100+ updates that make Shopify's foundations even stronger – highlights from Winter ’24 Edition

Great software comes from careful craftsmanship and nailing a million little details that work perfectly together.

Today, we’re releasing 100+ more of those little (and large) details. It’s Shopify Editions, where we take you to the cutting edge of commerce. For our Winter ’24 Edition, we’re focusing on the world-class foundations of our software to make them even stronger.

These commerce foundations largely determine what and how you can build on Shopify, so we know our focus here is essential. We want you to be able to architect exactly what you want and need.

The full Winter ’24 Edition is live now, but TL;DR, our latest upgrades span four categories that are critical to our merchants’ success: conversion, channels, marketing, and operations.

1. More ways to convert your buyers

We did a ton of work to better support the products you sell, and to turn more shoppers into buyers.

Merchandising

How your products show up in your store is really important. It’s one of the top factors that drive conversion for your business. We’ve made the biggest upgrade to our platform’s foundation in 10 years, including:

• 2,000 variant limit: Our new GraphQL APIs increase Shopify’s variant limit from 100 to 2,000 per product. This will help those of you with complex product catalogs and lots of colorways, sizing, and SKU options. 
• Combined listings: If you’ve got a product that comes in multiple variations (like color or style), buyers can now purchase any of them from a single product listing. Each variation will have its own description, media gallery, and descriptive URL.
• Better product classification: Our new taxonomy reduces the time and effort it takes you to create product listings. The product page now automatically applies standardized categories and category-specific product attributes (like color, age group, or size) across different variants so you don’t have to do it manually over and over and can make your products more discoverable when they are published to social and marketplace channels.

Storefront performance

Speed = conversion. With our new Web Performance Dashboard, we now show you industry-standard Core Web Vitals for loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability — 3 stats that can help impact your store’s page ranking and your ability to sell more.

Notice your shopping experience becoming faster? Over the past year, we’ve worked to make our infrastructure 35% faster, and we’ve expanded our global points of presence to nearly 300. You’re now within 50 milliseconds of everyone on the planet.

Semantic search

We communicate by understanding the meaning behind what is being said, not just the literal words. In search, that means keyword matching isn’t enough to get people what they’re really looking for.

Semantic search, our new AI-powered storefront search feature, goes beyond keywords to better understand a shopper’s intent. This gives them more relevant search results that they’ll be more likely to buy from.

Someone might type “warm clothes for the winter” and the algorithm will recognize they’re looking for sweaters, beanies, woolen socks etc., even though they didn’t use those specific keywords.

Checkout upgrades

Shopify Checkout is the highest converting checkout on the internet, and it becomes even more powerful when we make it more flexible. That’s why we launched:

• One-page Checkout: We’ve streamlined our checkout experience from three pages to one, reducing buyer completion time by 4 seconds on average.

• Checkout Extensibility: We’ve added 14 new APIs and updates to customize Shopify’s checkout, plus more than 90 new apps that unlock powerful features like upsells, loyalty programs, post-purchase surveys, conversion tracking, and custom content.

ButcherBox recently migrated to Shopify and has seen increased conversion rates on their store, even though they kept the UX the exact same. 

“We had an awesome Q4, I think in part because of Shopify, in part because of the technology under the hood. As an engineer, that makes me really happy,” said David House, ButcherBox’s Principal Engineer who led the migration to Shopify. 

Subscriptions

Our new free Subscriptions app lets you set up and manage your subscriptions directly from your Shopify admin.

2. More channels to sell more around the world

You should be able to expand into a new market or channel as simply as you can add a new product. Whether you want to sell in a new region, marketplace, social channel, or retail location, we’re building features to make it easier.

POS Ship from Store

You will soon be able to select a retail store as the fulfillment location for an order so your staff can pick, pack, and ship that order right from your shop. We hear you when you tell us you want streamlined POS fulfillment, and that in-store fulfillment can increase your efficiency, reduce warehouse load, and lower your shipping costs. 

Markets Pro 

Worldwide ecommerce sales are expected to grow 9.4% in 2024, and selling cross-border allows you to access more of that growth. Markets Pro is designed to help you do just that, and it’s now available to all US businesses. This product bundle takes the complexity out of selling internationally, simplifying things like global taxes, duties, restrictions, international shipping labels, customs, fraud, and foreign exchange.

3. Maximize your marketing to buyers, wherever they are

Shopify Audiences

We built Shopify Audiences to help you find more customers, lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), and improve return on ad spend (ROAS). With our app, you can pull custom targeting lists to use across ad platforms like Meta, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok. Because of the sheer scale and volume of commerce on Shopify, we’re uniquely positioned to use machine learning to improve digital advertising for you. 

In this Edition, we launched smarter retargeting algorithms, and most merchants are seeing at least 2x retargeting audience sizes as a result. We’ve also added benchmarks for measuring performance, so you can compare your ad results to similar stores or industry groupings to pinpoint where to make improvements. 

Shop Campaigns

Shop Cash offers, our risk-free customer acquisition program, has already helped merchants acquire more than 1 million new customers since launching last year. This Edition, we’re rebranding Shop Cash Offers as Shop Campaigns, and adding estimates and analytics to maximize the impact of those dollars for your buyers.

You can launch your campaigns across multiple surfaces with one click without having to build audiences or create assets. Plus, you only pay for converting customers.

Kitsch, a beauty and hair accessories merchant, has seen big results from using Shop Campaigns. “In November 2023, we saw a 143% month-over-month increase in new customers acquired on Shop,” Kitsch’s VP of Growth Yingying Kuang said. “The campaign effectively and effortlessly helped us acquire new customers.”

4. Streamline your business operations

We built new financial solutions and AI tools to make your hard jobs easier.

Shopify Magic

We’ve built AI into the foundations of our platform with Shopify Magic, our suite of free AI-enabled tools. To keep your business on the cutting edge, we’re working on:

Media Editor

Building an online store requires tons of high quality media assets, which can cost hundreds of dollars per image and weeks to produce. Our new Media Editor lets you use generative AI to DIY your product images instantly and for free, directly within your Shopify Admin. Create original images and professional-level edits with a few clicks or keywords, no design skills needed. Soon, you’ll be able to erase unwanted pixels and enhance details in a low-resolution image (up to 4K).

Sidekick

Sidekick will be the world’s most useful AI-enabled assistant for commerce. It allows you to use AI to increase productivity, improve workflows, make smarter decisions, and spend less time on operational tasks. We’ve rolled out Sidekick to a select number of merchants in early access, and we’ll let you know when it’s fully live and ready for you to try.

Shopify Capital

For more than 7 years, Shopify Capital has injected more than $5 billion into merchant businesses when they need it most. Our offers range from a few hundred dollars all the way into the millions.

As your business grows, your needs diversify, and you want more flexibility in your lending options—so we’re growing our suite of lending solutions with two new products.

Line of Credit

When it comes to financing options, you shouldn’t only have access to a large lump-sum of money that you need to start paying off right away. With Shopify Line of Credit, you can access only the funding you need (not necessarily the full limit), right from your admin, and only pay interest on the amount you withdraw. Your credit limit replenishes as you repay. There are no origination or draw fees; no hidden fees at all.

And that's a wrap!

That’s your rundown on Shopify’s Winter ’24 Editions. We hope you’ll take a look at Shopify Editions for the full experience detailing our 100+ updates.

As for us, after this massive round of show and tell, we’re getting back to shipping more updates that we can show you in another six months. 🚀