Shopify revealed today over 100 platform updates and feature launches, including a new B2B offering, Google and Twitter integrations and partnerships, and Tap to Pay on iPhone.
The Ottawa-based e-commerce giant shared the news through its first Shopify Editions, the company’s new digital showcase of product news, which Shopify plans to run twice a year.
“It’s for everyone—merchants, partners, developers, and fans of Shopify,” a Shopify spokesperson told BetaKit.
“Shopify Editions is our new semi-annual showcase demonstrating our speed and breadth of innovation, and it’s for everyone—merchants, partners, developers, and fans of Shopify,” a Shopify spokesperson told BetaKit. “We’re bringing together our product story from across the entire platform to give a glimpse of what we’ve been building recently, including a number of entirely new products.”
Editions marks a shift away from Shopify’s traditional approach of revealing new updates and features incrementally throughout the year, instead collecting them together in a single announcement—embracing the Apple model of disclosing them all at once, as Apple does with its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). Much like the coinciding Apple keynote, one might consider Editions a rollout of Shopify’s latest e-commerce OS.
The launch of Editions comes a month after Shopify announced changes to Shopify Unite, the company’s annual developer conference, in an effort to better connect with its community of developers and partners in regions across the world.
“Instead of one event, limited to one location, centered around one moment in time, we’re branching out and creating more opportunities to meet under an umbrella of Shopify Unite events,” wrote Shopify VP of engineering and developer experience Dion Almaer, in a blog post announcing the changes to Shopify Unite.
With its new B2B offering, Shopify aims to help Shopify Plus merchants sell to other businesses on the same platform they use for D2C sales. According to Shopify, B2B on Shopify will provide a similar online store experience optimized for business buyers with tools that make it simple to buy products in bulk, including a checkout with the payment flexibility necessary for B2B.
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Shopify also shared that it is launching local inventory sync on Google through Shopify’s Google channel, which will permit merchants to automatically let nearby customers know when products are available in store.
The company has furthered its push into social commerce—Shopify has become the first commerce platform to partner with Twitter to launch Twitter Shopping. Twitter Shopping will enable Shopify merchants to showcase products directly on their Twitter profiles in a scrollable carousel, and allow them to showcase up to 50 products through the Twitter Shops tab.
“Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users represent potential connections for independent merchants,” stated Shopify.
To help merchants navigate the return of offline, in-person commerce, Shopify has also announced Tap to Pay on iPhone, in partnership with Stripe, which it plans to make fully available in the United States over the coming months.
For the first time, Shopify has also begun to open up some of the logic behind its platform with Shopify Functions. Historically, Shopify’s back-end code has been off limits, but now, Shopify is enabling third-party developers to extend or replace the commerce platform’s back-end logic with custom code—enabling merchants to better customize their online stores and customer experiences.
Feature image courtesy Shopify.