The Boring Edition: Everything improved

This Edition is all about smoothing rough edges, improving performance, and making sure everything works well together. 

Sounds boring? Talk to merchants and they'll say otherwise. That's why this Edition represents what merchants told us they actually need. And trust us, we have the receipts.

Here's some highlights from the 150+ updates this Edition that will make merchants’ businesses run even smoother.👇

1. Shopify Checkout, now faster and better

We've optimized our cart infrastructure to boost load speeds by up to 50%, made Checkout Blocks available to all plans for customized thank you pages, and integrated chat apps into the checkout. We’re also improving draft orders by enhancing features such as:

• Checkout customizations: Merchants can now use Checkout UI extensions in draft order invoice checkouts.
• Bundle options for B2B: When dealing with Bundle orders, merchants can customize product assortments and purchasing options that match buyers’ needs, regardless of how they check out.
• Functions support: Checkout rules and payment and delivery customizations powered by Shopify Functions can now be executed in draft orders. 

 

2. Unified customer accounts

A great customer journey begins with a simple login. Our new Customer Account Extensions offer a unified experience, are powered by high-quality apps, and are fully controlled by the merchant. 

Customer Account Extensions are app blocks that help enhance a customer's account. These can be added directly into customer account pages (i.e. Order Index and Order Status).

Here’s just a few of the improved features that comes with Customer Account Extensions:

• Seamless order and return management: Allows customers to manage all aspects of their orders and returns within a unified account via a passwordless login. 
• Better customer relationships: With customer account extensions, merchants can use survey apps like Zigpoll to collect direct feedback and opinions. This data is seamlessly stored within a single customer record to help merchants better engage with customers.
• Personalize the customer experience: Build personalized experiences directly into customer account pages in minutes with no code. The result: a seamless, branded experience that removes friction and drives sales.
• B2B functionality: While Shopify has a host of out-of-the-box B2B features, a seamless B2B customer account experience was a challenge—until now. With Customer Account Extensions, merchants can easily build a tailored experience for their wholesale customers, with self-serve functionality for quotes, invoicing, bulk ordering, and even B2B storefronts.

3. Smoother in-person selling 

The future of commerce is offline as much as online. Over the most recent Black Friday, we saw Shopify POS sales grow 31% year-over-year globally. Some of our latest POS updates include:

• Shopify POS for Bundles: Merchants can now manage and sell bundles directly through Shopify POS. 
• Split screen selling: POS search results now display via a split screen view so results are always visible alongside the cart.
• Metafields in POS: Retail offers one of the most personalized channels for merchants to capture customer data. Now, metafields are available through POS, leveraging first-party data to create more relevant and efficient marketing communications. Example: A pet store staff asks customers in the store what sort of pet they have and can create a metafield for "animal type” in that customer’s profile.

“We could build up our brick and mortar and our online store at different cadences,” says Mark Nieves, co-founder of gift shop Independent Goods. “I could track both online and physical retail on one screen. And we could still have one source for data, for inventory, for everything.”

4. Automated tasks with Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow lets merchants set up custom workflows to avoid repetitive tasks for inventory management, loyalty programs, and discounts. Here are a few things that now work better:

• Returns and exchanges: Automate more of the returns workflow with new triggers and actions specifically designed for managing returns, and even canceling returns if products are not sent back.
• Marketing automations: Marketing templates in Shopify Flow are now easily accessible in the Flow library, meaning merchants can quickly set up campaigns like abandoned cart or welcome emails using our templates.
• Segment triggers: Merchants can now automate operational workflows and key marketing moments based on when a customer joins or leaves a segment.

"More Shopify merchants should be taking advantage of what Flow can automate in their businesses. The new template library will help people see what's possible," says Andrew Sherrard, ecommerce manager at fitness brand PowerBlock. "Having prebuilt templates available from partners makes connecting even more apps right within Shopify faster—potentially allowing them to rely on 3rd party automation platforms."

5. Shop Campaigns for cost-effective marketing

Shop Campaigns is like customer acquisition on autopilot, helping merchants increase sales of first-time customers on Shop. Merchants set their budget across Shop, Meta, and Google. Shopify does the rest, and merchants only pay when a customer converts. 

The fastest-growing brands on Shop Campaigns attribute up to 24% of their new customer growth to the program.

“Shop Campaigns is just so easy to get going. You don't have to go gather a million assets. You don't have to go set up a bunch of pixel tracking on your site. You don't have to do a bunch of stuff to make sure that it's not going to break your checkout experience,” says Connor Dault, vice-president of growth and digital product at kitchen brand Caraway. “We were looking for efficient customer acquisition, and we found it.”

Now, Shop Campaigns is available to merchants across all of our plans in the United States and Canada—helping more entrepreneurs reach more buyers.

6. Fulfillment that just makes sense

Fulfillment and delivery settings are now applied across more Shopify order sources, including:

• Third party channels such as Facebook and Amazon
• Draft order invoices
• Subscription orders
• Order editing 

Previously, the rules and settings that merchants set up to control order routing were only applied to online checkout orders. Now, merchants only need to set their fulfillment logic once, saving time, preventing overselling, and reducing the scope for errors.

7. Better commerce with AI

Our AI-enabled commerce assistant, Sidekick continues to roll out to all English language merchants around the world. It gives business owners more superpowers and is purpose-built to answer all of their questions as they start and scale their business.

Practical AI 299: Sidekick is an AI Shopify expert – Listen on Changelog.com

8. All the financial tools merchants need in one place

Now with Shopify Finance, merchants can more easily view and manage all of their finances in one comprehensive finance home directly in the admin or the Shopify app. With Shopify Balance, Shopify Credit, Shopify Capital, Shopify Bill Pay, and Shopify Tax all in one place, the complexity and administrative burden of managing multiple financial tools will be reduced.

This Edition is boring, so you don’t have to be

The hallmark of good software is that it just works. It’s frictionless. That predictability and reliability is what our merchants count on. Everything they need in one place, working hand-in-glove so they can focus on what matters: growing their business.

Explore the Winter ‘25 Edition and enjoy the most boring Edition yet. ❤️‍🔥