Conversion Tools
Shopify gives you all of the tools to increase that ever-important conversion rate. Conversion rates are all about reducing friction, and that is exactly what Shopify’s streamlined cart system does.  Shopify has created the best update to e-commerce conversion since Amazon’s “one-click” checkout with their “Shop Pay” and Shop login system and quick checkout. The Shop login system enables a Shopify customer to have a single account across any and all Shopify stores, greatly reducing the time and energy to complete an order.
 
Equally important to ease of use in a checkout is the speed of your site. Shopify’s global server infrastructure enables the balancing load of traffic spikes. This means that you basically never have down-time on a Shopify store unless their entire system is down, which very rarely happens. The quicker your site is, the better your conversion rates will be.
 
Shopify is also launching a single-page checkout (“One-Page Checkout”), which will greatly reduce the time and friction from reviewing a cart to finalizing an order. Shopify has added the ability to further customize your checkout flow with the drag-and-drop editor to better brand the cart experience for your customers. Shopify has also: added new image optimization tools for product image quality and load times; enhanced the customization capabilities for CSS, headers, footers, and color settings, and greatly improved the user experience for product search.

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The new Shopify Magic enables AI-generated store-front content (ChatGPT-powered descriptions).  The new Metaobjects enables the creation of reusable content blocks that can be re-purposed across your site.  Add the ability to upsell products with dynamic pop-up offers and in-cart promotions with recommended products, and you have the recipe to increase your conversion rates (and Average Order Values or AOV). 
 
Product bundling is becoming increasingly important for e-commerce businesses. When an artist, entertainer, or brand releases a new range of product, it is common practice these days to create bundles of certain items to offer fans a discount by buying more items, and to increase the overall AOV of the shop.  The problem historically with Shopify was that it was not the easiest to do bundling.  There are a host of third party apps that are all workable but generally create some kind of operational friction point (typically, reporting issues). With “Shopify Bundles” coming soon, it will be easier than ever to offer, account for, and fulfill product bundles.
 
Shopify’s latest update to their discounting and promotions system will definitely help with increased conversion rates. You can now combine multiple discount codes for a single cart, and seamlessly offer promotions such as “free gift with purchase”- all within Shopify’s system. Additionally, Shopify has now rolled-out channel specific discounts, enabling promotions that are specific to a certain sales channel such as social commerce.
 
Multi-Channel Commerce
Shopify is the premiere omnichannel commerce platform that allows merchants to list and sell products with most commerce-enabled channels on the internet (and in the real-world with their Shopify POS system).  The new POS Go makes selling at an event or in-person easier than ever with an all-in-one mobile attachment for processing credit cards and capturing data right into your Shopify store back-end.
 
Shopify recently rolled-out a direct integration with YouTube to enable product integration into YouTube Shelf. Prior to this update, merchants had to integrate with a third party middleware to feed product into YouTube. This created unnecessary costs and time spent on listing product from Shopify on YouTube.
 
Check out Yoga with Adriene’s YouTube Shelf and featured product on her YouTube channel just below each video.
 
Operational Updates
Shopify has additionally launched helpful updates for the operational management of storefronts including: Shopify Markets product expansions for the management of global commerce, Event Webhooks which enables easy access to API logs, Metafields bulk-editing, scheduling tasks via automation with Shopify Flow, Shopify Flow/OpenAI/ChatGPT connector for automated messaging and content, alerts from Shopify for critical shop and business updates, data analysis and deeper reporting with ShopifyQL Notebooks and Analytics, and improved sales tax calculations with Shopify Tax.
 
… and this piece just covers what I felt was the most relevant of the updates for Mainfactor.  There is so much more.  Check out the latest from Shopify here:
https://www.shopify.com/editions/winter2023