At its annual Shopify Unite 2021 event, the Canadian eCommerce powerhouse announced its largest set of platform investments to date for a stronger, better, faster and more flexible future of eCommerce; specifically through Shopify Online Store 2.0.

Given the staggering boost pandemic lockdowns triggered in online shopping, it’s only expected that the understanding for better customer experiences will give way to more customisable updates, better brand story-telling and checkout efficiency.

As per the announcement,

“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.”

Key Points from Unite 2021

• Shopify unveiled “Online Store 2.0” and customization was at the forefront. This includes a big upgrade to Shopify’s Liquid platform, allowing business owners to get the best from developer features, without the need for coding. A new editor experience will be on its way too, with theme app extensions and a Shopify Theme Store, available from July 15; along with a fresh default theme in the shape of Dawn. The new Storefront features code-free design capabilities and a “Theme Store.” Netflix even used the new platform to launch its first e-comm store.

• Shopify Checkout will be even faster, giving any shop the capacity to handle tens of thousands of purchases per minute. The stated goal is for a single merchant to be able to sell 300,000 pairs of sneakers in just over eight minutes, and for each shop to have the ability to handle as much sales volume as was served across all of Shopify at the peak of Black Friday Cyber Monday in 2020.

• Shopify revenue share is now 0% for the first $1M app developers make annually on the platform. This share model will also be rolled out to Theme Store developers. Currently, Shopify charges 20% revenue share, so this aims to increase the opportunity for developers to build and grow their businesses.

• The introduction of Hydrogen, a new React framework for developers to build custom storefronts and Oxygen, the future hosting platform for custom storefronts on Shopify.

• Merchants, with the launch of Metafields, can now add things like products and product variants, with more upgrades to happen later in the year.

• Built on top of the new Metafields infrastructure, the upcoming Custom Content will serve as Shopify’s Content Management platform. Providing merchants capability to store content of any format within Shopify.

For more detailed breakdowns of these upgrades, head to Shopify Unite 2021.

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