Shopify upgrades its platform with 150+ changes

• Shopify announces 150+ small upgrades
• The upgrades are designed to improve the overall performance
• The company continues rolling out AI

One of the best ecommerce platforms worldwide, Shopify, has recently made more than 150 changes, designed to improve performance and “make sure everything works well together.”

In an in-depth blog, published in mid-December, the company said the update is “boring” since the changes are mostly small increments that “smoothed rough edges”, but still highlighted a few noteworthy mentions.

The Shopify Checkout should now be faster, as the cart infrastructure was optimized to boost load speeds by up to 50%, the company said. Furthermore, Checkout Blocks are now available for all plans for customized thank you pages, and chat apps are now integrated into the checkout.

Shopify also improved in-person selling. Apparently, POS sales grew 31% year-over-year globally, over the most recent Black Friday, it said. This prompted the team to improve in-person selling, by allowing merchants to manage and sell bundles directly through Shopify POS, or allowing POS search results to display via a split screen, so that the results are always visible alongside the cart.

Shopify Flow, an automation tool that helps store owners streamline their business operations without needing to code, has also been upgraded. It now lets merchants set up custom workflows to avoid repetitive tasks for inventory management, loyalty programs, and discounts. Among the things that “now work better” are returns and exchanges, marketing automations, and segment triggers.

Rolling out AI

Finally, no upgrade is complete without improvements in the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sidekick, Shopify’s AI-powered commerce assistant, will continue to be rolled out to English language merchants around the world, the company confirmed. It added that the tool will give business owners “more superpowers”, since it is purpose-built to answer questions and help with business scaling.

“The hallmark of good software is that it just works,” the company concluded in its announcement. “That predictability and reliability is what our merchants count on.”

The entire list of improvements, for those interested in more reading, can be found on this link.

Comment from the expert

Owain Williams

Owain is the Website Builder & CRM Editor at TechRadar. He has built several ecommerce businesses throughout the years, has tested countless ecommerce platforms, and has interviewed several key players in the website building industry.

Although 150+ updates sounds like a radical change and may seem a little daunting to existing Shopify users, in reality, these changes will have little impact on how you use and interact with the Shopify platform.

Scratch the surface and you'll discover that the majority of these changes have been made 'behind the scenes' with the aim of making existing tools and processes smoother and faster for users and their customers.

Innovation is always welcome in the website builder space, but it's great to see Shopify listening to users and focusing its resources on improving current features, rather than overlooking them in favor of new tools.

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