Shopify Unite 2017
In the 2nd half of April this year, more than a thousand of Shopify partners, merchants and developers descended on San Francisco for Shopify Unite Conference. After the huge success of last year, the company upped its game for this year’s conference that focused on Shopify’s plans for the forthcoming year together with recapping some commendable stats on how Shopify continues to grow. This two-day event witnessed Shopify developers sharing and discussing ideas about the platform. Like last year, Shopify made announcements about their products as well. All the attendees eagerly waited to hear about the exciting new features of Shopify that will transform the use of this platform. Here’re the key highlights of Shopify Unite 2017.
Shopify Pay
Shopify has always been concentrating on improving conversion rates for the merchants and with the introduction of Shopify Pay, they should be able to succeed. When customers checkout on any Shopify store, they’ll have the option to let Shopify ‘remember’ their payment details. By enabling this powerful feature, you would no longer be required to enter your billing information when you checkout of any Shopify store in the future. Returning customers can now easily checkout with just one touch or click and as we all know, lowering the number of steps from shopping cart to the final checkout process is highly beneficial when it comes to improving conversion rates, especially for the mobile customers. Cutting down the barriers will surely help the merchants give a significant boost to their conversion rates.
Mobile Store Builder
With the number of mobile users increasing quickly than ever, as a merchant, you would probably want an amazing mobile application to offer your users an enticing and seamless shopping experience. This becomes essential when you consider the fact forecasted by analysts stating 45% of all e-commerce is likely to take place through mobile devices by 2020. For merchants with a comparatively high recurring buying rate, developing a good native mobile experience can be a great way to build loyalty and make the shopping experience on mobile devices a smooth one. With Mobile Store Builder, merchants would be able to develop a native mobile app without any knowledge of coding. Apps are developed based on template systems utilizing customizable themes. Additionally, native apps are faster, more responsive and are able to provide the users with a more seamless checkout experience.
New Card Reader
With Shopify’s New Card Reader, selling products and accepting payments in person has become much easier than ever. This easy-to-use card reader is perfect for any type of selling. Now you would be able to sell your products at pop-up shops, markets or at your permanent retail location. With this elegant device, merchants can accept any kind of credit and debit cards. This reader works through dipping the card (almost similar to in-store POS ‘chip’ readers). An amazing feature of this card reader is that it can be detached from the base and connected through Bluetooth, empowering a merchant to help a consumer with the reader in hand. To get this card reader, existing customers need to pay $29 only while new merchants can have it for free.
Custom Storefronts
Over the years, as business has evolved from brick-and-mortar standalone stalls to shopping malls and finally to ecommerce stores, the way people purchase and sell continues to develop and evolve. With the introduction of Shopify’s Custom Storefront, developers can now integrate commerce in every place where merchants wish to sell and where their consumers wish to buy. This development kit allows you to develop a Shopify purchasing experience simply into any platform. Whether it’s a desktop store, a mobile app or in-game buys for mobile games, Custom Storefront will help merchants to expand their reach to almost anywhere. With this software development kit of Shopify, you can easily think outside of your online store and expand your reach to multiple platforms and areas, which in turn would help you take your conversion rate to the next level.
Marketing Events API
As we’ve said earlier, Shopify continually strives to help the merchants with new apps to increase their conversion rates. The company’s new Marketing Events API is surely going to help the merchants to a great extent. According to surveys conducted by Shopify, one of the most difficult struggles that merchants experience is finding ways to market their business and products. As a matter of fact, more than 50% merchants install different marketing apps but the problem begins when they use these apps together with multiple marketing campaigns and efforts. Then it becomes really difficult to identify the impact of an individual marketing effort and the way it contributes to the overall growth and sales of the business. With help of the Marketing Events API, developers will be able to add tracking to an app automatically, which can be utilized to accentuate performance data, how much traffic an app drives and how it contribute to sales.
Wholesale Channel
To sustain in this rapidly accelerating e-commerce landscape, businesses - regardless of their size, simply can’t afford to leave anything within their scope. Discovering new sales channels which are currently being used by a very small number of your competitors can give you a significant head start and help you attain substantial growth. The Wholesale Channel developed by Shopify empowers merchants to grow their businesses based on their existing stores. Instead of depending on handmade draft orders, spreadsheets etc, the Wholesale Channel helps merchants develop their market, attract high-volume consumers and enhance lifetime customer value. This channel empowers Shopify Plus merchants to provide the consumers with a committed wholesale store that’s separate from their normal B2C operations. Orders together with management stay at the same dashboard of Shopify, making the entire wholesale handling activity simple.
Launchpad
High-volume merchants often get confused between preparing for flash sales, kicking off a new sales campaign and launching of new product releases because each of these requires highly time-consuming and laborious pre-event activities to attain the goals. With Shopify’s Launchpad, now you can plan as well as automate all of the pursuits required to execute a sales campaign, product launch or flash sale. This application can be your command center from where you can schedule, manage and execute your major business events in advance. Launchpad empowers you to pre-plan everything on the to-do list and roll it back instantly once the event or sale is over. With Launchpad on your side, you can easily get rid of all the headaches associated with all your major commerce events.
Summary
Shopify has always innovated for beginner and large-volume merchants. Shopify Unite 2017 has actually solidified the merchants’ confidence in Shopify, thanks to the announcements of some game changing features showing their commitment and focus to eEnterprise users. With the introduction of a significant number of amazing features from Shopify Pay to Launchpad, which has the substance to transform the way merchants vend online, Shopify Unite 2017 demonstrated the futuristic and innovative thinking of Shopify. The leadership, mission and vision, ethos – everything equally contributes to making Shopify an actually recommendable platform for the merchants, the developers and all other associated with today’s transforming e-commerce landscape.
