In September and October 2022, Shopify Unite was back with a reimagined format focused on Shopify developers. We toured London, Toronto, and Melbourne, bringing a more in-depth look at announcements from our Summer Editions ‘22 through talks and workshops from Shopify employees, sessions on technical and business oriented best practices from some of our partners around the world, and opportunities for our developers to connect, talk, and spark innovation.
If you want to get caught up on everything that happened at Shopify Unite 2022, keep reading!
Shopify keynote, talks, and workshops
Our journey at each location started with a keynote focused on presenting the state of the Shopify developer platform, more extensible than ever for all types of developers.
Our lineup of Shopify talks went more in depth into some of the topics presented in the keynote, with a special focus on the most recent announcements from Summer Editions ‘22.
We had topics for all types of Shopify developers, from app developers to themes and custom storefront developers. Content included:
- The state of tooling for app developers
- Building powerful and future-proof checkout customizations with Checkout Extensibility
- How to customize stores’ business logic with Shopify Functions
- How to make your app stand out using our latest design guidelines
- Building high performance custom storefronts with Hydrogen
- The state of theme development
For those interested in getting a better understanding of the business opportunities in the Shopify ecosystem, we had three talks presenting our research on what merchants need in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, North America, and Asia-Pacific.
If you are interested in trying some of the features we talked about, all the Shopify Unite 2022 workshops are available for a self-paced execution. Among these workshops, you will find:
- How to create custom Shopify Checkout experiences with Checkout UI extensions
- How to use Rust to create a Shopify discount function
- How to create a product page with Hydrogen, and much more!
Partner talks
At each stop, we hosted talks from six regional partners, with topics focused on two main areas: business- and technical-oriented best practices.
Business-oriented talks
Building an app is only half the battle when it comes to creating a successful app development business. Shopify developers took the stage to share their best practices from years in the business:
- Mat de Sousa from The Wide Company talked about how to grow your app’s success on the Shopify App Store
- Amit Porwal from Expert Village Media Technologies shared how value driven strategies and the importance of a good team brought them success
- Lior Haimovich from Yotpo talked about the experience of growing from different apps to a platform of service
- Victoria Beal from Disco Labs spoke about transitioning from an agency to a product-focused company
Funding is another key component of growing a developer business. Developers shared their funding journeys, too:
- Rhian Beutler from Govalo and Venntov talked about going from a bootstrapped startup to a venture-backed one
- Sara Du from Alloy Automation presented the journey of growing Shopify apps from side projects to a $20M Series A
In the APAc region, Xavier Lee from Jumpstart Commerce talked about his experience growing D2C brands on Shopify Plus in Southeast Asia, and Thomas Bertrand from Ship&Co presented his journey going from shipping bento boxes to 100+ countries to creating Ship&Co for sellers in Japan.
Technical best practices
There was such a variety of topics on technical best practices shared at Shopify Unite that it’s hard to categorize them by common patterns. We covered:
- Amos Shacham from BOA Ideas and Nir Rehav from SodaStream International presented about developing an international ecommerce infrastructure used across 14+ markets
- Natalie Parker from Auctane talked about their experience simplifying the management of boilerplate templates for coding projects using open source software
- Gordon So and Tico van Beurden from Ask Phill shared how they made React developers love to code on Liquid projects
- Alexandra Edelstein from Klaviyo presented their work to build an API-first platform to increase app interoperability within Shopify's growing partner ecosystem
- Niks Evalds from Printful gave us insights on how they tackled one of the top concerns for every ecommerce business: managing delivery expectations for customers
- Kaus Manjita from Mason talked about using a LEGO-like approach to application architecture to modularize ecommerce apps
- Max Rolon from Half Helix took a dive into different strategies used to build custom theme storefronts for merchants with complex requirements while digesting and adopting Online Store 2.0 theme development principles
- Peter Tivy and Jordan Binotto from Teifi shared how they used the new Shopify Content Platform to empower merchants to manage content and complex data, and how they plan to use it in premium themes
- Blake Waldron from Convert Digital explored everything from small, quick changes that you can implement on your Shopify themes that will have an immediate positive impact on performance, all the way to how to approach a total theme optimization
- Tom Fulcher from Okendo presented the thrilling journey of integrating their reviews widgets with a Hydrogen store in six weeks, with no client side API calls
Don’t forget to check out our partner panel conversations from London, Toronto, and Melbourne, and hear how our partner panelists took live questions from the audience around everything from app and theme development to custom storefronts, replying from the perspective of a Shopify Partner.
Until next time
Shopify Unite 2022 was all about coming together to learn. We hope these videos help you get caught up on everything that happened at the events, and learn from other Shopify Partners and developers on building robust apps, themes, and businesses. Until next time!
