t forget about consumers. Unemployment and lower consumer spending have been byproducts of COVID-19. Shopify Pay Installments is a new checkout feature for buyers to have flexibility when paying for their purchases.

The idea is to allow customers to split the payments of their purchase into four equal payments at no additional cost. While this is a great relief to your customers, it’s also an excellent strategy to improve conversion rates and increase the average order size. This feature is coming to Shopify later this year through the Shop Pay app, which has over 40 million users worldwide.

Online Store

Agatha Krajewski from the Online Store team joined the broadcast to talk about six new features her team has been working on to optimize the online store experience for new industries that are opening online stores. She posed questions like, “how does a restaurant put their business online?” and announced how Shopify is working on getting these businesses online faster.

Express Theme

This newly launched, free theme is for service-based businesses like coffee bars and restaurants. What makes it different from most themes is its focus on the mobile experience while also being a one-stop-shop (or one-page shop). It’s easy to navigate, less to configure, and doesn’t include a lot of design content.

Check out the new Express theme on the Shopify Theme Store.

Gift Cards

Gift cards, previously a luxury only available on higher-tiered Shopify plans, are now available to everyone. COVID-19 has made it impossible for some businesses to operate, like your neighbourhood eyelash technician or hairdresser. Gift cards are great as a promotion if merchants can’t sell online yet. Merchants can offer their customers a percentage off their purchase once they’re back to business if they purchase a gift card. This feature is now available on all Shopify plans.

Tipping

We mentioned that new industries are joining the online store scene, and Shopify knows that some of these businesses have unique requirements, like tipping. To address this need, Shopify introduced tipping into the checkout flow. The money received from this channel is calculated separately in reports and is customizable. You also don’t have to be a restaurant to enable it in your online store. If philanthropy has always been important to you, you can allocate the money received to your favourite charity, or ask for a donation to help support your own business during this economic shutdown.

Selling internationally

Cross-border sales are top-of-mind, especially since the market has seen a 45% increase in stores acquiring new customers. Shopify is rolling out multiple-store domains so store owners can have country-specific stores. Merchants are now able to configure localized domains and personalize them to different languages, domains, currency, and more.

The cherry on top? Customers pay in their local currency, so they see no exchange rates. On the merchant’s backend, there’s an automatic exchange rate when you receive your payouts. Launching later this year, merchants can implement a custom exchange conversion so customers can always see the same price when they come to your store, even when exchange rates fluctuate.

Online Store Design Experience

The new online store editor brings flexibility and personalization. Before, customization was only available on your shop’s homepage. Now, customization will be available on every page of the online store. Soon you’ll have the freedom to break from the traditional product page template and customize the content blocks to your business.

Marketing and channels

Satish Kanwar from Shopify’s Retail team spoke about the resiliency of brick and mortar retailers. Half of all retail stores had to close because of COVID, and 71% of sales from point of sale (POS) systems disappeared. Retailers powered by Shopify managed to pivot and successfully replaced 94% of their POS sales with online store sales. Talk about a comeback story! Consumers adapted their purchasing behaviour, and retailers quickly adapted their business.

Shopify POS

Shopify released an all-new POS system that is ready for the future of retail. They’ve included a “smart grid” on the main screen of the POS, where store owners can customize their embedded apps to include important features like loyalty programs. The new POS also includes better staff control and permissions, so you can set which staff members from which store location can have access to certain features.

This new POS also comes loaded with a contactless checkout. Buyers can scan a QR code through the POS screen, which brings them to the online store where they can finish their purchase on their phone. They don’t even have to roll down their car window. With all these new features available in the Shopify POS, Shopify is hoping that store owners use this time while their retail locations are closed to reevaluate their POS systems. Shopify believes it supplies the best on the market, and merchants can quickly start the integration process to get their stores open as soon as possible.

Shopify Email

Seasoned entrepreneurs know that nothing is more important than building customer relationships and turning them into repeat customers. Email is an imperative channel in building those relationships, and Shopify is now helping merchants communicate with their customers through an ecommerce-optimized email service. This product automatically pulls content and design templates from merchants’ online stores for a synched branding experience. Your email segments and customer lists are already in place thanks to your archived order information, and soon you’ll be able to schedule emails to send automatically.

This feature is now available on Shopify and is free for merchants to try until October.

Free Google Shopping listing

Google is a powerful engine for product discovery. Shopify and Google are now allowing US merchants to list all their products for free on Google Shopping through Shopify’s Google Shopping app. Once merchants sync their products through the app, the product approval process will start, and products approved by Google will appear in search results on Google’s shopping tab.

Facebook Shops

Facebook previously collaborated with Shopify to bring a “Shop” button to a merchant’s Facebook page, which linked a customer to their full online store. Facebook Shops is a new and improved product that will allow merchants to create a simpler, branded version of their online store within Facebook and Instagram that will sync with Shopify. This social media shopping experience will be available for all merchants to implement in a few months.

Shopify Ping

Like Shopify Email’s philosophy, few things are more important than creating a personal experience/connection with your customers. Shopify Ping is a realtime chat app that was, until now, only available on iOS. Soon, it will be available on Android and the web. It will also collect all your business conversations into one spot. Your staff have access to Shopify Ping, DMs to other staff members, plus have meaningful conversations with customers.

Shop and Shop channel

Shopify has described the Shop mobile app as a personal shopping assistant. It takes shipment tracking from the (former) Arrive app and adds the speed of Shop Pay to create a single app. Shop makes it easier than ever to reach customers and foster relationships. Over 16 million users already can see a list of the stores they buy from and get personalized, relevant recommendations. When they place an order, they can also keep track of when the orders will arrive. Shopify has updated this channel to let merchants control how their brand appears on the app and their involvement with customers. This channel is a great opportunity to re-engage customers and will undoubtedly keep growing as Shopify adds more analytics and marketing features.

Back Office

Lynsey Thornton joined the live stream and shared about how Shopify can make it more efficient for merchants to run their business. She spoke of three principal places merchants spend most of their time in the Shopify admin:

1. Product pages
2. Inventory
3. Order Index page

Product states

According to Shopify, a merchant visits a single product page seven times before publishing it to their online store. With the launch of product states, merchants won’t have to use workarounds like hiding their products from all channels to avoid publishing before they’re ready. Soon, store owners will be able to save their products as a draft to be published later or archived.

Faster Product Creation

Anyone who has built a Shopify store knows the most time-consuming task is getting your products onto the shop and managing them. Sometimes it can feel like more work than it’s worth, and that’s what Shopify is aiming to change. Shopify is introducing faster product creation directly from your mobile phone. You’ll be able to snap product photos, scan barcodes, add variants and prices and publish straight from your phone.

Shopify is also improving the desktop experience by moving the product upload workflow to a single page to add photos, titles, inventory and variants without needing to visit multiple pages.

Purchase Orders

In an aim to improve the lifecycle of inventory management, Shopify has introduced Purchase Orders. Merchants will be able to:

• Order from suppliers
• Track and receive inventory
• View inventory reports

Purchase Orders will allow a merchant to understand what’s selling and how much money is invested in your inventory, all through mobile.

Order Index Page

Until now, the Order Index page was a heavily-used jumping-off point for merchants. This page would show you limited information, so even though it’s one of the most visited pages in the Shopify admin, it was only used to identify which orders you needed to view in more detail. Shopify’s vision is for merchants to work directly from the order index page to fulfill orders, and customize it for specific workflows. For example, merchants will have the ability to group orders by their delivery method.

Shipping

Thea Earl spoke about the massive amount of local support Shopify has seen customers show local merchants. Local orders were up 176% in mid-March to the end of April compared to the previous six weeks. Supporting local not only means you contribute to your local economy and help small businesses survive, but it also means customers have a good chance of receiving their product within 24 hours.

Curbside Pickup and Local Delivery

Right now, in the shipping settings for a store with less than 20 locations, merchants can enable curbside pickup. Shopify plans to bring more functionality to this feature, like allowing a customer to schedule their pickup from any location they choose.

Local delivery is also a focus and has simplified. Store owners or staff will be able to select a vicinity or set certain ZIP/ Postal Codes to offer local delivery. Any customer checking out in the area will automatically see the local delivery shipping option, and will also be able to leave delivery notes. A heads up is always appreciated if you’re delivering to someone with big loud dogs! This feature is being rolled out to all shops globally. Shopify is also offering a local delivery app. From the order index page, merchants can pull all local orders, and the app will optimize a route within the city and let your customers know their order is on the way.

Shopify Fulfillment network

Shopify’s answer to competing with Amazon, the Shopify Fulfillment Network, was announced in 2019 at Shopify Unite. Now, on the first anniversary of this launch, it’s getting some upgrades. The “early-access” sticker that the launch initially came with has been ripped off, and the product is now fully functional. Shopify has acquired five new warehouses to offer two-day shipping anywhere in the world. Unlike Amazon’s universal Amazon-branded packaging, merchants who use the Shopify Fulfillment Network will have their packages shipped with their store branding.

Speed is vital to operate a successful fulfillment network, so Shopify acquired a Boston-based company, 6 River Systems, famous for designing collaborative robots named “Chuck”. Chuck is a self-driving autonomous robot that makes it easier to pick items for shipping. Once Chuck receives its pick list, it’s assigned to a human associate and supplies a list of the products that need picking. Chuck has platforms on its body so associates can place products on Chuck for shipment. The robot has won two design awards for robotics, in both design and functionality categories.

Speed is vital to operate a successful fulfillment network, so Shopify acquired a Boston-based company, 6 River Systems, famous for designing collaborative robots named “Chuck”. Chuck is a self-driving autonomous robot that makes it easier to pick items for shipping. Once Chuck receives its pick list, it’s assigned to a human associate and supplies a list of the products that need picking. Chuck has platforms on its body so associates can place products on Chuck for shipment. The robot has won two design awards for robotics, in both design and functionality categories.

Performance

Shopify’s CTO, JML, came online to give us some insight into the unsung hero of Shopify’s admin; speed and performance. We all know people are happier when things are faster, like when your order arrives sooner than expected. Shopify is taking on the task of making sure their e-commerce sites are the fastest around with some new product launches.

Storefront Renderer

When a website page loads quickly, you might not notice, but everyone takes notice when a page loads slowly, especially search engines. Shopify’s new storefront renderer will bring a 40%-200% load time upgrade to your online store. With this speed boost, search engines will favour your site when displaying search results, and customers are more likely to convert. This update is happening now with all Shopify stores.

Online Store Performance Dashboard

It’s nice to know that your online store will be faster; what’s even better is seeing the actual results. Shopify is releasing an Online Store Performance Dashboard so merchants can understand how apps and code changes affect their store’s speed. With this new knowledge, merchants can optimize their store themselves to improve performance and speed. Shopify plans to launch this product in the summer of 2020.

Twenty-seven new products later, and we’re eager to continue digesting the announcements. It’s a challenging time to be an entrepreneur, but we’re setting out to build more solutions into our Edit Order app and help Shopify make commerce better for everyone. If you have ideas on how we can make Edit Order better for you, let us know in the comments!