New Shopify Features – Unite Conference Recap

In our community for online shop owners, we often see newer members asking if Shopify is worth the price, or if they should just stick with Squarespace or Wix or some other software. This tells me that people just don’t get what exactly Shopify is offering because the difference between Shopify and these programs is enormous.

The benefits of using Shopify aren’t equaled by any other software. And that’s even more true now that they unveiled the new Shopify features they’ve been working on for you lately!

We just returned from the Shopify partner conference in San Francisco, and we’re feeling excited about what Shopify has announced. Some of it is ready to go now and some is coming soon. I took notes on the features our clients are always interested in, and Shoshanna, one of our web developers, took notes on what our team can do on the back end to make your sites even more powerful.

Here is a quick overview of the news:

New sales channels

One of the coolest things about Shopify is that you aren’t just stuck selling your stuff on your own site. You can also set your shop up to sell your products directly on other platforms, such as Facebook,  Pinterest, Wanelo, Houzz, and more. They just announced that they’ve added more new channels, including one of our favorites: Instagram!

Learn more: Shopify Sales Channels

New chip and swipe reader

This thing supports chips, fits in your pocket, and uses Bluetooth. You can order it right now! It’s free for new POS customers, and $29 otherwise. It looks pretty beautiful, too.

Learn more: Shopify POS

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Accelerate checkout with Shopify Pay

This was one of the things that impressed me the most. The Shopify team showed us that their checkout performs much better on mobile than average. But with this big change, I think you’ll see a big conversion rate boost on mobile.

If your online shop is like most, your mobile shoppers have either surpassed your desktop shoppers in number, or they’re about to. But it’s hard to shop on mobile! So many bits of info to type in and maybe you’re swinging from a bus strap or you have a toddler chewing on your leg.

I’ve made a few purchases recently using Apple Pay and I loved how easy it was. Shopify Pay is going to do the same thing for your mobile shoppers. They can save their info once (via a “remember me?” checkbox) on ANY Shopify website, and then when they visit you, Shopify will have remembered their info, turning something like 16 fields to fill out into just two. I can’t wait to see how this takes off.

Learn more: Shopify Pay

Selling wholesale on Shopify

First, it appears that Shopify have solved online wholesale for their Shopify Plus customers. This is their enterprise-level platform, and wholesale is so important to many of our clients that I think they would be able to consider the cost of Shopify Plus as a worthwhile investment to grow the wholesale branch of their business.

If your business is not at that level, things are still looking bright for you, because there have been a whole bunch of APIs that Shopify has worked on and is giving developers access to: Order Fulfillment, and Draft Orders, in particular. That means that the somewhat hacky wholesale apps that exist today may soon be replaced with more robust apps that will do more of what you want them to do. We’re keeping our eye on that!

Learn more (Plus only): Wholesale Channel

What else?

We also heard a lot of interesting stuff about improvements to inventory tracking, a new admin design that’s going to let you instantly share new products to social and track your marketing conversion better, improvements to checkout, and flash sales.

Learn more: Everything We Announced at Unite 2017 (And What It Means For Merchants)

Ready to make the switch?

If Shopify is starting to sound like the right place for you, I’d love to talk with you more about your business’s particular needs, the details of moving your site to Shopify, and how we can help. Please do get in touch so we can get your site up to date and selling more efficiently.

Like to give it a try yourself? Sign up for a free trial of Shopify here. That’s Aeolidia’s affiliate link (and then if you’d like, let me know that you did and if you could use any help with your next steps).