Shopify Editions Summer ‘23: Our Top Picks

One of the biggest drops from Shopify’s Summer ‘23 Edition is its suite of AI features. While these aren’t all new, Shopify has increased and improved its offering overall.

Most notable is its new AI commerce assistant, Shopify Sidekick, and users can sign up for early access now. The purpose of Shopify Sidekick is in the name – it’s a powerful helping hand that merchants can use in a variety of ways. The AI tool can support you with day-to-day work, carry out research, answer your questions, and find solutions to problems in seconds. All of this saves you time to focus on other business areas.

For example, you can ask Shopify Sidekick questions you’d usually ask Google or Shopify’s Help Center, or even make Sidekick take on tasks, such as tweaking your site’s overall appearance or adding a new product collection to the homepage.

Shopify Sidekick complements Shopify’s suite of free AI-powered features, known as Shopify Magic. These tools help generate content for your online store (e.g. product descriptions and blog posts), support email campaigns using Shopify Email, and work alongside Shopify Inbox to improve the customer experience.

Shopify Magic can generate smart replies to respond to live chat queries on your behalf, meaning customers can receive support right away. In partnership with Shopify Inbox, Shopify Magic can also compose instant answers for common questions that you can tweak to suit your store. If there are further questions, it’ll even create a suggested response which you can review within Shopify Inbox before sending.

As Tobi Lütke, Founder and CEO of Shopify, shared during the announcement:

“I can’t actually think of any corner of the internet that will benefit more from AI than the pursuit of people building and growing their own businesses.”

With Shopify Marketplace Connect, merchants can now sell products across marketplaces, such as Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. This helps business owners find customers on channels where they’re already shopping, and Shopify makes sure to sync your products and orders across platforms.

When you make a sale using a third-party marketplace, the order will be automatically imported and your inventory updated in real time. Plus, you can edit and manage your products and pricing separately from your primary store.

It’s official – Shopify has the highest-converting checkout on the market, beating its competitors by 15%. Besides this new report, what’s new with Shopify Checkout? The process has been streamlined into a one-page experience, saving customers time and difficulty, and increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Shopify Plus merchants will also have access to 17 new checkout extensions and apps to customize the checkout experience. For example, you could push subscriptions or pre-orders, offer unique delivery options, or have your checkout page suggest address changes to guarantee a successful delivery.

Shopify Collective allows merchants to find, curate, and sell new products from other Shopify brands across the US. Simply add their products to your store, or let other stores sell your products – it’s a great way to increase sales, offer more products to customers, and minimize inventory costs.

If a customer buys a product you’ve listed from another brand, it’ll be shipped to them directly, so you don’t need to worry about stock and delivery.

Shopify’s Summer ‘23 Edition included improvements to the Shopify Bundles app. You can now include more variants in your product bundles and have them sync in real time with your inventory. This is a great way to boost the average order value and improve the overall buying experience for customers.

The majority of online stores can create fixed bundles and multipacks (such as a starter set for pottery supplies), but if you want more advanced bundles, such as mixing products for a customized bundle, you’ll need to use one of the updated bundle apps in the Shopify app store.

Shopify Subscriptions allows businesses to create new subscription plans and add them to their online store with ease. Simply select the products you want to include in the service, determine the delivery frequency, add discounts, and fill out the rest of the details. Once saved, you can use the subscription widget in the online store editor.

Not only does this give you more control over what you offer to customers, but the customers themselves have also been granted more flexibility since they now have the option to pause or skip their subscriptions.

The final feature we want to highlight – out of the 100+ product updates in Shopify’s Summer ‘23 Edition – is the Shop Store. Using the Shop App, you can now customize your Shop storefront with branding, collections, and engaging elements like shoppable videos.

This is a great way to build connections with mobile shoppers and increase your store’s conversions. You can even collect customer reviews from the Shop app and use them on other platforms, including your online store and social media accounts.