What’s new from Shopify? We take a peek...
One of the best things about running your business on a hosted platform like Shopify is that there are continual improvements to the solution that get rolled out automatically to merchants. As it’s the summer and there are many welcome distractions, like holidays and ice-cream, some of you may have missed out on new feature releases in the past few months. The announcements from Shopify Unite were significant and plentiful and we are now starting to see some of those announcements roll out to Shopify merchants around the world. Let’s take a brief tour through the latest ones.
Apple Business Chat is now available for Shopify merchants
Available to all Shopify merchants, Shopify Ping now supports Apple Business Chat so you can chat directly with your store visitors using their preferred messaging solution and offer support, product information and discounts directly within the chat. When visitors are browsing your store on Mac, iPad or iPhone they can converse with you within the native Messages app and continue that conversation without having to return to your website.
Download Shopify Ping from the Apple App Store and enable Apple Business Chat from Ping. Apple Business Chat and Shopify Ping are both free for sellers.
Learn more about using Apple Business Chat with Ping from the Shopify Help Center.
Filter Products by Collection
When viewing all your products from the Shopify Admin, you can now filter by Collection. This allows you to rapidly access the products you may need and then bulk edit or update from there. It’s a small change that will have a large impact in saving time for merchants when managing your store.
Store search has been updated
A slightly technical update here - Shopify has added three URL parameters to the storefront search results that will improve the measurement of how search within your store performs and that will surface more relevant results for your visitors. Helping store visitors find what they are looking for more quickly is a proven way to improve your conversion rate and increase sales.
Images now load faster on Shopify - FACT
Announced at Shopify Unite and supported on every Shopify store WebP is a new image format designed to compress images on the web without losing any image quality when compared to the more common image formats like JPEG and PNG. Since switching this on, Shopify has made all their stores on average 30% faster for visitors using any of the popular browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera.
By reducing the image size, the user experiences faster download times and reduces their bandwidth usage. This all contributes to pages being returned to visitors visibly faster and helps increase conversion rates.
Best of all, you don’t have to make any changes to your store - this is available automatically to anyone using one of the supported browsers.
Shopify Pay just got better
There have been a number of improvements to Shopify Pay over the summer. Shopify Pay is available to all stores using Shopify Payments. With Shopify Pay, the customer’s shipping and billing information is securely stored on Shopify’s PCI compliant servers and is only shared with your store if an order is placed. This accelerated checkout lets customers complete their transactions faster. As always with online commerce: faster checkout = more sales!
Since late June customers who use Shopify Pay can now input a discount code during the ordering process, add or update their saved shipping addresses and select between your store’s available shipping methods.
Customers also now have more control over where and how they manage their deliveries while still using Shopify Pay. It is especially important for frequent shoppers. Customers can view and select from up to five shipping addresses based on their last saved delivery locations—without opting out of the Shopify Pay checkout flow.
Shopify Pay now supports even more languages helping internationally focused and ambitious merchants to grow their business to an even wider audience.
Shopify Payments now supporting Maestro debit cards
For merchants in Ireland, UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands using Shopify Payments you can now accept customers using a Maestro debit card with Apple Pay when taking online orders.
We love Apple Pay at the Milk Bottle Creamery. For stores who offer this, we can checkout in 6 seconds! If you want to offer your customers the ability to pay with Apple Pay, check out Shopify’s help centre article here.
Shopify Scripts character limit has increased
Finally, for our Shopify Plus merchants, the character limit for Shopify Scripts has been increased by 50% to 24,576 characters giving merchants the flexibility and space they need to build more complex line item, shipping, and payment customizations at checkout.
We think Shopify Scripts are one of the most powerful conversion rate optimisation and growth tools available to store owners - and with this update, they have become even more powerful to Shopify Plus merchants.
Peter @ Milk Bottle
