Tap to Pay on iPhone
First on our list of new features in Shopify 2024 is Tap to Pay on iPhone. In-person shopping is making a major comeback now that the pandemic is easing down. Shopify’s new Tap to Pay on iPhone feature makes the company one of the first commerce platforms to introduce this feature, with the help of the partnership of Stripe. First released in the United States, the iPhone will be accessible to easily make purchases in-person within the upcoming months. It is already in early access with a few chosen Shopify point-of-sale merchants.
With Tap to Pay on the iPhone, Shopify is making it easier for businesses to enter the offline retail market without making additional hardware or financial investments. Consider farmer’s markets, pop-up shops, and pilot stores for seasoned retailers looking to expand to new physical locations. By enabling Tap to Pay on iPhone, businesses that haven't yet tried in-person sales will have more opportunities to engage with customers in real life.
Pop-up shops are set to surge in the coming months, as more retailers look to leverage physical retail to drive customer loyalty and new customer engagement. This makes Tap to Pay one of the most simple but effective new features in Shopify 2024. To make selling in person easier for both entrepreneurs and seasoned sellers, Shopify is working with Stripe and Apple to help merchants securely accept payments using only their iPhone and the Shopify POS app for iOS.
With the new payment acceptance feature Tap to Pay on iPhone, you may accept contactless credit and debit cards as well as digital wallets like Apple Pay without the need for additional hardware. You can use your iPhone to take payments everywhere your customers are thanks to
Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments is PCI compliant, and Tap to Pay on iPhone takes advantage of iPhone built-in features to protect the privacy and security of your business and client data so you and your customers can complete transactions with confidence.
You can start selling IRL faster using Shopify POS and Tap to Pay on iPhone without having to set up additional equipment. This makes it simpler than ever to establish your own retail space and interact with customers at pop-up stores, neighborhood events, farmer's markets, festivals, or other locations. You only need to download the Shopify POS app to your iPhone to get started.
Tokengated commerce
Next on our list of new features in Shopify 2024 is
Tokengated commerce. Shopify business owners have already created fervent groups and devoted followers of their brand. By granting NFT holders exclusive access to goods, benefits, and experiences, Tokengated commerce now offers a fundamentally novel approach to strengthen such connections and reward true fans and VIPs. These once-consumers-now-fans only need to link their cryptocurrency wallets to a Shopify online store to use their NFTs to gain access to thrilling events. The best part is that retailers will be able to deploy Shopify Tokengated commerce experiences everywhere—on the web, on mobile devices, and in-person at point of sale.
And that's not the end of it. Multiplayer tokengated commerce is a possibility. Brands can invite one another to a shared experience by allowing one brand to restrict its storefront to NFT holders of a cooperating brand. Shopify is advancing community commerce through tokengated commerce, encouraging crossover, and introducing customers to their favorite brands they haven't yet encountered, all the while delighting them. All Shopify merchants worldwide can now access Tokengated commerce for their online store. What are examples of Tokengated commerce?
Perhaps the most innovative new feature in Shopify 2024, Tokengated commerce allows merchants to encourage communities to support their brand by offering incentives. When a customer connects a wallet to your store, provide token holders early access to drops or exclusive access to limited edition merchandise, experiences, and more.
Online stores can join together with other brands for a significant release or unique drop. Let them gate to your fans or gate to theirs. Challenge the idea of exclusivity and present token holders with unexpected opportunities to both blend in and stand out. This can help bring in new audiences to your brand. Brands can also work together with Shopify merchandising partners from concept to fulfillment to create high-quality products that both you and your customers will adore.
Last but not least, merchants can create bespoke NFTs and mint them on well-known blockchains like Polygon, Solana, and Ethereum. List them on your website and start selling them there. Shopify offers the highest converting checkout on the web—trusted by 100M customers worldwide—from flash sales to the trendiest drops.
LinkPop
Linkpop is a free tool in the bio built for online shopping that is supported by Shopify's quick and secure checkout. Curate everything you're generating online, including your website, blog, playlists, and more—all from your social network bio, with a shoppable link that is 2 times more likely to convert.
Dovetale
Developing connections with artists and influencers is essential for expanding your brand, attracting new customers, and boosting revenue.
Dovetale is Shopify's all-in-one creator management platform that enables you to discover new artists, establish genuine communities, improve relationship management, and monitor affiliate sales.
Twitter Shopping
Third on our list of new features in Shopify 2024 is
Twitter Shopping. The largest audience for a brand occasionally lies untapped. Because independent retailers could interact with Twitter's hundreds of millions of users, Shopify is the first e-commerce platform to collaborate with Twitter as it expands its Twitter Shopping ecosystem. In fact, tweets about shopping had 40 billion impressions in the past year alone.
In today's digital space, a seamless path to purchase may be created by using this new feature in Shopify 2024. The Twitter sales channel can be used to connect with customers directly from their Twitter profiles. The possibilities for businesses to engage in social commerce are still expanding. In the first quarter of 2023, orders placed with Shopify merchants through partner integrations doubled year over year.
Twitter Shops and Shop Spotlight, two of Twitter's shopping capabilities, are now free for all Shopify U.S. businesses doing business with Americans.
Shopify Functions
Often, the actual magic is delivered by things that we cannot see.
>Shopify Functions, the next on our list of new features in Shopify 2024 demonstrates this. For the first time, Shopify is enabling developers to add custom code to or modify Shopify's backend logic. With the help of Functions, developers can now customize Shopify's commerce experiences like never before.
This changes everything because both developers and retailers can now have everything: Functions provides the open source platform's versatility without requiring users to deal with any hosting, security, or code versioning hassles. Additionally, all experiences made with Functions are built to scale because the code runs on Shopify's global infrastructure. Therefore, a retailer will be able to use this new Shopify feature to manage the surge in traffic brought on by record-breaking flash deals and yet offer a quick checkout experience in 2024.
Starting with Discounts, Functions let developers build powerful custom offers like volume discounts (e.g., spend £50 get £10 off) or a free gift with a purchase. Merchants can use these alongside existing Shopify discounts, such as free shipping, without ever needing to touch a line of code.
This new feature in Shopify 2024 is just the beginning. With Functions, Shopify’s goal is to make the platform as extensible as possible. Soon, Functions will be available for payment methods and shipping options, and over time, Shopify will explore additional areas including customizable order routing, checkout and return validations, and shipping rates.
If
Hydrogen unlocked the frontend of Shopify to allow developers to design unique stores, Functions unlocked the backend to allow them to create distinctive experiences throughout the entire platform.
Through the
Shopify App Store, functions may now be created for a single retailer or shared with millions of merchants, giving developers more possibilities to make money with Shopify.
Local Inventory on Google, Turning browsers into local buyers
A large portion of consumers has conducted online searches for local companies, with more than a third of American users doing so numerous times per week. With the next new feature in Shopify 2024, local inventory sync on Google, which is accessible through Shopify's Google channel, the platform is about to significantly improve those searches. Shopify sellers may now instantly alert clients in the area when a product is in stock. It has never been more convenient to buy locally.
Local inventory sync on Google is available to all merchants utilizing the point-of-sale app from Shopify via the Google channel. In the last two years, the number of Google searches containing "shopping near me" has increased 3x. Because of this, Shopify and Google are making it simpler for retailers to attract local customers, increase foot traffic, and increase sales.
To list their products on Google for free, run Smart Shopping campaigns, and increase conversion using Buy on Google, hundreds of thousands of merchants have used Shopify's Google channel. You can now connect your store's product catalog with your Google Business Profile to make it easier for local customers to find out what products are available in-store, all from within Shopify.
With this new feature in Shopify 2024, customers may view crucial details like stock availability, store location, business hours, directions, and local pickup or delivery choices thanks to Google local inventory sync. Then, customers may enter the store confident that the item they want is there, or they can order it directly from Google without ever leaving the search engine. As a result, finding and shopping at local businesses is now quicker and simpler than ever for both customers and businesses.
To assist retailers with a physical store in getting their inventory in front of nearby customers for free, Shopify immediately integrated this into the platform’s Google channel. Listings can show up in Google Shopping, Google Search, and Google Maps when users search for businesses. To increase their reach, they can also pay for local inventory ads.
New Shopify Features in 2024: Summary
Our favorite ecommerce platform has been keeping busy this year with plenty of new features in Shopify 2024, the future does sure look bright for commerce as a whole as innovation continues to further add value for merchants and their stores. From new sales channels, new advanced code, and new ways to market Shopify stores, there are new features that can benefit anyone. Some other new features in Shopify 2024 that haven't been included in this article include
Shopify Audiences, Hydrogen and Oxygen, and
Shopify Markets. These new releases are quite big in themselves so have deserved individual articles in their own right! We hope you've enjoyed this article about new Shopify features in 2024, and Charle is of course on-hand to support merchants looking to make the most of these new releases and deliver a truly powerful ecommerce experience. Be sure to
get in touch.
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