Shopify Unite 2021 Recap

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show notes.

• Online Store 2.0
• Sections everywhere
• Dawn theme release
• Metafields are now in the Shopify admin 
• Shopify Theme Store reopens on July 15
• Shopify checkout is 2x faster
• Checkout extensions
• Payments Platform
• Shop Pay installments now available to everyone
• Pickup-only locations now supported
• Sell wholesale and source new products with Handshake

transcript. 

Kelly 0:00
Last week returned I tuned into Shopify unite Shopify annual conference where we learn all about the new releases for the Shopify platform. Today, we're going to break down our favorite announcements from unite and how you can use them to help you succeed on Shopify. Let's dig in.

Rhian 0:25
Welcome to Commerce Tea, a podcast to help you succeed on Shopify. I'm Rand.

Kelly 0:30
And I'm Kelly. Grab a mug and join us as we talk about all things commerce.

Rhian 0:43
Hey, Kelly, let's say I can't write code, but I want to create workflows that carry out repetitive tasks automatically. So that way I can focus on my business and create great customer experiences. What what to use,

Kelly 0:57
I recommend Mesa a no code workflow builder for any action your customer takes. You can use meses built in features to extend your connected apps, set up email notifications, received forms, scheduled tasks, delay workflows, and much more. Developers like me also love Mesa because we can lift the hood on any automation to customize for total control.

Rhian 1:17
Okay, I'm in how do I start

Kelly 1:20
go to get Mesa calm. That's GE t mesa.com. And their team of automation experts will support you on your journey. 24 seven. every aspect of your website is a variable that could be impacting your business's revenue. We all want to grow our business and we may change in the hopes of seeing our business grow. Maybe you add a new graphic here new social proof on your product page there, maybe change your pricing. But do you know if this new thing is helping or hurting you? Today, testing is a requirement understanding what is and isn't working for your business. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to test in fact, I set up my first test in less than 10 minutes on a client store using neat A B testing. After the test was live we saw a confidence level on each of our tests to know which is actually best for the business how they sort of see additional revenue per view for each variants. Give her friends that need AB testing tried today and start testing for your business head over to try dot neat AB comm slash commerce dash t to start your 14 day free trial. Again, that's try dot n e@ab.com slash commerce dash t Hello Ryan.

Rhian 2:29
Hi Kelly. How's it going?

Kelly 2:31
Great. It's nice to see your face. You know, three feet away from mine.

Rhian 2:36
Yeah. So everybody Kelly and I actually watched unite together in person

Kelly 2:41
in real life

Rhian 2:42
in real life. We're both vaccinated. I flew out to Atlanta, and we've been having a ball this week.

Kelly 2:49
It's been so much fun.

Rhian 2:50
It's been so much fun. We've been talking about the the new releases that were announced to Shopify unite, the ones we're stoked on. We got to watch it together. And we're gonna break them down today.

Kelly 3:01
Yeah, why don't we just get started? Because there are a lot of them.

Rhian 3:03
There's a lot of them buckle up. Alright,

Kelly 3:06
so the first big one is that online store 2.0?

Rhian 3:12
What does that mean for people who don't speak developer?

Kelly 3:15
So a low bring it on this way? Okay, know how, when you will go into the theme customizer on the homepage, you can drag and drop the new sections and blocks that you you create and put them in any order you want. But you can't do that on any any other page. Yes. Online Store 2.0 changes that.

Rhian 3:35
Okay,

Kelly 3:35
so it introduces what we were calling sections everywhere, a while ago, we call it that, where we're just referencing online store 2.0 as a whole. And so what this means is that you'll be able to add these blocks and sections, anywhere on your on the site, within like various places on your theme, not only just like staff sections as well as it currently is on the homepage, you'll be able to pull in content, which I'm not going to get so much into the content side of things, because that's actually coming later is no

Rhian 4:10
joke by the way. I'm very excited about the

Kelly 4:12
content page. Yeah, it separates the content from your theme. It like lives in its own section on the admin, which means that you can you know, let's say you have testimonials from your customers, you can create these content definitions of this specific testimonials and then just like plug them in in various places on your site instead of having to write that content again and again. One of the biggest places where this is useful as FAQs. Yep. I found a way to plug in FAQ. Oh my god,

it took me like

Rhian 4:41
what we're how we're barely into this episode. less than four minutes.

Kelly 4:47
Of course with sponsors. Thank you sponsors that might be longer than four minutes but we'll see. Anyway, yeah, content is to come later. Online Store 2.0 is going to be rolling out to everybody over the over the summer, basically. Over the next month or so, if you have a developer friend who can create a development store for you, it comes with a new theme called dawn. And we can see that inaction on netflix dot shop. Yes, yes. So the Netflix store, the Netflix merge store was built on top of dawn, it is much more performance. And it uses the new theme infrastructure that lets you kind of play along with play around with all of these sections. It's, I'm going to be entirely honest, it's going to be a little overwhelming at first. Yeah, it's a lot because there is a it's a mindset shift to realize just how much power you have over your theme now. So give yourself some time to learn how to use it. It's important to note that this is not going to change your existing theme stay the same, nothing's nothing's changing about that. This is a brand new theme that you would install on your store. So you would have to upgrade to a new theme to a new version of your existing theme that supports the new online store 2.0 structure because developer speak the entire directory of files and templates have changed to support this new this new format. So online store 2.0 will be rolled out to all stores over the next two months and then you can get a new theme.

Rhian 6:26
I'm very excited about it. By the way. I'm in charge of the serotonin boost button today. So get ready everybody.

Kelly 6:34
serotonin boost button it says serotonin boost. I just call it the touchy.

Rhian 6:41
Okay, so what else has been rolled out? This Okay, this part's a little bit nerdy. So I'm going to give to Kelly.

Kelly 6:50
Yes. Okay, so you may or may not have experienced with meta fields on your store?

Unknown Speaker 6:58
meta probably have,

Kelly 6:59
it's possible that you do, which is why I'm going to explain what they are first, meta fields are custom fields. Yeah. So let's say you're selling a food product. And you want to include the nutritional information, maybe allergens, maybe how to cook, prepare, something like that. But you don't want to dump all of that content into one section on the like the product description. Custom Fields, or meta fields on Shopify are how you use these. Now meta fields have been around for a very long time very, very, very, very many, many years long time. However, they always required a third party app or using the API to use. And with the updated Shopify admin, you're going to be able to access meta fields directly within your admin on the Settings page. So what this means is, you're going to be able to create the definition. So a definition being like a subtitle for a product, or ingredients, whatever it might be. So you you define what that is. And then you define the content type. So you can have it be like an image, or just a general file, or a text or number or my personal favorite, a reference to a different product or different variant. There are all kinds of fun things you could do about think, for example, that'd be useful for pairs well with so you can create a site like that. Yeah. So like complete the set, for example. Yeah, so meta fields. And right now, when one set up two releases, it rolls out to everybody. You'll be able to use it for at the moment, I think, just products and variants. But you'll be able to use it for collections and pages and blogs, and accounts in orders, I believe. I don't know if pages have them. I think it's just blogs, accounts, orders, and collections has not been released yet. So many fields are really, really useful. Most importantly, you're going to be able to set the definitions in the Settings section. And then when you go to that like specific product on the like Shopify admin, you're able to actually write in what that what that is. And then you can pull in those meta fields, the all that meta field data directly into the customizer, so you can reference those meta fields in the new online store 2.0 customizer. Like I said, there are a lot of moving pieces all at the same time that are being released all at once. It's going to be overwhelming, I highly recommend giving yourself some time to play with it before.

Rhian 9:31
Absolutely give yourself some time. But what one thing more than anything that I took away from Shopify unite this year was this doubling down on the concept of arming the rebels and the rebels being you the merchant. So this democratizes commerce and e commerce in a way that hasn't been democratized before because Shopify is really pushing the needle as to what you can do as a merchant. I'm super excited about that. Because I, I love agencies, obviously Kelly has an agency, but but you don't need an agency for everything. And this will help you get from zero to one or 02. point five, before you need an agency. Yeah, it will help you in that very beginning stage so much. I'm just I'm very excited about what that could mean.

Kelly 10:24
Exactly. So it's going to be a lot of fun to play with. I'm really excited for it to roll out. I've been playing with the development store with all these features. And it's even for me being in the Shopify ecosystem since 2014. It's a big mindset shift.

Rhian 10:40
It's a big mindset shift. I

Kelly 10:42
think it's gonna be so much fun. I'm very excited.

Rhian 10:45
We should talk about something else that really benefits merchants right now. And it goes with this. Checkout extensions.

Kelly 10:53
Yes. So two things about checkout. First off, it is two times

Unknown Speaker 10:57
faster.

Kelly 10:58
Yes. So obviously, faster checkout means more people

Rhian 11:03
completing Checkout, yes, less churn less churn at the end.

Kelly 11:07
But my personal favorite part of this is checkout extensions, it's huge. So if you are on Shopify plus, one of the benefits you get is called checkout dot liquid, you get access to this template file that lets you customize your checkout, it is only available to Shopify plus merchants, until now. So you're not you're still not getting access to checkout dot liquid if you're on core Shopify, but we're going to do one better. And by we I mean Shopify. And I might build one of these for you. Checkout extensions, extends the functionality of the Shopify checkout. So to give you an example, let's say you have a customer who has over $50 worth of items in their cart, and you want to offer them a free gift for the purchase of over $50. A checkout extension allows you to just plug in the rules for whatever you know, whatever that is the threshold of $50, and then select that free gift. And then when a customer reaches Checkout, and they have over $50 in their cart, they're going to be able to see the thing that says universally, you're receiving a free gift, add it to your store, you can also upsell with this, so maybe it's not even free. Maybe you want to be like oh, you have this in your cart, you might also want to buy this, these are considered pre purchase upsells. So it's different from what's already available in the app store called post purchase upsells. This is before they've entered in their credit card information. So a good a good option for upselling here would be like, Oh, why don't you buy two of those instead?

Rhian 12:37
Yes.

Kelly 12:38
So that's a that's an example of this. The other example that was given at Shopify unite was, you're gonna have to help me with this, again, if you live in the state of California,

Rhian 12:47
yes, prop 65. Everything

Kelly 12:50
causes cancer,

Rhian 12:51
on everything, but it's for toxic chemicals that could potentially cause cancer. There's also a sign it at where Mickey Mouse lives, there's even signs up there about prop 65. I mean, they're like everywhere in California.

Kelly 13:06
So what you can do is watch for somebody to choose the state of California as where they're shipping to, and show them that message, but only show it to the people who live in California. Maybe you can't ship to po boxes. You can detect when somebody starts entering an appeal box and be like, Oh, sorry, we can't ship to you. Yeah, all kinds of things you can do with this. But it goes beyond just affecting, you know, upselling, whatever. You can also use checkout extensions to build trust. Let's say you have an extension that allows you to plug in an image that says free shipping and returns every time. Maybe you have a checkout extension installed, that lets you display a testimonial from a customer like just one. One more reminder that customers love our products, you should you should buy this. I'm really excited about this. It's

Rhian 13:55
it's really it's massive. There's just so many use cases, so many ways to make sure that you're grabbing your buyer and keeping them there. Exactly. And making sure there's no answers, or no no questions that they have going into the checkout process. Yes, that's where you can reify other things, right? Like, oh, it takes us five days to fulfill. That's a great place to put takes us five days to fulfill or any other information that you find critical and will help reduce your support debt.

Kelly 14:28
Yeah, exactly. And this is available to all merchants. It's not just Shopify plus. A really important point to make about this, though, is in the past, things like Shopify scripts, or other checkout customizations only applied to the standard checkout and never applied to shop pay the one click Checkout experience that bolts your card and address so you can really quickly reach check or go through checkout. Checkout extensions apply to shop pay as well. You built right into it. So you're still able to show whatever message to upsell, whatever you want to do with shop. Pay So this is this is never before done. So I'm excited to see that rollout. I wonder how many times you want to say I'm excited in this episode?

Rhian 15:08
Well, very many. We're not even talking about some of the releases that I'm super pumped about because they're just like developer releases hunting on what our timing looks like for this. Yeah, I'm just I'm just excited in general this was the biggest set of unite announcements ever I've been to every single unite and this one I was like,

Kelly 15:28
especially for a year for Shopify unite. That's being virtual.

Rhian 15:32
Yeah. Is a lot of really was

Kelly 15:35
like, imagine what it would have been like to be in that keynote, the mainstage Oh, my gosh,

Rhian 15:41
it would have been just vibrating with energy. Everyone would have been so pumped up. If you if you're, I'm sure you've watched the apple conference, WWDC and people are clapping and sometimes folks who are not in technology, like why are they clapping? And it's because they've just released something big that impacts us, or they're engineers who built it and so this was one of those times I think it would have been a wall to wall applause for almost the entire time.

Kelly 16:09
Rhian watched me happy dance many times

Rhian 16:12
I did I did it. Well, there was cause for happy dancing Korean.

Kelly 16:16
What can I do to help my support team be more efficient?

Rhian 16:19
I recommend gorgeous, gorgeous combines all your communications channels, including email, SMS, social media, live chat and phone. It's a one platform that gives you an organized view of all help requests. This saves your support team hours per day, it makes managing customer orders a breeze.

Kelly 16:38
Sounds great. What else can it do? with gorgeous,

Rhian 16:41
you can pre write and save responses to your most frequently asked questions. You even have access to the customer's order information. So you can personalize responses with things like an order or tracking number. This then frees up your time so your support team can focus on complex questions.

Kelly 16:58
That sounds like a great way to also increase sales and brand loyalty.

Rhian 17:01
Where can I learn more to request a demo? Visit Commerce tea.com forward slash gorgeous, that's Commerce Tea calm slash GORGI a s. Okay. Let's talk about the next thing. Okay, because I'm excited about this table. So

Kelly 17:16
we mentioned that there's a new theme called dawn that was built by Shopify.

Rhian 17:21
Yes.

Kelly 17:23
This is the first thing that supports online store 2.0. The good news is Shopify is reopening the Shopify theme store, to developers and web designers to create new themes supporting online store 2.0. It's been closed for a long time, which is why you haven't seen any new or like very few new themes released for like the past two years. Yeah. It's officially reopening on I think July 15. I believe that's correct. And so you're going to have your pick of all kinds of new themes to choose from as well. And the existing themes I would imagine are also updating to support online store 2.0 as well. So you'll have all kinds of it's not gonna say that she's

Rhian 18:02
she's about to say she is excited. And for the writer, so thrilled, I am thrilled. I am no aghast as bad. elated.

Kelly 18:11
There we go.

Rhian 18:12
I'm elated. Just start thinking you Gru words and say them out loud. Oh,

Kelly 18:15
good. I pull out my fist.

Rhian 18:20
One thing that I was gonna mention regarding dawn, and this is just so y'all know, who are listening at home is it's dawn da w en not dawn like doin. That's, that's that's a good point to make when you're searching. And you're like what

Kelly 18:36
another really great thing I would like to mention about Don. And most people probably won't care about this, but I'm excited about it. It's the first Shopify theme that's fully open source, which means that the code base for the entire theme is available on GitHub, which is a code repository. And you're able to like any developer can download the theme and customize it from there and install it on a store. So it's a really great like starting point, it's a really great opportunity to see how themes are built how this brand new theme is built, because again, the whole structure is very different. I was poking around it. Like since Tuesday really, I downloaded the theme started, like digging into the code. And I'm like, I don't know how to use this. That's fine. This is fine. This is fine. Everything's fine. But it's okay. have plenty of time to learn.

Rhian 19:26
Yes, absolutely. We'll learn along together. So the next thing I want to talk about are app theme extensions.

Kelly 19:34
Yes. So this, I think is theme app extension

Rhian 19:37
is a theme app.

Kelly 19:38
I get it wrong. Every single one.

Rhian 19:40
I don't know the order of the words.

Kelly 19:42
I have a tab open. Um,

Rhian 19:44
it just says app extension. Yeah.

Kelly 19:46
Okay, so let me just explain what app extensions are.

Rhian 19:51
That's either app theme extensions or theme app extensions. We'll link to the right thing in the show notes.

Kelly 19:55
So you know how you install it app sometimes and it adds code to your theme And then you uninstalled the app. And that code stays in your theme. And then it slows down your theme. And one day like two years from now, you're like, why is this reference? I have not used this app in a very long time. app extensions fixes this. Yes, it does. So provided that the app developers use it, of course, what what theme app extensions do is allow the app developers to create a block or section to use in your theme in various places. So you can add this section, let's say Shopify rebuilt the product reviews app to use the extension app theme app extensions, there we go. So you can add on the snippet that says, like the star rating, for example, you can put it wherever you want and drag and reorder it. And then the actual section that allows you to read the reviews and write a new review. That's its own section as well. So again, you can just drag that into your theme, instead of pasting in the snippet that you use on that. This is brand new, just got released. So it's going to be a minute until anybody has released it for their app.

Rhian 21:08
Yeah. I'd say give it three months.

Kelly 21:12
Where I'm currently learning how to use it. Yeah, the super secret out that Ryan and I are building Yes. So we are going to support it through. It doesn't matter. They're out blocks. And there's also app embeds. They're two different types of things developers go look at the documentation on Shopify dot Dev, if you're curious. But this is going to keep the themes a lot cleaner. And it's also going to make your themes faster as well.

Rhian 21:35
Critical for core web vitals for search for checkout, because now What did they say? 10 minutes, make it 10% faster? And then, which makes you four times more likely to check out?

Kelly 21:51
Is that correct? sounds nice.

Rhian 21:53
That sounds does that? Is that correct?

Kelly 21:55
It's in my email.

Rhian 21:56
Let me I'm going to check that while you keep talking. Okay.

Kelly 22:00
Yeah, so that is a that is being built. Um, it really is, I'm not going to get there's a there's a technical component to the way that it like ends up compiling into the the theme. But the most important thing to to note here is the fact that it is apps, or it's going to be more difficult for an app to slow down your store, because of the way that it actually gets built into your theme. So really, really excited about that. Rena and I were live tweeting the updates. And so Ryan's currently like scrolling through her twitter feed to find out what it is.

Rhian 22:31
Okay, so here's the stat. If you are 10% faster, if your theme is 10% faster, you have 7% better conversion.

Kelly 22:43
Wow.

Rhian 22:43
That's the stat.

Kelly 22:45
This is why performance optimization is so important.

Rhian 22:48
Super, super important. And I also found out theme app extensions for my Twitter for you.

Kelly 22:57
As somebody who's been building one of these for a while I keep on I think, Oh, no, I have my my GitHub. Branch correctly. Name is thematic. I got it. It's okay. Cuz on my other computer, I started without app beam extension. I'm like, No, it was just trash this and start over again. It's cool. It's fine. Everything is

Rhian 23:18
fine. Everything is fine. Everything is fine. So

Kelly 23:20
online store 2.0 sections everywhere. Dawn theme has been released. It's open source, the App Store reopen or theme store rather reopens on July 15. So you're going to see some new themes in there supporting online store 2.0. Shopify checkout is two times faster shop or checkout extensions have been released.

Rhian 23:38
Yes. I just have a cool fact I want to talk about let's do it. 8% of the world's population checked out on Shopify in 2020. What and the world is large sized? There are

Kelly 23:53
many people in the world. Yes.

Rhian 23:54
So that's just a cool a cool fact that I love. For those of you know me, personally, you know, I love trivia for those of you who don't know, guess what, I love trivia. And now that is a piece of trivia I am passing on to you, although it's not trivial.

Kelly 24:10
It is not trivial. And actually on this topic is something that we didn't write down or notes to, but it's worth talking about 8% of the world. So we're talking international customers all over the world, you're running your store from a different country from a different continent. That's not that not North America. One really important piece of this is at the moment. The servers for graph qL, which is what is used to query Shopify is to grab data, send data, whatever it might be, is housed in North America. Yes. Which means it's fast. You get faster response times for people who are shopping in North America who need to fetch that data. But if you're in Asia, if you're in Europe, if you're literally like APAC, anywhere else. Yeah. It takes a long time to is it takes a longer time to get that response. So once Shopify is actually working on doing this over this year. I believe it is this year. Yeah, adding more servers elsewhere. So you have like a more local server basically.

Rhian 25:12
And that way Shopify will be within 15 milliseconds of every buyer.

Kelly 25:17
Yes. Exactly.

Rhian 25:19
And that fast.

Kelly 25:22
Yeah. 1000 milliseconds is one second.

Rhian 25:26
Yeah,

Kelly 25:26
that is a very small. What's your favorite fact?

Rhian 25:31
in general? No.

Kelly 25:32
About?

Rhian 25:33
Oh, my favorite fact is that half of a bite is a nibble. You're welcome, everybody. My favorite technical felt like the the perfect time like my favorite fact, in general. Oh, I've got a lot

Kelly 25:48
to just do an episode on reinstatement. Okay, it's perfect. Okay, so going back to updates. One of the things I did want to mention as well back when we were talking about shop pay is shop pay installments is now available to everyone. Correct. So this is using a firm to power. So basically, I think it's, you know, X number of payments and installments, whatever that happens at checkout is currently available for orders between $50 and $1,000. Yes. General factoids about twins. I don't know, just say that word. How this works is you get charged a slightly higher transaction fee for installment purchases. But it's really helpful for higher conversions for those more expensive orders, where I don't want to drop $375 on an order split it into four payments instead. Yeah, I don't want to pay. You know, 20 $800 for my peloton, upfront, let me pay make make some number of payments of $72. Instead,

Rhian 26:51
yes. One thing that I'm really excited about with the shop pay installments for everybody is the impact it's going to have on their conversion rate. Yeah. Especially with those higher price point items. It just makes all the difference in the world. Exactly.

Kelly 27:07
So if you're if you have an average order value above $50 definitely consider using shop pay installments for your store.

Rhian 27:17
Yeah, get to it,

Kelly 27:18
your customers will appreciate it. Okay, so next one I wanted to talk about is the payments platform. So as you are likely aware, when you go to Settings payments, you can see your payment methods that are available. Shop pay is great. Or Shopify payments, rather, it's not available to everybody or you have you know, things like Pay Pal, Amazon pay a bunch of third party ones g pay. But the reality is, Shopify, as global merchants are everywhere, your customers are everywhere, you likely have different payment gateways that are not actually available in you know, currently on Shopify. So this payment platform payments platform allows you to do is create a new payment method, working with the developer to integrate other payment gateways that are not currently on Shopify. So you can really customize the payment gateway available, or availability based on what you need specifically.

Rhian 28:13
Yeah, it's really exciting.

Kelly 28:15
I think it's awesome. Yeah. I'm really interested in seeing what people do with it. It,

Rhian 28:19
people are gonna flex all of this stuff.

Kelly 28:21
That's totally, it's gonna that's what we do. That's what we as developers do. What What can we push the boundaries on doing?

Rhian 28:27
Yeah. I've always been a big fan of that. How far can I push the Shopify platform? What can it do?

Kelly 28:34
How can I break it?

Rhian 28:35
Well, I'm not trying to break it. I'm trying to make it do cool stuff.

Kelly 28:39
I just I break it in the process. Oh, that's fair. That's fair. That's usually is like my code that's not working. It's not like Shopify, that's not working. But Shopify is like, I don't know what this means. I cannot do anything with this mess.

Rhian 28:49
It's It's true. You know, today, Kelly, and I actually went to an escape room. And one thing I'm a little concerned about is at one point, we had to look up at this, there was a ceiling covered in stars. And her and I were looking for the aberrant star. We couldn't find it. And I'm thinking, we are not great at finding bugs.

Kelly 29:12
Outside, I stared at that ceiling for so long, and couldn't find the weirdo star. real bummer. So one of the ones I thought was really cool is, you know, you currently have a lot of locations available to ship from however, you might have a store location that you don't actually ship from, you can now specify a location to be pickup only. And Shopify is smart enough to know that you can't ship from this location. And that is the only place that the inventory is available. And so your customers won't accidentally purchase it expecting to have it shipped when you're when they have to pick it up.

Rhian 29:56
It's really exciting. I truly believe and clearly show I truly believes that picking up at stores isn't going anywhere. That's now a new consumer behavior. It was a consumer behavior pre COVID as well. But

Kelly 30:09
was I use targets

Rhian 30:11
all the time, like in collapse, you know, whatever it's called wherever you are on on the face of the planet. But obviously COVID has accelerated this rapidly. Yeah. And so now people are just so used to it. And that I'm so excited about it. It's great. It's great.

Kelly 30:26
Thank you for saying you're excited instead of me.

Rhian 30:28
Yeah, no problem, I got you.

Kelly 30:32
handshake. What handshake allows you to do is two things, one, sell your own products wholesale. So other buyers can add them to their store. And as you essentially dropship for them, you become a drop shipper. Or you can add other merchants products to your store.

Rhian 30:53
Yes.

Kelly 30:54
So you can expand your product offering if you want to purchase from other merchants who happen to be on Shopify. Or you can expand your business and become a wholesaler on top of selling direct to consumer as well.

Rhian 31:08
I think it's exceptional. And it's a great opportunity to find things that aren't your typical drop shipped items. Oh, yeah,

Kelly 31:15
if you're the seller, and you're also supporting small business, exactly. Other other merchants on Shopify, I played with the beta A while ago, back when I was still running a merge store. And my it didn't make sense for me to sell because I had print on demand. It was very niche, not really what I wanted to do, but I wanted to see how it worked. And it was a really cool system, and I think is really going to open up a lot of opportunities for more discoverability for your products. Absolutely.

Rhian 31:42
So

Kelly 31:43
definitely recommend taking a look at that. Um, the last thing I do want to mention, just as a bonus, and this is more for Shopify plus merchants is hydrogen. So some of you have made or may have heard of the term headless as an option for your store. And what this means is that the storefronts for your store like what your customers are shopping on live separately from Shopify, but you're able to, like store all your data in Shopify, and like all your customer accounts, your your products, everything like that, and your customers still can check out on Shopify.

Rhian 32:18
I like to think of this as a technical mullet. So it's a party in the front and all business in the back.

Kelly 32:24
Tech backwards. Yeah. Should be business in front party in the back.

Rhian 32:28
Was it isn't your party. The party is the front hammer? No, no, no, it's a backwards molot. You saw this. Oh, you Sorry. It's a technical backwards merry go. backwards. molot. Party in the front business in the back. Yes. That is headless commerce. So which is I really think that's how it should have been branded actually is a backup. Instead, totally. Because headless just sounds like they're

Kelly 32:53
headless is terrible.

Rhian 32:54
Like there's a horseman riding around with no head. I don't I don't love Express.

Kelly 32:58
So they're the current state of headless is it's it's a it's difficult. It requires a developer to custom value a storefront. Yes, your data, you're usually using a third party content management system to store the data, you're having to store or create a data layer to manage all the various, you know, from your content management system from Shopify, so you can cache it, perhaps meaning of storing at one time. Anyway, it's it's costly, it requires developers it can, you know, significantly speed up your store as well. So there are obvious benefits to it. But what hydrogen does is hydrogen is a new it's basically adding a new sales channel to your store to allow you to build these custom headless storefronts directly within Shopify. Now headless storefronts, because it's not your typical Shopify theme. It does require hosting elsewhere, which Shopify is also introducing with the release of hydrogen. It is called oxygen.

Unknown Speaker 34:06
You gotta love it.

Kelly 34:06
I love it. I think it's great. I'm really excited to play with it. I you know, I'm obviously I'm a developer Did you know that

Rhian 34:13
Yeah, I heard actually on the internet on this app called just the burnout Twitter I believe it's pronounced it's gonna

Kelly 34:21
say something else. Yeah, I'm I'm really excited for it is not released yet is the you can't even preview it. You can't be to beta test it yet. But if you're into react as a developer, you can build custom react storefronts directly on Shopify and deploy it directly to Shopify.

Rhian 34:43
Love it.

Kelly 34:44
Okay, so we did not cover literal, we not cover every announcement. No, we did not. Um, there are a bunch of new API's released to the storefront API, or with the storefront API and new API endpoints. There's new admin API endpoints. There's the There's a ton of stuff that we didn't cover that are a little bit more developer centric. If you're interested in in real like actually watching all of Shopify unite it is available to watch again at unite shopify.com. There are also deep dives into each individual thing that was released to if you don't want to watch the hour and a half long video and you're interested in certain parts, I highly highly recommend watching the online store 2.0 video so you can actually see what it looks like in action and see how other components get dragged around and things like that. And if you are nerdy like me and enjoy coding and want to see what hydrogen looks like, watch that one as well. Yes. Okay, do we have a shout out for this week? I want to do like a joint shout out and said since we're like staring at each other's faces,

Rhian 35:45
I was gonna say my shadow does to the entire Shopify team for putting out unite because that must have been a lot of work, a lot of work. And apparently damage and the production was fantastic.

Kelly 35:57
Oh, I have a shout out Okay. Um, this is a shout out to all the plant people. I have a challenge for you to go through and count and name the plants that everyone has in the background of their in their scene. There is a if you're if you're curious, there's somebody on Twitter who like literally took all the stills from everybody like got graded what plants they have if they have any.

Rhian 36:21
I love that so much. I love that so much. Yeah, so that's that's my shout out which isn't really a shout out. But just acknowledgement to the team for absolutely crushing it. It was awesome. You know

Kelly 36:32
what my shout out actually is what my shout outs to you. Oh, all the way out to Atlanta to hang out with me. So we can wash off by unite together and work

Unknown Speaker 36:41
on our

Kelly 36:42
super secret app together. And just hang out with me in real life in all kinds of good food and do escape rooms and find fun things to get

Rhian 36:51
in trouble about. Okay, fine. My shoutouts to you for yay good food and I had some great barbecue y'all. Some great barbecue. So we've had a really, really great time.

Kelly 37:03
I hope you enjoyed this recap. Again, unite dot shop fight.com contains the entire thing. Highly recommend watching it set aside an hour and a half. And then set aside another hour and a half to watch it again. Because you're going to have to like sit there and pause and rewind be like Wait, what

Unknown Speaker 37:19
note?

Kelly 37:20
I watched it twice. So thank you so much for tuning in. And thanks again to our sponsors for supporting this episode. We have a YouTube channel. You can visit a youtube.com slash Commerce Tea. If you like our podcast, please leave us a review. Reviews make us very happy. And you can subscribe to Commerce Tea on your favorite podcasting service. We post new episodes every Wednesday. So grab your mug. Join us then we'll see you next week. Bye.

Rhian 37:58
Locked in as a time clock for Shopify. With clocked in your team members can easily clock in and out of their shifts from anywhere. You can manage your team's hours as they work remotely with an intuitive interface that can be used from desktop, tablet or mobile. Check it out at clocked in.io or in the Shopify App Store.