At Shopify Unite 2021, the largest set of platform investments to date were announced, giving developers and merchants even more potential to create unique experiences that will define the future of commerce on the internet.
Shopify Unite 2021 announcments
- Online Store 2.0: The biggest upgrade to Shopify’s Liquid platform ever. It features greater levels of flexibility and customization so merchants can better showcase their brands, create unique online experiences, and integrate apps—all without touching code.
- Custom Storefronts: Shopify have made major global infrastructure investments to get online stores and their GraphQL Storefront API within 50 milliseconds of every buyer on Earth. This includes expanding hosting regions to every continent, with Shopify commerce logic running in 100+ server locations that will directly serve API requests for Custom Storefronts for faster response times.
- Metafields and Custom Content: With support for additional Metafields, merchants can now add their own attributes to models like products and product variants, with support for other models like customers and orders coming later this year. Custom Content is also coming soon and will be built on top of the new Metafields infrastructure serving as Shopify’s Content Management platform. It will allow merchants to store content of any format within Shopify.
- Shopify Checkout: Shopify Checkout will be even faster, giving any shop the capacity to handle tens of thousands of purchases per minute.
- Checkout Extensions: Allow developers to securely build apps into Shopify Checkout.
- Payments Platform: A way to integrate third-party payment gateways into Shopify Checkout, unlocking new sales growth opportunities for merchants.
- Developer-Entrepreneurs: Developers who build for the Shopify App Store will now pay 0% revenue share for the first $1M they earn annually on the platform starting on August 1. That’s down from 20%. The $1M benchmark resets annually. The same 0% revenue share model will also be available to Theme Store developers.
“The internet is the world’s largest city, and Shopify is building its commerce infrastructure. Especially over the past year, we saw independent businesses succeed by showing up creatively and uniquely in this city. The future of commerce on the internet relies on creative expression at every touchpoint. Together with developers, we are building the infrastructure to make this possible.”
– Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify
