Here’s Everything We Announced at Shopify Unite 2019
If you weren’t at Shopify Unite (the ecommerce platform’s annual partner conference) or are a Shopify Merchant, there are some big product announcements to be aware of for 2019.
There were a lot of updates to Shopify Core, Advanced, and Plus offerings:
- Updates to Sections, Master Pages, and Content Portability updates will make it easier than ever for Merchants to manage and iterate on their stores.
- The ability to sell in multiple currencies, new APIs for multi-lingual content, and checkout app extensions to improve the customer experience.
- Big improvements to the POS and back office merchant experience.
- New access to new developer tools, APIs and GraphQL libraries for order editing, delivery profiles, and fulfillment, among others.
The biggest surprise was the announcement of the new Shopify Fulfilment Network. Already set up across the USA, this new service is designed to get Merchant products in the hands of customers in ~2 days. This answers one of the biggest storeowner challenges when it comes to integrations and a problem the platform has been yet to solve.
...when buyers order something, they can wait multiple days or even weeks to get their products delivered. Worse, they often abandon carts when they discover how much shipping costs. All of this leads to lost sales and a bad customer experience. The experience is not much better for merchants either.
In short, shipping is as much of a pain for merchants as it is for buyers, and we want to improve the shipping experience for everyone.
Announcing Shopify Fulfillment Network—a geographically dispersed network of fulfillment centers with smart inventory-allocation technology, powered by machine learning that predicts the closest fulfillment centers and optimal inventory quantities per location to ensure fast, low-cost delivery.
The Shopify Fulfillment Network manages inventory allocation, predicts the closest fulfillment centers manages optimal inventory quantities per location to ensure fast, low-cost delivery (source: Shopify.com)
As a Shopify Plus Partner we’re excited to see big platform changes in response to merchant and developer needs and can’t wait to implement these new features on future projects.