Shopify Editions is a twice-yearly event showcasing all of the platform’s updates, feature launches, and enhancements expected to roll out to users over the coming days/months. Shopify Editions for Summer 2024’s theme is “Unified,” representing Shopify’s goal of connecting key workflows and infrastructure all across the platform, making it easier for merchants to build out their stores, expand to new markets, and access the data they need to make smarter decisions for their businesses. 

As an ecommerce agency working with businesses of various sizes – each with unique goals and needs, we’re always excited for these showcases as they show off how we can better support our clients. In this article, we’ll break down all of the features announced at the Summer ‘24 Edition that our team is the most excited about.

Our Favourite Feature Announcements and Updates from Shopify Editions Summer ‘24

We’re always left impressed and excited for what’s to come after the latest Shopify Editions event. Here’s what we’re the most excited about testing out and building for this time around:

Fully Reworked Analytics 

With Shopify’s Summer Editions ‘24, the analytics experience has been completely revamped to be even more useful to merchants. Now, your Analytics page is fully customizable so that you can focus on the data you want and nothing you don’t. Add, remove, move, or resize new metric cards to fit your needs. 

These metric cards pull data from pre-built Shopify reports, which you can also further customize by layering other metrics over them to compare and contrast your store’s data and uncover insights to help you stay on top of your business and grow. Custom reports can also be created and saved so that you can refer back to specific reports with data laid out exactly how you need it, anytime.   

A New “Markets” Experience

Shopify has turned its Markets Pro experience into a unified Managed Markets setup, making it much easier for stores to handle their international operations than they could previously. This new “home” for merchants wishing to sell internationally combines all operations into one hub page in the Shopify Admin, enabling users to manage their international, cross-border B2B, and retail operations from one location. 

While Shopify has always had a cross-border selling solution, managing all your stores, international operations, and catalogs has never been easier. Now, you can manage multiple markets and catalogs from one page using a single store without splitting inventory or keeping data in sync between multiple stores. Simply create a new market, add a new region, and start building your catalog for that market based on your existing products. 

You can tailor your store’s theme for your new audience, create submarkets under it, create multiple B2B catalogs for different markets, change currency/language, and more!

Along with these new options comes the ability to preview stores as specific buyers in specific regions in the Shopify Admin. This allows you to get a better view of each of your stores from any perspective you choose, ensuring a better shopping experience for everyone, no matter where they shop from. 

Upgrades to Shopify POS

We already love the Shopify POS for its ease of use and versatility, and with regular updates like these, Shopify is ensuring that its Point of Sale offering remains the best one available on the market. Here’s what’s new to Shopify POS with Shopify Editions ‘24. 

POS-Specific Catalogs and Pricing

Included in the new Markets experience that we broke down above, POS users can now set up catalogs and pricing specifically for their POS systems in whichever retail locations they choose. Set up discounts for certain regions or only stock bestsellers at another, all from one location in the Admin! 

Return Rules

Shopify POS can now determine whether a product can or cannot be returned when the user starts the return process. It can tell them why the item is ineligible while also blocking them from accepting the return. 

That said, Shopify POS makes it easy for managers to override this block for unique cases and customer service-related reasons. This ensures staff doesn’t accidentally accept invalid returns but leaves the flexibility to break those rules on a case-by-case basis intact.  

New Discount Functions Support

As an ecommerce agency, we’ve been leveraging Shopify Functions to extend or replace Shopify’s native business logic for our clients since they were announced as a replacement for Shopify Scripts. Now, some of these same Functions can be used on the POS side to offer the same level of customization to in-store transactions. The APIs developers will be able to use with Shopify POS are:

• Shopify Functions
• Order Discount Function API
• Product Discount Function API
• Shipping Discount Function API

A Fresh CMS Editor for Headless Commerce

Shopify’s brand new Hydrogen Visual Editor powered by Utopia makes your developer's code the source of truth while allowing non-developers to use and edit their coded templates in a visual editor to create new pages and make changes on the fly without needing any code. 

Changes made are synced to GitHub with straightforward diffs, allowing developers and non-technical teams to work side by side on projects rather than sequentially. Additionally, developers can now use this new interface to see their changes visually and debug issues in real time. 

This new tool also allows users to bring MetaObjects directly into your store’s pages so you can add/update content or generate lists right in the editor. 

New Uses for Shopify Magic AI

Shopify’s Magic AI has been improving with every update, and this Summer Editions 2024 is no different. Here are the AI-powered features we’re most excited about this time around. 

Sidekick Now in Early Access

Sidekick is Shopify’s AI assistant, with functionality sprinkled throughout the platform to help merchants get more done faster. It offers Shopify-related support, generates reports, answers questions about your business, and can help you write and create content – from blog posts to product descriptions. Interested merchants can sign up for early access to Sidekick from the Shopify Magic AI landing page. 

Shopify Inbox

Shopify Inbox will now suggest answers to customer questions using Shopify Magic and store-specific data. Instead of spending extra time looking for answers and typing responses, all you need to do is review the generated text and either edit or hit “send!” This saves you time and creates happier customers when they get their questions answered much faster.

Shopify Magic is able to answer both Shipping and Product Information-related FAQs.  

Native Ship-to/from-Store with Background Stock Transfers

You can now enable store transfers so that the products customers want are available at the stores they’d like to pick them up from. Select which stores you’d like to enable transfers for, and either use your default expected pickup date setting or choose a different processing time to complete store transfers in your Shipping & Delivery settings, making in-store pickup even more convenient for your customers. 

If you’re also using the Shopify POS, you will now have access to the new ship-from-store fulfillment workflow that allows you to leverage all your fulfillment centers/retail stores to assist in fulfilling orders. When stores are too busy to prepare orders for shipping, they can re-route them to other locations to maintain high fulfillment speeds while taking the pressure off of the busiest locations. 

Honorable Mentions