Shopify has announced over 100 new features as it pushes to improve its ecommerce platform.
At its bi-annual showcase, Editions, Shopify launched a new headless commerce offering called Hydrogen & Oxygen, as well as new ecosystem, checkout dev capabilities and various other upgrades.
Hydrogen is a React-based framework for building performant, commerce experiences and Oxygen is a hosting platform built specifically for commerce.
Ramping up ecommerce solutions
Shopify says its Hydrogen tool improves development phase speed, and optimizes website performance for large ecommerce websites and merchants, while its Oxygen tool hosts and maintains DevOps for commerce backend developers.
“At Shopify, we believe in the infinite game. That means we’re constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible for entrepreneurs,” said Tobi Lütke, Founder & CEO of Shopify.
“We work hard to solve the complex challenges merchants face today while imagining entirely new ways for them to grow their businesses. With Shopify Editions, we’re sharing our big bets and latest innovations in commerce so that those ambitious enough to try their hand at entrepreneurship can start and scale faster than ever before.”
Aside from Hydrogen and Oxygen, Shopify also released a new checkout extensibility feature for developers and merchants to build functional customizations for checkout, that focuses on speed and flexibility.
With the new tool, developers and merchants using Shopify will be able to build customizations for checkout with Checkout UI extensions and Functions and deliver via custom app or public app on our App Store.
The ecommerce website builder also introduced Shopify Functions built on its ShopifyVM platform, which lets users build custom discounts, shipping and payment functions and sell them in its app store.
“Discounts are the number one pain point articulated by merchants; now, merchants will be able to access apps with better, faster, and more customized discount options for their customers right in their dashboard, no coding required,” said Shopify in an email to TechRadar Pro.
“App developers will now be able to reach millions of merchants with discount apps built on Functions, providing more trusted, secure, and performant discount functionalities to merchants than ever before. Shopify Functions was built with performance and scalability in mind and can scale up to handle global sales events—while still executing code in under 5 milliseconds.”
Other announcements include local inventory on Google, which automatically lets nearby customers know when a product is available in store through Shopify’s Google channel, as well as the launch of Shopify’s new Twitter sales channel and its US-exclusive Tap to Pay on iPhone feature in partnership with Stripe.