Shopify’s bi-annual major product release optimises mobile commerce, streamlines Checkout to keep Indian retailers on the cutting edge

India | February 09, 2023: Shopify (NYSE: SHOP), a provider of essential internet infrastructure for commerce, has today unveiled a major set of 100+ platform updates, with new features that unlock the power of mobile commerce, and meet shifting shopping preferences with a seamless checkout experience 

A new suite of features for Indian merchants comes as retailers seek new ways to get more from less as they double-down on customer experience in an effort to convert more conscious and considered shoppers in 2023. The new suite of features for Indian merchants comes as retailers seek new ways to build direct-to-consumer (D2C) relationships, with India’s D2C market projected to triple in size from $33 billion in 2020 to $100 billion USD by 2025.

“Not even a year ago we launched our first Edition, and now our Winter ‘23 Edition showcases over a hundred more products and features we’ve built in the last six months alone,” said Harley Finkelstein, President at Shopify. 

“We know we need to be the fastest moving commerce company in the world because our merchants depend on Shopify’s innovation for their own longevity. So with this Edition, we moved quickly to offer tools that help merchants access the promise of mobile commerce, meet customer expectations for fast delivery and seamless checkout, and sell more with AI — it’s the best version of Shopify yet, and will shape the future of entrepreneurship.”

Optimising Checkout to drive higher conversion for Indian merchants

With more than 5.5 billion orders processed, Shopify Checkout is reliable, scalable, and lightning fast. However, with 75% Indian consumers saying that price rules purchase decisions in the current economic environment, we’re launching new levels of extensibility to help merchants optimise for conversion.

Using our global insights from Shop Pay — which converts 72% better than a typical checkout and 91% better on mobile, while boasting the processing power of 40,000 checkouts per store per minute with 99.99% uptime — Shopify Checkout now offers:

• Drag & Drop Checkout Editor helps merchants easily edit the look and feel of checkout, threading their unique brand identity all the way from browse to buy. Merchants can also easily add new functionality to their checkout, like upsells and loyalty programs, by installing apps from the Shopify App Store and configuring them in the checkout editor. 
• Enhanced developer tooling with a new suite of powerful components and APIs , allowing developers to build checkout apps for the Shopify App Store and unlocking new functionality for merchants  to optimise the customer experience for Indian shoppers, including post-purchase pages, discounts and custom logic, additional fields, custom content, and more.
• One-page Checkout will replace our existing three-page checkout later this year. Designed to replicate an express checkout experience like Shop Pay, our new one-page checkout is faster, friction-free, higher-converting than standard online checkouts. 

Set up, grow, and run a world-class commerce business from your phone

India now has the world’s second largest mobile phone market in the world, with smartphones now the main gateway to go online for 650 million people. Shopify is laying the foundation for mobile-first users to start, run, and scale a business all through mobile, launching a series of new mobile-first solutions for Indian merchants as part of Winter ‘23 Edition, including: 

• Online Store Editor for Mobile allows merchants to easily edit and update the look of their store, or take product images with their phone and follow an intuitive flow to create new products and set up new variants. 
• Shopify Email and Marketing Automations for Mobile allows merchants to automate their marketing and create branded emails using a variety of templates, or build custom emails on-the-go straight from their smartphone.
• Simplified inventory management for Mobile gives merchants the power to quickly and accurately update inventory on mobile.

Unlocking the Shop app for developers to help merchants win in the mobile era of commerce  

Shop is a brand discovery app that is available to Indian customers on iOS and Android, with more than 100 million users globally. As mobile commerce continues to grow, we’re introducing Shop Minis, to give developers a new way to build for mobile. 

The Shop Mini software development kit (SDK) enables developers in the Shopify Ecosystem to extend their Shopify app functionality to Shop, creating innovative in-app brand discovery experiences for merchants around the world, including in India. The Shopify Ecosystem already includes nearly 50,000 partners and developers who earned more that $411 million from Shopify in 2021. Now, we’re opening that same opportunity to developers to build for Shop and inviting them to help us build for the mobile era of commerce.

Bharati Balakrishnan, Shopify’s Country Head and Director for India & Southeast Asia highlighted the impact these changes will have on Indian merchants who are navigating significant economic and consumer shifts in 2023, “Commerce looks different this year as consumer behaviour and shopping habits shift in response to the current economic environment. Those who stay on the current edge will win, which is why we’re doubling down on our investment in innovation and product development to keep Indian brands and retailers ahead of the curve and give them an advantage over their competitors that’s built to last. I can’t wait to see the incredible experiences Indian brands and retailers build with these newest updates.”

In addition to these new releases launching with our Winter ‘23 Edition, we’ve also launched the following in India over the last six months:

• Shopify Translate & Adapt, a new app that works with Shopify Markets, to help merchants quickly and accurately translate a merchant’s store into different languages with both manual and machine translations.
• Payoneer, PayGlocal and Tazapay partnership helps Indian merchants streamline cross-border commerce on Shopify, with around 1-in-5 now selling internationally to an average of four international markets, reaching more than 70 million shoppers from around the world.

• Shopify x YouTube Shopping allows creators and merchants in [India] to sell their full range of products on YouTube via livestreams, in-video clickable product shelf and store tabs.
• Shopify Starter Plan helps merchants that are just starting out and who want to sell to their customers through social media platforms or messaging apps, without maintaining an online store.