It’s not a lie that Shopify is the best ecommerce platform in the world. The company did not gain this position just because of its records or the accolades they possess.

But they are accorded this honor because they are constantly working on delivering the best ecommerce service to their users. Their utmost desire is to enhance the strong connection between merchants and consumers.

To serve and make life easier for their users, they normally roll out new features twice yearly, first in the mid-year and the second update close to the end of the year.

The past few years recorded a rise in ecommerce activities. The covid-19 pandemic changed the shopping manner of many people across the globe. Many now prefer the online shopping and home delivery employed during the period to physical shopping.

At the same time, there was a burst in the cryptocurrency market. Many people now possess virtual wallets, and some companies accept cryptocurrencies as payment. Moreover, we now have non-fungible tokens (NFT).

In order to adjust to all these changes and ensure that users don’t miss out on the ecommerce opportunities of this new era, Shopify’s mid-year update this time was massive.

For the first time, the ecommerce platform unleashed over 100 new features in its Shopify Summer 2022 Edition themed Connect to Consumer. These new features include small changes like a new and upgraded payment method, increased store staff permissions, template upgrade, and more.

But in this article, we will cover summaries of the most significant and notable features of the new Shopify Edition.

Are you a merchant on Shopify? If yes, make yourself comfortable and read through this blog because there’s much more you can do with your store. And if you don’t have a store yet with the company, here are more reasons to join the ecommerce platform today.

Twitter Sales Channel

The term social commerce has only been possible because of Shopify. For a long time, this company has been signing partnerships with social media so its users could sell on these platforms.

Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest sale channels were announced in May 2020, and TikTok later in December of the same year. Now, Shopify is happy to announce that its merchants can sell on Twitter, one of the world’s best business-oriented social media platforms.

This new partnership was announced as part of the new features added to the Shopify edition. And it could only be possible because of Twitter’s readiness to empower businesses and professionals on the platform with marketing tools.

Twitter has been experimenting with many marketing tools for the past few months. These tools include Shop Spotlight, Location Spotlight, Shopping Manager, and Twitter live Shopping. And the latest added to the arsenal is the Twitter Shop. The success with these tools led to the partnership with Shopify.

Now, merchants can use the Twitter sales channel on Shopify to connect their store to their account on Twitter. With this installed, they can export their product catalog to their Twitter Shop and sell directly to their followers on the platform without any challenges.

Presently, merchants can use Twitter Shop, Shopping Spotlight, or Location Spotlight for ecommerce activities on the platform. However, they have reassured the public through TechCrunch that they are working on a solution allowing merchants to enable more than one of these options.

Twitter is really going to attract sales for merchants on Shopify. The platform currently has over 400million monthly active users. Moreover, it’s an online environment where people freely engage in business and professional discussions. Therefore, this partnership is a big blessing to merchants.

Tap to Pay on iPhone

Shopify has been making hardware payment solutions to cater to merchants who also run physical stores. The latest of their innovation in this category is the Tap to Pay method that’s currently available on iPhone.

Tap to Pay is a contactless physical payment solution in which buyers pay with their phone or chip-enabled card without touching the POS device.

Although the Covid-19 pandemic is behind us, the period has made people overly conscious of what they touch, and many would not use POS machines. The pandemic taught us that we must create hardware that can be used without making contacts.

If we’re to bring back physical shopping, Tap-to-Pay must be implemented. Only through this technology can we protect buyers and prevent spreading deadly diseases.

With help from Apple and Stripe, Shopify has made it possible for iPhone users. Now, Shopify merchants can receive contactless payments using the Shopify POS App.

Merchants can now set up temporary retail points anywhere and collect money without contacting buyers. All they have to do is to enable this feature on their Shopify POS App, and the customer can send money to them using the Tap to Pay App on their iPhone.

Tap to Pay is a secured payment system. All Shopify Payments are PCI complaints, and the Apple Tap to Pay is designed to protect users’ payment details. Therefore, both parties can transact business knowing their data is safe and secure.

B2B Shopify

Do you have the urge to sell your products to wholesalers and not directly to consumers? Or wish you could do both online from a single platform. Wish no more and register for Shopify Plus.

The Shopify summer 2022 edition added a new feature for the Shopify Plus subscribers, allowing merchants to perform B2B and DTC from the store.

The beautiful part is that you can choose to manage both from a single dashboard or have a separate dashboard for your B2B transactions. B2B Shopify will help you meet the need of wholesalers from different parts of the world.

Marketing to other businesses is not as easy as selling directly to consumers. Wholesalers have different purchase partners, and taxes usually varies with location. However, you don’t need to spend a minute worrying about all these because Shopify has got you covered with this upgrade.

Now, you can set a profile for each company that buys wholesale from you. You can set a special price list, discount, taxes, and location for each company. This feature also comes with full customization ability.

You can design the store to your taste and even automate some tasks that used to be manual. All within your Shopify plus store without the need to integrate any third-party app.

Shopify Tokengated Commerce

Well, Shopify and Surprises are two best friends. And they rock together every single time. Who would have thought of Shopify and NFTs?

Non-fungible token (NFT) is currently one of the popular terms in the art industry. It’s a way through which creators sell their artworks without sharing the rights with the platform on which they advertise the artworks.

Between 2021 and now, many people have become fortunate through this method. And because it pays well, many musicians and digital creators engage in the business. It’s currently the talk of the internet world.

Tokengating NFT rewards NFT holders by giving them exclusive access to communities, contents, or physical products. Tokengated ecommerce allows NFTs creators to reward their faithful fans and VIPs with discounts and exclusive products on their online store.

NTF creators, who are also in the ecommerce business, usually use Tokengating to appreciate their holders. Also, creators who like to create and sell merch around their artworks could use it to drive sales to their store while showing love to their true fans.

Shopify makes this easier for NFTs creators with these new plugins that allow them to link their crypto wallets to their ecommerce store. They can set discounts and exclusive product access to their true fans without writing a line of code.

Shopify headless e-commerce

Headless e-commerce is a new tech stack that enables merchants to build a store with a better and personified user experience, faster loading speed, improved CMS, and beautiful web templates.

To serve better, Shopify has worked out this stack solution for its users to obtain more control over the look, functions, and experiences their store provides to buyers.

Shopify could only develop this solution because they can see into the future. They saw increasing merchants demanding more functions and controls, which theme Layered, and easy-to-use editors can’t provide. Merchants should be able to hire developers that can make changes by editing codes.

Headless e-commerce is one in which you use a different head or front-end while keeping all the incredible features of the Shopify backend. This has existed for quite a while, but now, Shopify is adding the new Hydrogen and Oxygen features.

To make its stores more flexible for developers, Shopify created Hydrogen, a solution that allows developers to edit Shopify stores using JavaScript and React. JavaScript and React are better frameworks for headless solutions, enabling developers to develop APIs to build unique Shopify stores for merchants.

Moreover, Shopify has prepared React components to enable developers to enjoy the process without breaking a sweat. Shopify believes this will unveil the full capabilities of Shopify stores as there are more JavaScript and React-based developers than Liquid developers.

The problem with Shopify’s headless solution is that it requires third-party hosting. However, we’re happy to inform you that you can now host your headless store on Oxygen, Shopify headless hosting solution.

Closing thoughts

At this stage, Shopify is no longer contending to be the best ecommerce platform because they already acquired that position a long time ago. Now, they are working on serving their users better while developing futuristic ecommerce solutions.

As Glen Coates, VP Products at Shopify, described to TechCrunch, “We want Shopify to be one big button.” A platform where merchants can quickly build fantastic stores and buyers enjoy the best online shopping experience.

This article is just an overview of the Shopify Edition updates. We urge you to follow this series to the end to explore all the new features released by Shopify fully.