Twice a year Shopify curates the updates that make their product experience better and make your business even stronger. In the recent Winter ‘24 Edition there were more than 100 product announcements. We have pulled together some of our favourites below, which you can also dive deeper into in our on demand Editions recap webinar.

More product variants

New product APIs unlock up to 2,000 variants per product to support more complex and sophisticated catalogues. With an updated taxonomy, each product category is mapped to richer attributes. It’s now easier to create, classify and organise products. And automatically create variants. These richer variants, like colour, can be pushed to channels like TikTok or Google for enhanced discovery too.

Increased performance

A new web performance dashboard is centred on three Core Web Vitals to track and optimise your storefront performance with metrics that matter. All Liquid storefronts perform 35% faster and Lighthouse integration means you can quickly and easily audit the quality of your web pages.

More control and power over theme blocks

Content blocks are now more flexible and easy to use. Enhanced nesting makes it simpler to reuse elements, and blocks can now be preset and reused. Spend less time recreating established blocks and manipulate content—even if it’s been coded in a very specific way.

Enhanced B2B 

A new base theme speeds up the wholesale setup out of the box, so you can get started sooner. Additionally, B2B-specific promotional discounts and partial payments are now available to sell in a more B2B-friendly way.

Sales reps are now empowered to sell B2B. Setstaff permissions so that sales reps can place orders and view customer information for their own accounts, exclusive to Shopify Plus.

Subscriptions

The new Shopify Subscriptions app means merchants can launch subscription products with first-party support. This is a great way to test the waters and see what kind of response there is for a subscription model, without overinvesting in it.

New Shopify Flow features

Along with increased robustness and reliability, Shopify Flow comes with a new “run code” action. This makes it possible for merchant-side developers to write custom code inside a Flow action and integrate it into workflow automation. In other words: almost any workflow can now be automated.

Store credits and more flexible discounting

Store credits and discounts can soon be handled natively in the admin. Instead of using gift cards and workarounds, merchants can take advantage of a simple store credit and discount system. This will integrate with common loyalty apps, to avoid more admin too. This feature requires new customer accounts and is currently in developer mode but is something for many merchants to be excited about.

You can now add, remove and modify discounts and shipping on unfulfilled orders or if an order is updated. Create automatic discounts with subscriptions or for particular shipping methods. And incentivise your customers with more sophisticated discounting by applying multiple discounts from a single Shopify Function, for example take a percentage or fixed amount off specific shipping options, or discount based on buyer identity or purchase history.

Combined Listings app

Dovetailing with the increased product variant limit, the Combined Listings app means that multi-colour or multi-style products can be merchandised from a single parent listing. Each variation can have its own description, media gallery, and URL, with overall performance gains. This is a first-party app exclusive to Shopify Plus.

Checkout Extensibility

Checkout Extensibility lets you customise the highest-converting checkout on the internet. Now more powerful with14 new APIs and UI components, there is even more possibility to convert with customised discounting, payments, branding and tracking. Get access to one-page checkout to turn browsers into buyers faster.

Of more than 100 updates, these are just some of our favourites. Some updates are subtle and some are substantial but we think across the board the updates in Winter Editions ‘24 are about creating a strong base to grow a thriving commerce business. Enjoy exploring the updates and discovering new ways to elevate the way you do commerce.

Feel free to reach out to the Convert Digital team at any time for clarity on how any of these new features and updates can make an impact on your business. Plus, tune into our on demand webinar with Convert Digital, Submarine and Shopify as they cherry-pick the product updates they are most excited about. Tune in now.