Shopify, the leading global commerce company powering over 25% of all online retail in Australia, has unveiled 150+ new products and enhancements to create a faster, more resilient, and unified experience for merchants.
With enhancements across Point of Sale (POS), AI, analytics, merchandising and more, Shopify’s Summer Edition reimagines a truly streamlined and unified commerce experience for merchants and developers. Updates include AI-powered tools that support content generation and help merchants quickly answer customers, features that enable smoother in-person transactions, and the evolution of Markets, to make expanding your business more seamless.
“The Summer ’24 Edition reflects our mission to create a unified commerce experience for our merchants,” said Shaun Broughton, Managing Director, APAC at Shopify. “This unwavering belief in simplicity is what allows entrepreneurs and teams to expand into new markets, quickly pivot on up-to-the-minute data, and share new and exciting products, all without the costs and complexity that can so often hinder business growth.”
Simplify expansion with reimagined Markets
Millions of merchants rely on Shopify to scale their business—from entering new regions, expanding to wholesale, or opening brick-and-mortar stores. This Edition, Shopify has evolved Markets, formerly its cross-border selling solution, to become the central command centre for growth and expansion.
New in the Summer ’24 Edition for Australian merchants is:
- Markets: With our reimagined Markets, merchants can sell internationally, expand into B2B and sell in person with Shopify POS—all consolidated into one location in their admin. They no longer have to navigate multiple stores or different workflows. The process stays consistent—simply create a new market (international, wholesale, in-store), make the customisations, and they are ready to launch.
AI enhancements built for commerce
Time is a valuable and often scarce resource for an entrepreneur. That’s why in the Summer ‘24 Edition, Shopify has taken its AI-powered features to the next level, embedding them throughout Shopify to save merchants precious hours and dollars.
New in the Summer ’24 Edition for Australian merchants are:
- Media Editor: In January, Shopify released AI image generation via Media Editor and saw merchants save over one million AI-generated images to their storefronts. Now, Shopify has extended AI image editing to everywhere in the Shopify admin where merchants use images, like the Online Store Editor and Email Editor. This feature is also available on the mobile app, so merchants can make professional image edits while on the go.
- AI-powered product creation: There is now an easier way to add new products to a store. With just a few keywords and a product image, Shopify Magic instantly suggests personalised and intelligent recommendations for all product categories. It will assign the right attributes to new products—like colour, size, and style—minimising listing errors so customers can easily find them on a merchant’s online store, on social, and on marketplaces.
- Suggested replies: Providing online shoppers with real-time answers to their questions can take up precious time that merchants are short on. Now, Shopify Magic quickly suggests an AI-generated response to an incoming customer chat based on information specific to a merchant’s store. Merchants can then approve (or edit) the response, hit send while they have the customer’s attention, and keep on selling—all in seconds.
Streamline in-store selling
Creating a seamless shopping journey in-store is vital for businesses. With Australians continuing to show interest in brick-and-mortar experiences, Shopify has made a series of upgrades to make selling in-person as easy as selling online.
POS updates in the Summer ’24 Edition for Australian merchants are:
- Automations: Retailers can now offer one-tap digital receipts. If an in-store customer is a Shop Pay user, their email shows at checkout, where they can opt into receiving digital receipts and marketing. Shopify has also enabled automatic detection of whether a product can be returned, and provide staff with context on why. This reduces uncertainty among staff and creates a more consistent return experience for customers.
- Discounts: Merchants can benefit from added flexibility when it comes to creating irresistible offers for customers. In POS, multiple discounts can now be applied at once to a cart. Merchants can also enhance their promotional strategies by introducing “Buy X Get Y” discount codes.
Support timely decision-making with up-to-the-minute data
In a competitive retail environment, merchants need to be able to analyse customer behaviour and pivot quickly when needed. Fragmented and outdated data impacts timely decision-making, so Shopify has completely rebuilt its analytics to work smarter, faster and more intuitively for merchants.
New in the Summer ’24 Edition for Australian merchants is:
- Unified analytics: Act on smarter, faster and more intuitive data with Shopify’s updated dashboard, powered by a pre-built report designed to provide insights on the most frequent commerce questions from merchants.