Shopify unveils variety of changes to its platform that support retailers and developers revolutionize the ecommerce space
Shopify is unveiling its largest set of platform investments to date, adding a host of new features including Storefronts and Checkout in the Theme Store and enhancing its Partner Ecosystem—giving developers and merchants even more power to create, customize, scale, and monetize on Shopify.
“The internet is the world’s largest city, and Shopify is building its commerce infrastructure,” said Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify. “Especially over the past year, we saw independent businesses succeed by showing up creatively and uniquely in this city. The future of commerce on the internet relies on creative expression at every touchpoint. Together with developers, we are building the infrastructure to make this possible.”
Storefronts give users an online store 2.0, according to the vendor. It features greater levels of flexibility and customization so merchants can better showcase their brands, create unique online experiences, and integrate apps—all without touching code.
The company is launching new developer tools and a new default theme that is faster and more beautiful than ever: Dawn. These will make building themes significantly easier and provide merchants more creative options for their storefronts, according to the vendor.
The company is also introducing Hydrogen, a new React framework for developers to build custom storefronts (launching soon), as well as Oxygen, thefuture hosting platform for custom storefronts on Shopify.
With support for additional Metafields, merchants can now add their own attributes to models like products and product variants, with support for other models like customers and orders coming later this year. Custom Content, coming soon, will be built on top of the new Metafields infrastructure and will serve as Shopify's Content Management platform. It will allow merchants to store content of any format within Shopify.
Shopify Checkout will be even faster, giving any shop the capacity to handle tens of thousands of purchases per minute.
The latest updates introduce Checkout Extensions, allowing developers to securely build apps into Shopify Checkout. These checkout customizations will also work in Shop Pay, making the fastest way to pay on the internet another creative brand surface for merchants.
Shopify Scripts are now easier to build and more powerful than ever for developers creating unique checkout experiences for Shopify Plus brands.
Developers who build for the Shopify App Store will now pay 0% revenue share for the first $1 million they earn annually on the platform starting on August 1. That’s down from 20%. The $1 million benchmark resets annually.
For more information about these enhancements, visit www.shopify.com.