June has been a big month for Shopify announcements. On the heels of everything that was announced at Shopify Unite 2017, Shopify has released several new tools that are going to help you sell more.

These releases aren’t just important for your sales today, they’ll also give you a glimpse at which areas Shopify thinks will be important in the near future.

So in case you missed it, here’s all the important Shopify news that was announced in June:

1. Shopify Gets a New Look

You’ve probably already noticed that your Shopify admin section looks a bit different. In early June, they rolled out their new look. Aside from a design overhaul that makes your store easier to navigate, the rollout has some other notable benefits.

For one, it’s built using Polaris. Polaris is both a set of design guidelines and a framework that ensures everything looks consistent across all of your devices. Polaris is also available to app developers – which means the apps you use to run your business every day will integrate more seamlessly with the rest of your store.

Source: Shopify Polaris

For developers, Polaris is also a React component library. React is a fast, lightweight Javascript library developed by Facebook, which means Shopify can more quickly release features that load faster, do more and work the same way across all of your devices.

The new design also puts greater emphasis on user profiles and search, making it easier for your team to work together and get things done quickly.

You can check out the Shopify UX blog to learn more about the work that went into this new design.

2. Kit is Now Free for All Shopify Store Owners

Think of Kit as your own virtual assistant that automatically runs marketing campaigns and other time-saving tasks. Kit needs very little input from you, saving time and money.

What’s more, the list of skills you can add to Kit continues to grow, making it more and more valuable. If you’re using Pixc to edit photos, you can now integrate with Kit to automatically send new product photos to us to be edited!

Source: Kit

Previously, Kit would cost a Shopify merchant upwards of $300 per year. So if you’re one of the many people already using it, this announcement is particularly good news for you.

3. The New BuzzFeed Channel is Available to U.S Customers

With 200 million readers, BuzzFeed has become one of the leaders in creating engaging content that keeps people coming back. Now you have the opportunity to capitalize on BuzzFeed’s audience.

The BuzzFeed Channel allows BuzzFeed to embed your products in their articles. BuzzFeed earns a commission on any sales generated as a result of the article.

You can list your products to be available on BuzzFeed by enabling the BuzzFeed Channel. From there, you can set your commission rate (how much BuzzFeed will earn per sale) and set up the categories and tags that help BuzzFeed editors find your products.

4. Changes to the Checkout URL

On Friday, July 7th, Shopify is changing the URL structure for checkouts. What this means is that when a customer goes to checkout, instead of being redirected to www.checkout.shopify.com/your-shop-id they will now be redirected to www.your-shop/shop-id/checkouts/.

This probably won’t have any impact on your store, but it will make the checkout experience a little bit more seamless for your customers.

However, if you’re using any apps that redirect to the old URL, checkout buttons that link directly to the checkout instead of the cart, or integrations that require the checkout URL to be whitelisted, you may need to update those settings.

5. Buy and Sell Shopify Stores with Shopify Exchange

One of the biggest announcements in June from Shopify was the release of Shopify Exchange.

Shopify Exchange allows you to buy and sell entire eCommerce stores. Selling websites on sites like Flippa has been a very popular – and even lucrative – business for many years now. The difference with Shopify Exchange is that all of the revenue and traffic data comes directly from Shopify, so you can trust the information behind what you’re buying.

Communication between sellers is also anonymous and secure.

Shopify Exchange is a great opportunity for a variety of reasons:

• New sellers who don’t know how to set up a store or choose a product can get started quicker with a store that’s already making sales.
• Well-established stores can easily acquire other stores in a similar domain to boost their audience.
• Developers, designers, and entrepreneurs have a new avenue to sell the businesses they can no longer commit to.

6. New Shopify Apps Released in June

The Shopify App store is growing faster than ever. In fact, right now it takes up to a month for new app submissions to get reviewed and approved. There are now apps to help you create a store for almost any niche. Here are a few interesting apps that were released in June:

Multiple Image Slider

Images can often be more convincing than words, but finding a way to display them properly can be tricky. This app lets you feature an image slider on any page in your Shopify store. Image galleries are optimized for SEO and customizable.

Painless Product Pricing

If you find yourself working with CSV’s to update prices a lot, this app might save you some time. It allows you to search for products by tag and export them to Google Sheets. It removes unnecessary fields so you can make the pricing updates quickly. Then, just re-upload them to the app to update all of your prices.

ImageLock

Do you want to protect your images from being copied? This app makes it trickier for users to download your images by disabling the ability for them to right click on images. It also has the added benefit of allowing you to create a custom menu they will see when they right-click instead of the usual menu.

Source: Shopify

Have any of these new changes had an impact on your store yet?

What are your thoughts on Shopify’s new design?

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