Shopify unveils major platform investments and upgrades

Shopify has announced a new set of platform investments, the largest to date for eCommerce platform.

In 2020, more than 450 million people checked out on Shopify, and the company processed nearly $120 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume.

"As the world's commerce platform, we keep innovating to give entrepreneurs endless possibilities to creatively present their brands and grow their businesses," Shopify says says.

"With a lens into the future where every merchant can tell their unique story, we are reinventing the internets commerce infrastructure like never before and calling on developers to help us build that future together."

"The internet is the world's largest city, and Shopify is building its commerce infrastructure," says Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify.

"Especially over the past year, we saw independent businesses succeed by showing up creatively and uniquely in this city. The future of commerce on the internet relies on creative expression at every touchpoint," he says.

"Together with developers, we are building the infrastructure to make this possible."

Shopify has unveiled these latest announcements:

Online Store 2.0

The biggest upgrade to Shopify's Liquid platform ever. According to the company, it features greater levels of flexibility and customisation so merchants can better showcase their brands, create unique online experiences, and integrate apps all without touching code.

It is also launching a new set of developer features including sections on all pages to personalise every aspect of a store, a new editor experience, and theme app extensions.

The Shopify Theme Store will open for developer submissions on July 15. It is launching new developer tools and a new default theme that is faster: Dawn. These will make building themes significantly easier and provide merchants more creative options for their storefronts.

Custom Storefronts

Shopify has made major global infrastructure investments to get online stores and its GraphQL Storefront API within 50 milliseconds of every buyer on Earth. This includes expanding hosting regions to every continent, with Shopify commerce logic running in 100+ server locations that will directly serve API requests for Custom Storefronts for faster response times.

The company has also introduced Hydrogen, a new React framework for developers to build custom storefronts (launching soon), as well as Oxygen, its future hosting platform for custom storefronts on Shopify.

Metafields and Custom Content

With support for additional Metafields, merchants can now add their own attributes to models like products and product variants, with support for other models like customers and orders coming later this year.

Custom Content, coming soon, will be built on top of the new Metafields infrastructure and will serve as Shopify's Content Management platform. It will allow merchants to store content of any format within Shopify.

Checkout

Shopify Checkout will be faster, giving any shop the capacity to handle tens of thousands of purchases per minute.

"Shopify's goal is for a single merchant to be able to sell 300,000 pairs of sneakers in just over eight minutes, and for each individual shop to have the ability to handle as much sales volume as we served across all of Shopify at the peak of Black Friday Cyber Monday in 2020," the company explains.

Checkout Extensions allows developers to securely build apps into Shopify Checkout. These checkout customisations will also work in Shop Pay.

Shopify Scripts are now easier to build and more powerful than ever for developers creating unique checkout experiences for Shopify Plus brands.

The Payments Platform is a way to integrate third-party payment gateways into Shopify Checkout, unlocking new sales growth opportunities for merchants.

Developer-Entrepreneurs

Developers who build for the Shopify App Store will now pay 0% revenue share for the first $1M they earn annually on the platform starting on August 1. That is down from 20%. The $1M benchmark resets annually.

The same 0% revenue share model will also be available to Theme Store developers.

"Commerce is rapidly evolving for merchants all over the globe," says Lutke.

"These updates mean more merchants will have their diverse needs met through a larger selection of apps and themes, and developers will have more entrepreneurial opportunities than ever before."