Shopify announced new platform investments. The company aims to reinvent the internet’s commerce infrastructure. The updates, from Storefronts and Checkout to the Theme Store and our Partner Ecosystem allow developers and merchants to allow create, customize, scale, and monetize on Shopify more easily.
Highlights
Storefronts
- Online Store 2.0:
- The biggest upgrade to Shopify’s Liquid platform ever. It features greater levels of flexibility and customization so merchants can better showcase their brands, create unique online experiences, and integrate apps—all without touching code. We are also launching a new set of developer features including sections on all pages to personalize 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. We’re launching new developer tools and a new default theme that is faster and more beautiful than ever: Dawn. These will make building themes significantly easier and provide merchants more creative options for their storefronts.
- Custom Storefronts:
- We have made major global infrastructure investments to get online stores and our 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.
- Introducing Hydrogen, a new React framework for developers to build custom storefronts (launching soon), as well as Oxygen, our 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 even 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.
- Introducing Checkout Extensions, allowing developers to securely build apps into Shopify Checkout. These checkout customizations will also work in Shop Pay, making the fastest way to pay on the internet another creative brand surface for merchants.
- Shopify Scripts are now easier to build and more powerful than ever for developers creating unique checkout experiences for Shopify Plus brands.
- Introducing Payments Platform, 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’s down from 20%. The $1M benchmark resets annually.
- The same 0% revenue share model will also be available to Theme Store developers.
Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify said,
“The internet is the world’s largest city, and Shopify is building its commerce infrastructure. 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. Together with developers, we are building the infrastructure to make this possible.”