Welcome to our monthly product newsletter for Shopify developers. Read on for important updates and new features.
Upcoming deprecations and new GraphQL product APIs supporting 2,000 variants
The 2024-04 stable API release includes the new GraphQL product APIs that can support up to 2,000 variants per product, enabling developers to build support for larger and more complex catalogs.
Alongside this release, we’ve also announced the deprecation of REST product APIs, as well as several fields within the existing GraphQL product APIs.
Learn more about these important changes in the docs.
Introducing category page ads on the Shopify App Store
Developers can now generate even more demand for their apps by showcasing them on the category and subcategory pages of the Shopify App Store.
Category page ads enable you to get in front of merchants in a high-context setting, right when they’re beginning to explore apps for specific use cases.
Just like search ads and homepage ads, category page ads operate on a cost-per-click basis. This means that you only incur a cost if a merchant clicks on your category page ad, giving you a cost-effective new solution for accelerating growth.
Offer third-party pickup locations from any network of your choice with Pickup Points
Introducing Pickup Points, a new Shopify Function that enables developers to build custom apps for Plus shops that offer pickup points in checkout to locations like post-offices and parcel lockers.
Developers can integrate third-party pickup locations from any network of their choice, customize delivery information based on business logic, and define location-based pricing.
Learn how to tailor B2B buying experiences
Dive into Shopify Academy's latest course, Customizing B2B Orders, to learn how to accept preorders, set customer credit limits, and establish minimum order totals. Leverage metafields, checkout validation functions, Shopify Flow, and third-party apps to streamline B2B operations and enhance your development skills.
That's all for this month
To stay up to date with changes that impact the Shopify platform and app development, subscribe to the Shopify developer changelog for real-time updates as they happen.
Previous updates from 2024
March 2024
March 2024 Hydrogen release: Vite, `env push`, and GitHub deploy comments
Starting March 2024, Hydrogen is moving to a monthly release cadence with new features and updates dropping the first week of each month.
This month’s release includes:
- Experimental support for Vite.
- A new `env push_ _unstable` command to upload local environment variables to Oxygen from the command line.
- Comments on GitHub PRs when Oxygen creates a preview deployment on your connected storefront.
- New example apps, performance improvements, fixes, and an upgrade to Remix v2.8.
Star our Github repo and stay tuned for our upcoming release in April.
New headless courses and certifications from Shopify Academy
Choose your own adventure with technical learning paths focused on custom storefronts:
- The Liquid Storefronts for Theme Developers path offers two free courses to hone your skills in Liquid and theme basics, as well as best practices for testing and optimizing a theme to ensure performance and accessibility.
- Headless at Shopify for Developers includes four free courses to equip you with an understanding of Shopify’s headless framework, tooling, and hosting options in order to prepare, implement, and optimize a custom storefront.
After completing each learning path, demonstrate your new skills and knowledge by taking a certification exam.
Developer Spotlight: How Stikky leverages Shopify’s Checkout Sheet Kit to uplevel mobile commerce
With just a few lines of code, Shopify’s new Checkout Sheet Kit enables mobile app developers to implement the world’s highest converting, customizable, one-page checkout in their apps.
Sebastian Hennig, co-founder of Stikky, shares his story about how the early implementation of Checkout Sheet Kit helped Stikky uplevel their mobile checkouts and boost conversion by 15% while reducing code.
Defer Directive for Storefront API is now available in developer preview
Introducing the developer preview of defer directive for the Storefront API. If you are currently using the Storefront API, we would love your feedback.
The defer directive prioritizes parts of a GraphQL query without the need for additional requests to fetch remaining information. With defer directive, you can sequentially fetch the most critical data, improving performance and reducing wait times for the user. This is particularly useful when you have fields not required on the initial page render or when leveraging resource-intensive data. Give it a try and share your feedback below.
February 2024
Find out how Checkout Blocks scaled successfully on Shopify
Read about how solo developer, Gil Greenberg, leveraged Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility tools to bring Checkout Blocks, the popular all-in-one customization app, to life.
Store Credit Primitive and API now available in developer preview
Help merchants with post-purchase customer service by enabling them to issue, track, and report accurately on store credit using Shopify’s new Store Credit Primitive and API, now available in developer preview.
Streamline checkout, customer support, and workflows with a single, reloadable store credit balance for customers. The store credit GraphQL API enables merchants and developers to:
- Increase customer loyalty by offering store credit in returns, loyalty, and customer support flows
- Issue, track, and report on store credit, directly in the Shopify admin
- Link store credit to a sole customer
- Support expiring credits
- Maintain a concurrency safe store credit ledger
Going headless on Shopify: ButcherBox’s principal engineer takes you inside their migration
Our Winter '24 Edition included many features specifically for devs, but what do these updates and tools feel like to use? To give you an idea, we interviewed David House, Principal Engineer at ButcherBox, one of the leading direct-to-consumer meat brands, about his migration to Shopify using Hydrogen and Oxygen.
New Hydrogen tools that make your path to production painless
Hydrogen and Oxygen’s newest developer tools enable you to easily debug and optimize your build before deploying. We also released a new suite of implementation examples to support development.
Build merchant trust and streamline the install experience
Make the installation process smoother and build merchant trust by defining the permissions your app requests. Once defined, merchants can see the information on your app listing page and experience a more streamlined modal install flow. You can further enhance this by implementing OAuth2 Token Exchange and managed install to eliminate screen flickering and improve app load times.
Show off your app’s key features
You can now highlight key features that merchants frequently look for as they’re evaluating apps through our new, category-specific structured fields. This information will soon show up on your app listing page and new comparison view to help showcase your app. Structured fields are available for 10 app categories, with more coming throughout the year.
Visit your Partner Dashboard to add your app category details.
Improved app discovery across Shopify
We’ve made improvements to the ways merchants search for and find apps in the Shopify App Store and admin.
Merchants can now discover your app in more places, including our new AI-powered guided search, which supports natural language queries and provides insights to help merchants make more informed app selections. We also made it possible for merchants to search for specific apps in the Shopify admin search bar and get results that take them directly to the app’s detail page.
To optimize app discovery, make sure your app details page is up to date.
January 2024
Start planning for the Checkout Extensibility upgrade
Extend Shopify Checkout with Checkout Extensibility in a way that’s upgrade-safe, and more performant. On August 13, 2024, the existing way to customize the Shopify Checkout with checkout.liquid will be turned off for the Information, Shipping, and Payment pages.
With Shopify Academy’s Upgrade Shopify Checkout learning path, learn how to assess current customizations, take advantage of Checkout Extensibility features, and get prepared to support merchants on the upcoming upgrade.
Start planning ahead of the August 13 upgrade deadline with confidence.
Increased performance, decreased complexity: Updates from Shopify engineering
At Shopify, we’re obsessed with technical excellence. Always have been. We spend a lot of time on our infrastructure—even when the results aren’t immediately obvious. Here are some of the updates we shipped in 2023 to remove complexity and improve performance.
