Shopify’s 100+ new updates and its bet on a new era of commerce

Shopify recently announced Editions, a semi-annual product showcase that highlights new and improved features across its platform.

This summer release includes a whopping 100+ updates, some of which we’ve spoken about in our newsletter. I wanted to understand the behind-the-scenes of this launch, so I sat down with Desiree Motamedi, Shopify’s VP Global Head of Product Marketing to find out more.

About four months ago, Tobi Lutke, our CEO, had reached out to me saying “Des, I really want to work on a project that will allow us to show all the product work that we've done over a certain amount of time.”

In the past, it’s been really difficult to see where all of our launches were. If you were able to follow along, it was hard to find everything across our different channels. You could do it by looking at our blog post or by following some of our leadership team on social media, but there wasn’t really a good aggregate way to see everything we shipped across the business.

Tobi really wanted to reimagine this and create a centralized location where people could look over the last six months and see everything that Shopify has shipped. That was the dawn of Shopify Editions. The idea of it was to create an interactive web experience.

Looking from the merchant’s perspective, one thing that’s clear is that a lot of them don’t know all of the things that we do. They use bits and pieces of our features, but a lot of them were not aware that we actually offer solutions across a bunch of different domains.

The theme was something very important for us. We wanted to make sure that it felt relevant to what's happening in the ecosystem as a whole.

Covid was an interesting time for commerce. We saw this massive spike with lots of new entrepreneurs coming to the platform. But more importantly, we’ve seen a lot of challenges in the ecosystem as well, whether it’s supply chain, adtech, or just the pace of innovation and all of the places where commerce can happen.

We felt there was an opportunity to build a narrative that proves why Shopify can help in this time. Shopify started 16 years ago and we started out with D2C. Direct to Consumer was our mantra and still is to this day.

We thought this could be a really interesting play where we can evolve the theme of Direct to Consumer to Connect to Consumer.

I lived in London during COVID. During that time, I knew my local butcher, I knew my flower person, and I knew my local baker. I started to build relationships with these people. I think all humans wanted to connect with someone and that was something that became very apparent to us. That also evolved even when it comes to buying and purchasing.

We wanted to hear the stories of merchants. We wanted to understand where we were buying from specifically. This built a new kind of dynamic, especially with the rise of social media and platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. People use these to tell their stories, connect with those stories, and start to build brand loyalty. So the Connect to Consumer theme really transcends that across the different product areas that we have on our platform today. It's something that we really want to invest in. We believe that's one of the biggest factors when working with Shopify.

It's… big. The idea of the Twitter integration is that merchants don't actually have to do any big paid media spend when trying to connect with their customers.

Merchants can sell products directly from their Twitter profile, so when someone lands there, they can actually see it and go directly to that storefront.

You're going to see a lot more of that kind of interconnectivity. Across our platform and within other platforms too. I think the nuance here is that your brand is you, so you’re going to start to bring that brand to life on all these social channels, and then people are hopefully going to be delighted when they find it as well, too.

Absolutely. We just had an interesting chat recently, and we were talking about how amazing it is that we actually get to serve so many different audiences.

If you think about it, creators are a very important audience for us. But we also serve developers, partner ecosystems, and general merchants, both large and small. We have such an interesting dynamic of different audiences on the creator side. It's really kind of bubbled up in the last few years and we want to make sure that we're giving them the right tools and solutions.

They're very unique. They have different requests on what they need for their platform needs, which means we're constantly thinking about how we can make it easier for them to get started and what roles those integrations play.

There are a lot of them! A lot of new ones, too. One, in particular, is B2B.

We did have a B2B solution that wasn’t native to Shopify, but now it's way more robust than it's been before. What’s different now is that it’s built within the platform itself. So even if you have your Direct to Consumer business on Shopify, you can use the same storefront to actually build your wholesale business as well.

This really opens up a new avenue of revenue for our merchants. We were really excited to be able to integrate this in a really seamless way.

On the developer side, one that I think has great potential (and it's also almost giving a peek into the future and how we're thinking about our platform) is Shopify Functions.

If you look at a tech stack from the front end, we have tools like Hydrogen and Liquid. Functions is giving access to our backend – to our own platform code base, where you can actually manipulate the code to make experiences that are unique for what you need for your business.

Functions is something that really shows the innovation of where we're going with our platform. We want developers to be able to have the flexibility to build what they want.

Yes, absolutely. I'm a big believer in live shopping as well, too. I think it's really interesting to watch other parts of the world, especially APAC. They've really seen a huge trend in this space. The west has not picked up as fast on it yet, but I think that we'll start to see some of that momentum very soon. So yes, I think live shopping is something that we're very excited about.

We did mention that this is a twice-a-year experience. This is the first one, which we're super excited about. We're hoping that by winter we'll have another update and we're really excited to show all the things that we do and the breadth and depth of our platform across the last six months.

So stay tuned!