5 New Shopify Merchant Features for Spring 2020
One of the things we love most about Shopify is that it’s always evolving. The platform is constantly making improvements and adding new features that make it easier for merchants like you to sell your products online.
Shopify just announced its latest round of updates set to take effect in the coming weeks. Among them are a tool that offers greater control over the design of your store, tweaks that help developers maintain clean code, a big change you need to know about if your site incorporates an Instagram feed, and more. Here are the most noteworthy new Shopify merchant features for spring 2020.
New store design capabilities
It will soon be even easier to customize the look and feel of your online store. Here are some of the new storefront design merchants will soon have access to:
The ability to add content sections to product pages via the online store editor
Content sections give you endless ways to make your pages more engaging, and now they’re available for individual product pages. You can use them to incorporate everything from photo galleries and videos to collections of related products that are designed to increase average order value.
The ability to edit product pages individually or globally
his gives merchants more control over the appearance of different product pages and will save lots of time when you want to make changes to one group of product pages without having to use custom code or change the look of your entire store.
Custom sets of headers and footers
Similarly, you’ll now be able to create distinct header and footer groups and apply them to specific pages of your store.
An easier way to integrate apps with your storefront
Integrating third-party apps can be a stumbling block for merchants, especially if you don’t have a developer in house. These new capabilities will make it easier to paste code snippets in the right place so that the Shopify apps you use display and function seamlessly.
An easier way to speed up your site
Faster stores make more sales. A delay as small as one second can lead to a 7% reduction in your conversion rate. Until now, though, finding the cause of slow loading pages has been largely left to trial and error. The new Shopify Theme Inspector for Chrome will change that.
This tool will do the heavy lifting when it comes to pinpointing speed issues. It’ll help front-end developers more easily debug code in the slowest-loading parts of your store to improve server response time and overall page load. This should ultimately help you achieve better conversion rates.
Deprecation of the Instagram API
If your online store incorporates an Instagram feed, it’s made possible through the Instagram API. As of March 31, however, that API will no longer be functional. In an effort to better protect the privacy of users, Instagram is switching to the Basic Display API.
For Shopify merchants, this means themes that feature an Instagram feed will need to be updated to function correctly. Alternatively, you’ll need to start using an app to incorporate your Instagram feed into your store.
Need a hand making sure your Instagram feed doesn’t stop working correctly or disappear altogether? We can recommend the right app to suit your needs or, if one isn’t available, build one for you.
More order editing capabilities for Plus merchants
Today’s eCommerce transactions aren’t as simple as they were ten years ago–and that’s a good thing. There are endless ways for merchants to earn more revenue and better serve customers through creative ordering options, and now it’s easier to accommodate those with order editing.
Merchants using Shopify Plus can now add items to orders, collect additional payment, and remove items within 60 days of the creation of an order. This opens new doors for upselling and cross-selling products, customizing orders and sending product recommendations.
So what does this look like in practice? You could use this new Shopify feature to automatically add gifts to an order under an offer like “free gift with $100 purchase!” Or, you could display a post-checkout landing page with suggested add-on items that a customer can tack onto to their order with just a click. These are just a few of the ways order editing expands your flexibility and creative options as a merchant.
Store-specific status pages
This feature will be useful for merchants who have multiple storefronts or multiple team members that access the same accounts.
Shopify is moving to a single-signon system where each account has a single email address and password used to log in (rather than each user having their own separate credentials). Now, there’s also a single status page to check the status of any store associated with the account. This is useful in situations that require quick access to status information, like when launching ads for your store or troubleshooting an app.
If you haven’t already migrated to a single-signon account, find instructions to do so here.
Learn What Shopify Can Do For Your Online Store
Discover how Shopify can facilitate growth and maximize revenue for your brand by setting up a consultation with our team of experts today. Whether you’re already on Shopify and want to do more with it or you’re on another platform and want to migrate, we can map out a strategy that will help you attract more traffic, capture more conversions and run your business more efficiently. We look forward to speaking with you.
