What's New in Shopify App Development?

The app store has a wide variety of applications that you can install on your Shopify store. These apps can make your life easier by letting you do things like personalize your storefront search, edit meta fields, and connect with fulfillment companies.

You can also ask a Shopify partner to create a custom app for your business needs. These apps are tailored to your specific requirements and offer exactly the features you need.

Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow is an automation tool that helps store owners automate their most time-consuming processes. This enables them to focus more on customer experience and sales.

For example, if customers place an order online and want to know when it’s shipped, you can create an automation that sends them an email when their package is ready to ship. This can help to boost buyer satisfaction and build trust.

Another way you can use Shopify Flow is to streamline product tagging and inventory management. For instance, Good American — a denim and leather apparel eCommerce brand — used the tool to automatically tag items as OUT OF STOCK or LOW STOCK when their inventory quantity drops below a certain threshold.

In addition to saving store owners time, Shopify Flow also lets them connect their apps to one another and automate tasks within and between connected platforms. This can be incredibly useful for high-volume stores that need to automate complex operations.

With Shopify Flow, you can create workflows by building triggers, conditions, and actions. Triggers are events that start the flow, while conditions are rules that decide if an action should occur.

For example, in the above flow, a condition might say that the order must be flagged with a new risk level before it is sent out for shipping. Then, once the customer receives their shipping confirmation email, you can trigger a welcome campaign to thank them for their purchase.

Using triggers and conditions, you can create workflows that work on any data point in your store. Then, you can connect those workflows to over 80 apps in the Shopify app store. This will allow you to automate processes across the entire store, from customer service to order fulfilment to product updates.

Shopify Theme Inspector

The Shopify Theme Inspector is a useful tool for anyone who needs to figure out what theme is being used by a store. It can also be helpful for competitive research, as it can show you which apps and plugins the store is using. It even lets you see how much traffic the store receives and what Google Ads campaigns it's running.

The tool uses a Chrome extension to run on a web page and visualizes Liquid render profiling data in the form of flame graphs. This can help you identify the parts of your theme code that are slowing down your online store and how to optimize them.

For example, you can spot performance issues caused by unoptimized Liquid code patterns in the flame graphs, such as nested chunks of code that become increasingly inefficient for your server to handle. This means that it's important to remove all of these lines of unused code from your theme and ensure that it is optimized to be fast.

Using the Shopify Theme Inspector can help you identify and fix these performance issues in your theme. It can help you make your themes faster and improve your page load times, which can lead to higher conversion rates.

Before you start looking at the performance of your themes, you need to understand how to interpret the flame graphs that are generated by the Shopify Theme Inspector. It can be tricky to decipher what parts of the code are slowing your store down. Luckily, the Shopify Theme Inspector makes it easy to track down and remove these code blocks that are impacting your online store's performance.

Shopify Chat

Shopify Chat is a feature that allows you to add a live chat button to your online store. It enables you to communicate with customers at their convenience and helps you convert more visitors into loyal shoppers.

This tool is free to use and can be integrated into your website easily via a simple embed code. It can also be used to track customer interactions in real time through chat analytics.

A good Shopify chat app should offer features like self-help, product recommendations, and file-sharing options. You should also be able to track and analyze your conversations to provide better service and improve customer satisfaction.

It should have a seamless integration with Shopify, allowing you to add it to your site without any hassle. You can even customize it by adding your brand’s logo or a custom design.

You should be able to create bot flows that can automatically respond to certain actions on your site, such as adding products to your cart or checking out. You can also use bot flows to send customers reminders about their orders.

Lastly, you should be able to use chatbots to help answer repetitive inquiries. These bots will learn from your past conversations and adjust their responses to enhance customer satisfaction.

Live chat is an important customer service tool for any business. It can increase your NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CES (Customer Effort Score), which both lead to increased sales. A good Shopify chat app will also provide detailed reports on how your customers engage with your store, including the key pages that drive conversions.

Shopify Editions

Shopify Editions is a semi-annual product sprint that showcases new products and improvements for merchants. It’s a great way for eCommerce owners to see the latest developments on a single platform.

Some of these features include improvements to the checkout experience, more APIs, and customization options. It also includes new features for Commerce Components, which are tools that allow you to build your commerce stack, your way.

One-Page Checkout: This new feature is a big improvement over the old one, and will help customers get through their checkout faster. It’s based on the learnings from Shop Pay, and is optimized for conversion.

Marketplace Kit: This is a collection of APIs, resources, and documentation that empowers developers to build marketplaces with Shopify. It’s a must-have for any developer who wants to add commerce features to their stores.

Re-engagement: This new feature enables merchants to use data to re-engage abandoned customers. It allows them to send automated emails to people who have left their cart, checked out, or browsed through products.

Markets Pro: With eCommerce growing worldwide, businesses need to sell, ship, and handle returns from anywhere in the world. With this update, Markets Pro offers the necessary tools to expand internationally and keep your customer data safe.

Built for Shopify: This program is a win-win for both merchants and developers. It provides the tools, functions, and documentation needed to develop apps that satisfy high-quality standards. Apps that qualify can then be featured on Shopify Admin and the App Store.

Shopify Functions

Shopify Functions are a new way to extend and replace key parts of the backend logic in your store. They work by injecting code into the backend and using metafields to customize it.

Currently, developers can write these functions in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. Then, they deploy them to apps that merchants can install on their stores via the Shopify App Store.

This is a great feature because it lets developers build sophisticated customizations that run in under 5ms and scale up for the world's largest sales events. It also removes the need for hosting and security, since functions run in line with Shopify's global infrastructure.

For example, you can build a function that automatically applies a free shipping discount when a customer reaches a certain cart total. This allows you to increase cart value, decrease shipping costs, and create a better shopping experience for your customers.

Another cool function is that you can now add a custom delivery option to a product in the cart. This is a handy tool for stores that cater to niche markets or buyers.

Then, there's a new fraud analysis function that helps you identify and prevent order fraud. This is a helpful tool for retailers who are worried about fraud in their stores.

In addition to this, there are also a number of other improvements to the system. For instance, you can now delegate different store management tasks to staff members on Shopify Plus.

You can also get a dedicated team of certified Shopify experts to solve problems on your eCommerce store. They can also help you improve your marketing campaigns and provide other valuable services.

Shopify Development Trends

Most Shopify store owners focus on their digital marketing alongside their web development. Keeping up with the cutting-edge Shopify Apps in ensuring a frictionless checkout for their online store, with additional tools to fill the Shopping Cart. Online shopping continues to grow year-over-year as the user experience improves with tailored customer service practices. Behind the scenes, are Shopify partners such as TheGenieLab. We are helping business owners and shopkeepers to drive continuous improvements through digital marketing services. Furthermore, they are providing Web Development in Shopify, BigCommerce, and other eCommerce store architectures. If you need a hand in any aspect of eCommerce, feel free to reach out to us at wish@thegenielab.com