Shopify Unite 2019 – Features that matter for merchants in Asia

Shopify Unite 2019 marks a whole new milestone for Shopify. With 820,000 Shopify merchants and 5300 Shopify Plus merchants already on board, Shopify Unite packs a whole punch of new features and APIs that would help merchants expand their offering and move towards a more frictionless approach to ecommerce. 

We’ve picked out the five most important announcements that would matter most to merchants in Asia.

1  Features to sell cross border with ease

With the new features, Shopify has made it easier for merchants to do cross border sales. 

• Selling in multiple currencies with Shopify Payments
  Previously, this was a feature only open to Plus merchants. Now this feature is also rolled out  globally to Shopify merchants. What this means is that the display currency (what your customers see) and shop currency (what merchants are paid in) can now be different.

When a customer views your site, the prices will be displayed in your local currency—an experience that carries through to the checkout. This pricing will automatically adjust based on foreign-exchange rates and displays buyer-friendly prices with simple rounding rules. And the merchants will still get paid as per the shop currency. 

There are currently 3 Asian currencies supported: HKD, SGD, and JPY in addition to GBP, AUD, CAD, EUR, NZD, DKK, and USD.

• Sell in multiple languages
  Shopify now supports selling in multiple languages from a single online store, allowing merchants to offer localized content to their customers in multiple different languages. This applies to all customer facing content such as product details, blog posts, pages, etc
  
  The enhanced Liquid API will now natively surface translations when they’re available. For example, Liquid will render a Chinese translation if a buyer is looking at a Chinese page (depending on the URL and availability of translations).

• Support of different subdirectories in URLs
  The online store can now support different subdirectories in the URLs (ie. shop.com and shop.com/fr) to support multiple languages. These enhancements will allow merchants to optimize SEO and offer the same consistent shopping experience in multiple languages.

• New languages for the Shopify Admin Dashboard
  For a long time, the Shopify admin dashboard was only available in English. Now Shopify has added 11 new languages, including Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Thai, Malay, Dutch, Hindi, Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norweigian, making it more convenient for merchants to access the tools in their native languages.

2/ More flexible shipping rules

More flexible shipping rules can now be implemented with the Delivery Profiles API. Merchants can now set shipping rules based on product characteristics (eg. bulky, fragile, etc.), as well as where inventory is shipped from (eg. a supplier). 

This comes in handy for merchants who have different shipping fees for different products (eg. subscription items, bulky items, food items) as well as for merchants with various warehouses across the country or require more complex shipping requirements.

3/  Checkout app extensions: Subscriptions
The good news for merchants who have been searching for a better Subscriptions flow – Shopify has now launched their first ever checkout app extension, which focuses on improving the purchase flow for subscriptions! 

Customers will no longer be routed outside of Shopify’s checkout to complete their transactions and merchants can now have the ability to process transactions for subscription goods and services within one seamless checkout experience. This will only be available end of the year.

4 / Editing of orders

Very often, after the purchase, customers would approach the brand to ask if they can edit their cart to add, remove or switch items. With the new order editing API, merchants now have the ability to add, remove, or switch items before or after an order has shipped.

5 / Easy management of multi-stores in Shopify Plus

With the enhanced Shopify Plus, merchants with complex businesses can now manage multiple stores, users, automation, and more in one place. These brands will start their day with rolled up insights across all of their stores, allowing them to see key insights about their entire business. They will also be able to view and manage stores and user access and permissions in one place, allowing them and their teams to operate more efficiently. Shopify Flow users are also able to copy flows across all stores.

Check out the rest of the announcements over at Shopify Unite 2019  here.