Shopify continues to roll out new features, functions, enhancements and time-saving updates to make life easier for merchants and their customers. Here’s the rundown of all the releases that we saw come to fruition through May 2023.
May 1st
Shopify SEO audit for your online store TODAY ⬇Use purchase orders to order and stock inventory from your suppliers
This is a useful update for Shopify merchants and their customers: the merchant can now track incoming inventory counts, costs, payment terms, and ETA for delivery directly in Shopify, and provides more data around restocking and where inventory should be stored. From the customer perspective, this information helps to set expectations for availability. Changes to when FX conversion fees are added to a buyer's price point with automatic currency conversion
If you’re using automatic currency conversion with Shopify Markets, the foreign conversion fee is no longer added to the buyer’s price point when their currency matches one of your shop’s payout currencies.
May 2nd
Vaulted credit cards now supported on B2B draft orders
Business customers now have more flexibility when placing draft orders. They can now add or use existing vaulted credit cards when placing draft orders at checkout or paying for an invoice.
May 8th
Media library centralised
Files are now unified across content/files and products. This makes it easier to find where all your files are, and much improves file management. For example, you’ll now be able to see how and where a file is being used across your store. (This includes files in brand settings, products and meta-objects.)
May 9th
Enhanced staff permissions selector
As a company grows and has more admins, each with different levels of access required, it has historically been a challenge to manage staff and permissions. This latest enhancement showcases a redesigned permissions selector so you’re able to bulk select permissions for speed while also taking advantage of increased granularity.
Changes to asset URLs
Some store assets will be served from the store domain rather than a Shopify CDN domain.
Some will continue to use the old ‘cdn.shopify.com/…’ format while the rest will change to ‘shop.example.com/cdn/…’
The benefits of this are:
- Quicker page load for enhanced customer experience and improved conversion rate.
- Better security
- Less Shopify branding on merchant domains
NB This does not apply to headless shops.
Marketing automations now include a ‘welcome email series’ template
A welcome series of automated emails can now be created in Shopify using new templates. There are two variants available:
Welcome (discount with reminder)
- Email 1: with a discount
- Emails 2 and 3: to build customer relationship
- Email 4: reminder to use discount (if no purchase yet made)
Welcome (brand story with discount)
- Emails 1, 2 and 3: Share your story and connect with new subscribers
- Email 4: with a discount (if no purchase yet made)
- More dynamic sources available in online store
The number of dynamic sources you can add in an online store template has been increased. The limit is now 100 dynamic sources per template and 50 per static section.
May 10th
Improve your store front thanks to code editor insights
You can prevent and fix errors and improve the performance of your store with the new proactive code editor which will flag up potential issues in your theme code.
This is available here:
- Online Store > Themes in your Shopify admin
- Actions > Edit code for the theme that you want to work on
- Dynamic field types in Shopify Flow
Union fields are those where a single variable has more than one possible type. There are many examples in the Shopify GraphQL API. For example, purchasingEntity on an order can be either a PurchasingCompany or a Customer.
Interface fields are similar, but the types share a set of fields. For example all of the DiscountApplications types share a “value” object.
With these fields types accessible in Flow, you can build new types or workflows that make use of this data.
For example, you can now check if a Scripts discount was applied to an order. With PurchasingEntity, you can now check which company placed an order.
May 15th
ShopifyQL notebooks support Python code blocks
Merchants are now able to leverage the Python environment and its powerful libraries to retrieve, combine and visualise data using some of the most powerful data libraries available.
For more information on this, refer to Shopify’s help centre docs.
May 16th
Shopify Magic now usable for email subject lines
In another huge time-saver, if you’re using Shopify Email you can now incorporate Shopify Magic to create email subject lines.
It will generate them using your email content, or you can set your own instructions to generate the headings. Once you’ve chosen a brand voice, the system will generate 3 options for you to choose from. You’re then free to amend, tweak, or try again for different results.
Shopify Magic allows you to optimise email send times
The system will now recommend a send time for your emails based on your time zone, the time zones of your recipients and when you can expect the best click results. You are able to go with the suggestion, send immediately, or select your own time.
May 17th
Create custom templates in Shopify Email
In addition to the suite of pre-existing templates, you’re now able to create your own custom variants. Amend the sections, the look and feel, and save it for future use. This helps save time and makes your emails much more tailored to your brand.
May 23rd
B2B checkout now supports PayPal
You can now enable PayPal as a payment option which allows your wholesale customers to pay for their orders and invoices without a credit card.
The availability of PayPal for B2B and D2C can be configured using Shopify Functions.
Shop Pay available for Markets Pro
Shop Pay is an accelerated wallet that is the fastest and best converting way to pay online. It gives your customers a quicker, more seamless checkout experience, with the added benefits of saved shipping and payment details for faster and more convenient future purchases.
By integrating Shop Pay into Markets Pro, there will be a significant increase in checkout conversion rates and an overall improvement in customer experience.
Post-order editing for sales staff
With this update, it will be easier to ensure accurate reporting on sales and staff commission. Permissioned staff will now be able to edit sales attributions on completed orders, allowing them to correct any errors made during checkout, so you have accurate information about who earned the sale. Improved printed receipts when using POS
You are now able to have a different logo on printed receipts at different locations.
New Markets no longer automatically creates subfolders by default
When creating single-country markets in the past, a language/country subfolder was created for that market automatically.
Now, they will default to the same URL structure as the primary market and it is up to you how you would like to configure them.
May 24th
POS Go available in Canada
POS Go is an all-in-one, hand-help POS device with an integrated barcode scanner, card reader and POS software. And now, it’s available in Canada!
May 29th
Payouts in multiple currencies available for Shopify Payments in Canada
And the final Shopify update of the month is another Canadian enhancement. For those businesses based there and using the Advanced or Plus plans, you can now connect two bank accounts and receive payments in USD or CAD with Shopify Payments.
(Any payout received in USD will be subject to an international currency payout fee.)
And that’s it for May, with a substantial wave of enhancements, upgrades, improvements and new features rolling out.
If you need any support with your Shopify store, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help!
