What’s new at Shopify: Year in review

December 18, 2020

The first edition of a monthly series where we help take the guesswork out of which product features to add to your Shopify store and when. In this webinar, we'll demonstrate impactful releases launched by Shopify in 2020 so you can walk away feeling confident about implementing on your own.

Hello, everyone, Thanks for joining us today for the December 20, 2020 edition of what's new at Shopify. My name is Megan. I'm a member of the merchant education team here at Shopify. And I'll be your host today. This month. I am very excited to have the opportunity to highlight a number of releases from 2020. We'll chat through and demonstrate each product and why it's important for your business. We want you to walk away from these sessions keen to apply these features directly to your Shopify store, whichever is most applicable for you and your business.

If you registered for today's events, you'll receive an email with the recording later this afternoon. It will also include the helpful links shared by your support advisors in the live chat today. And don't fret if you misregistration. We'll also share valuable. Next steps and our campus community forum link to follow on the live chat throughout today's session. Before we begin, if you're having problems with any visuals or audio, please reload your page.

There's also a volume corner in the player, so do ensure your volume is set to be on. Live chat is also available throughout today's webinar. If and when any questions, do arise. A Q&A at the end, so please don't hesitate to ask our Shopify support advisors. But this live so that we can get you the answers and resources to help you move forward. Let's unblock anything in your way today. So you could get into your Shopify Admin and apply your learnings as ASAP.

We have many product releases to cover today as we're recapping the year, we'll highlight features on the order fronts within the admin on the product side, marketing payments, checkout point of sale and shipping sides of the business. So let's jump in. We'll begin with some highlights from the Order section. It's hard to think back to may, but this is when you may have noticed visual changes to your order list, this update was released to help you get the right information at your fingertips and get your orders out the door quickly.

This new list page helps you prioritize your fulfillment workflows with relevant information, such as customer details, delivery method and fulfillment and payment statuses. All at a glance. You can also sort and filter your order list to make it easier to manage your business needs. Maybe you need to see your orders that are still pending fulfillment. So to focus your team today on those packages that have been in the longest, or maybe you need to ensure you haven't missed capturing manual payments on any orders.

You have more control over what order information you need displayed to move your business forward. Use this update to your advantage now, if you're not already by showing the order information you need when you need it, search for what you require and then filtered to display it in the most relevant fashion to what you need to accomplish. Order editing was a highly anticipated product release of 2019 so this year, our team builds upon this feature based on what we heard was a big March.

And frustration, the inability to apply discounts to newly added items when editing orders. So now you can. This is a great improvement for your team's efficiency and the back end of shopify, but also from a customer experience perspective to apply navigate to the order, you need to edit, click, edit. And under the new item, you want to discount, click, apply discount to enter the discount type value.

And the reason for the discount review, the updated total to ensure all is correct as the total cost of the order might increase or decrease from what the customer paid at checkout. Use this feature strategically by applying either a fixed or a percentage discount. For example, you can increase your store's average order value and improve customer retention by offering a discounted item, upgrade complimentary products or a free gift.

To note, shipping methods and rates are not recalculated when an order is edited, so be aware of whether you need to charge anything more once you are ready to update, either collect refund or simply notify your customer of the Edit to their order as needed. Keep this workflow in mind when you deal with customer inquiries after an order is placed. Late October brought a few additional changes to your orders page in the atman, you are now able to fulfill, edit, refund or return an order from one central location in your admin.

The product return process is an important part of your customer experience, and by refunding orders and a prompt and professional way, you show your commitment to your customer service. This can help build trust with your buyers and may encourage other orders in the future. From your Shopify Admin order section, click on the Order that you need to refunds click Return items. And so the quantity of items in the order being returned and enter what's required for your business.

And then return shipping section, then refund what's required, whether it's for the total order or specific items found within it. As part of the refund process, you have the option to restock the items and to send a notification email to the customer. If there is no payments or refund, you can simply restock the items from the order. To note, a refund can only be sent to the original payment method.

If a customer no longer has access to that payment method, they need to contact their original bank or agency to claim the funds after the refund is sent. Another note of caution. If a discount code was applied to an order, then you can refund an amount that is more than what the customer paid. You choose the amount your refund carefully as refunds cannot be reversed. The orders page is also where you can view the return status of your orders, leverage filtering to see the data you need when you need it.

Whether you are currently offering returns or not, consider the impact a return policy has on your products and/or services. If you choose to offer returns, clearly communicate the details on your website. I can suggest highlighting this information via link in your Footer if you offer free returns. This is a great promotion to include in a top vendor on site as it can have a positive impact on conversions.

If you're at a point in your business where you need to fulfill packages and larger quantities, you can now select multiple orders from your order list and speed up your fulfillment workflow by printing packing slips in bulk packing slips, how to communicate what is sent to the customer in their package. From the orders, page selects the orders that require packing slips, selects the location from where the orders are being fulfilled, click More actions and print packing slips your packing slips or opens in a PDF file that you can now print or save.

With this approach, packing slips are created for each selected fulfillment and each packing slip includes all of the items being sent in a specific package. Your packing slips are rendered using a language created by Shopify called liquid. You can edit this template using packing slip variables. If you are comfortable with HTML and liquid. Alternatively, Shopify has built a default template to get started with.

The last update to share on the orders front is the ability to share checkout lines from your Shopify mobile app as of late September, you are able to create and share checkout links for a draft order through SMS or any messenger app on your mobile device. This is great. For example, in virtual shopping experiences, say a staff member helps a customer find new clothing or furniture pieces during a virtual consultation.

After the session is complete, your staff member can then send the customer a checkout link to purchase what was picked out. Consider this technique as well. In a scenario where a team member is offering support to customers directly through direct messaging on Facebook Messenger or live chat to create a checkout link from the Shopify app, go to your order section, then draft orders, find the specific order, tap the dot.com button and tap share checkout link.

You are then prompted to choose the social media app to share your link, review and send. Once payment is received, the draft order will create an order on your orders page. Sending checkout lines through channels where your customers already are creates a more personalized shopping experience while making it easier for you to collect payments. Now for some highlights from the album.

The speed of your online store is a very important factor in creating the best customer experience, but did you know it is also an important factor in your search ranking? Search engines like Google use page speed as a ranking factor as to customers and directly, because if your pages load slow, then there's a great chance a customer will leave before making a purchase. And the better the customer experience, the higher your conversion rate.

But how many of you feel overwhelmed by this topic? If you're not familiar with what to look at or what the contributing factors are to a slow site, you may be putting off a very crucial analysis to understand where you stack up. Use the online store page speed report available directly in your admin. This report runs speed tests for your home page and highest traffic collection and product pages and then combines pages.

Google speed score into one ultimate speed score for your store. From your admen, go to online store and theme's, you can view your speed score in the online store speed score section to view your full speed score, click the report. The report contains additional information such as which pages are analyzed and how your score compares to the scores of similar Shopify stores.

You are now empowered to better understand the impact of your store's site speed going forward. Keep in mind that each feature you add to your online store needs resources to function. Adding a new feature can have a noticeable impact on your store speed, and you should weigh the benefits of the feature against its impact. The speed of your store. You may need to make speed trade offs to build a user experience that leads to more sales.

This report will show you how your score has changed over time. Plus, one app store installed it uninstalled to help you understand and troubleshoot the impact of your decisions on your online store speed, reference this information on a more regular cadence to create an improved customer experience. Now switching over to the tax front in early September, we streamlined the experience of managing your tax rates for those merchants selling in the EU and the UK, no longer do you need to know and manage how much vat to charge on sales from the UK and different EU countries in your tax settings.

When you provide the information about where you're registered in the EU or UK, Shopify automatically sets the tax rates that apply in the areas you're registered for. No more need to decide and manually update those rates. Please note, it continues to be your responsibility to consult with local tax authorities or tax professional to verify your charging customers the correct tax rates and to ensure you file and remit your taxes properly.

Collecting sales taxes in the US also got a lot easier in 2020 as we discussed in the earlier scenario for EU and UK based merchants, when you tell Shopify where you're registered for sales taxes in the United states, it will automatically determine the tax to collect on orders. If you're already using Shopify to sell in the United states, then you can update your us sales tax settings to reflect your tax registrations, visit your settings within the admin under taxes in the tax region section.

Besides us click Setup. When you update your tax settings, you're asked to provide a tax registration number. After it's been added, Shopify automatically sets that tax rate that applies in the areas you've registered for. The same caveat applies here as well. It is your responsibility to consult with local tax authorities or tax professional to verify your charging customers the correct tax rates and to ensure you file and remit your taxes correctly.

If you are a merchant selling in the UK or the us, visit your tax settings. Now to see how you can simplify this part of your business with Shopify. Now for some product highlights. To help reduce the impact of this year's events on your store, gift cards are temporarily available to sell on all Shopify subscription plans.

You can sell a gift card and your online store just like any other product, share links to gift card products and your social media channels, or issue them to a customer for free as a promotion, reward or incentive. This can be a great addition to your product catalog and to capitalize on those customers that want to support your business or gift it to others to begin, you need to activate the gift card feature, navigate to your admin, then go to Products and gift cards, click Start selling gift cards in my store.

Your first gift card is created immediately with its status set as draft by default within the gift card products section, you can create a gift card product with a specific title, description images denominations through which sales channels you'd like to sell, as well as how you'd like to organize the product on the front end up your store. Don't forget to review your search engine listing. Include keywords here that will help you rank higher and search.

To learn more on seo, search for the topic on Shopify compass. Going forward, you can view, organize and edit your issued and purchase gift cards from the gift cards page and your Shopify admin, you have the option to export this data to see file as needed to note, gift card sales can be found in its own report and your analytics section.

When you fulfill an order with a gift card, the customer receives an email containing a unique gift card code that is used at checkout to redeem its denoted value. Customers can redeem their gift cards at any of your sales channels that use shop office checkout, such as the online store, buy button, Facebook shop messenger and shop post channels activate. Now, if you are not yet selling gift cards on your online store, consider promoting gift cards to your community every so often to remind customers the simple product offering is available.

An additional feature launch related to gift cards this year is the ability to create or edit a customer profile from the gift card issue page. This helps you save time by creating customers and gift cards in the same place. For example, if a customer accidentally provides the wrong email address, you can easily edit the customer's address and resend the gift card. Whenever this may be the case for you from your admin, go to Products and gift cards.

Click on the code for the issued gift card based on the last four characters of the code on the issued gift card page under customer click, edit and enter the correct information. At this point, you can also select whether to send the gift card. Keep your customers happy, plus your customer support team productive and equipped with this new gift card workflow. To make product data discovery easier and your Shopify Admin product performance and sites on your product pages was launched, there is nothing to implement here for you to get started.

We suggest leveraging this powerful information as it populates to make data driven decisions for your business. You can now understand how an individual product has been selling over time, what type of customers are buying it and where the traffic is coming from. Directly from a product detail page. This information is found when clicking on a specific product and navigating to the Insights section. This data and reporting can be used to help inform inventory decisions.

Is the product selling frequently? How long will your inventory last or marketing campaigns as well? Which channels are bringing in more traffic versus others? Now for highlights from the marketing side. Eligible stores can sell their products for free on Google in late April.

Google announced it was offering eligible merchants free product listings across Google with products linked to a Google Merchant Center using shop office Google channel. This rollout was initially only for us based merchants, though luckily, this has since rolled out to over 45 countries across Europe, Asia, South America, as well as to Canadian and New Zealand merchants. Customers who search on Google Shopping tab have a high purchase intent, so your product listings in those search results can convert even better than regular search engine results.

If you have not yet set up the Google channel, start here via the sales channel section of your admin and then set up the app to sink your products with Google Merchant center, during this process, you'll be asked to select or create a Merchant Center account, depending on where you're at with your business. For those of you who have their Google Merchant Center already set up for your products to be eligible to show in free listings across Google, your store needs to sell in a supported currency or region.

The method you used to create your Google Merchant account also determines whether your product feed is automatically opted in to show on the services across Google program. Learn more about viewing the status of your product. Feed from Google Merchant Center. Help if you need to opt in to the services across Google program, you can do so from Google Merchant Center. This will take time to set up, but will be beneficial to your business in the short and long term.

As Google is a powerful marketing tool used to reach a large audience. A free offering is a great way to dip your toes into the world of Google advertising. Now for some highlights from Shopify payments. There was exciting news throughout the year for a European merchants, Shopify payments became available in Austria, Belgium and Sweden, allowing the ability to accept credit cards and local payment methods, leverage our payout and chargeback management and selling in multiple currencies and accelerated checkouts such as Apple Pay and pay.

Shopify payments in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Now also include payment methods, ideal and band contact with more local payment methods. Through Shopify payments, you can maximize conversions by offering customers, their preferred payment option during checkout. Even more, we dynamically positioned relevant local payment options, most likely to improve conversion in these countries.

For example, buyers from the Netherlands will see ideal at the top of their payment options, rather than having to look for it further down the checkout page. Eligible merchants can take advantage of these payment methods by enabling after navigating to your Shopify Payment Settings under your admin settings page. Next up, our highlights from check-out.

In early November, we introduced a new collection of post purchase upsell apps for shopify, check out a post purchase offer is a promise that appears to a customer at checkout after the completed payment, but before the order confirmation page. The prompt invites the customer to add additional products to an order post purchase up cells can boost your store's average order value by presenting one click offers to customers in the Shopify checkout after payment is confirmed without interrupting the customer experience as seen in the example here, you need to use a third party app that supports post purchase offers to enable the offers in your online store.

View the post purchase offer apps collection in the Shopify app store to get started. If you need help with any of these third party apps after installing them, you will need to contact the app developers directly versus Shopify. Support the app developers. Contact information is down on their app page in the Shopify app store. It's important to weigh the pros and cons of having a post purchase offer on your store, you should assess the impact after enabling this.

Are you seeing a larger average order value, more or less abandoned carts navigate to your analytics dashboard and review the trend in your average order value data and conversion funnel? Customers can react differently to promotions. And you want to ensure when adding a new app on your store that it brings value to the experience and your bottom line. At the same time, we introduced a new collection of subscription apps for Shopify out available in the Shopify app store.

These are the first apps built directly for Shopify checkout, which means they offer a smooth shopping experience for your customers and a better management experience for you. Offering subscriptions lets you sell products on a recurring basis, adding predictable recurring revenue to your existing business. Depending on the subscription options you offer, customers choose to pay an agreed upon price for your product and a scheduled frequency.

For example, you can offer subscriptions on a monthly, weekly or daily basis to use subscriptions with apps built by Shopify. You must be using Shopify payments as your primary payment gateway. This set up will allow for you to manage your subscriptions directly within the Shopify Admin. When a customer purchases a subscription from you, the information about the product and the frequency of the subscription that becomes visible in your admin to set up subscriptions, you need to complete the set up in the app that you install.

Customer payment information will then be stored securely by Shopify after you set up your subscription app of choice. Customers can begin making scheduled purchases and repeat frequency. Subscription information will become available to you in the following areas of your Shopify Admin customer list, customer profiles, product page discounts and the order list.

This recurring sales model subscriptions works for a number of businesses, but not all. Consider adding this option if customers currently purchase your products on a regular basis, if you currently offer subscriptions. This should be an improved workflow experience for you and your team. And it may tipping was enabled for your online checkout, with this feature enabled, customers can choose the option to tip based on a percentage of their total order or a custom amount while on the payment page as they are checking out previously only available through shopper posts.

Tipping options for online orders makes it easy for customers to show their support for stores or causes they love before you set up tipping options. Consider that tipping options for your online store checkout must be set up using your Shopify admin, even if you have tipping options previously set up for Shopify posts. You can change the labels and description on your checkout to customize the online shipping experience to suit your goals, such as supporting your business financially or collecting donations for charity.

This is done in the themes section of your Shopify Admin and the current theme section. Click actions and edit languages from here, click, checkout and system. And then scroll to the field that you want to change. We have a table in our health center that lists fields that you can change to suit your goals. Add this option to check out for your customers as a service based merchant social enterprise or in support of a social cause.

Now for some post highlights. We had a number of exciting releases on the pops or point of sale front. This year, including the release of the all new Shopify. This was followed by additional feature releases, including manager approvals for more control over permissions and product recommendations, to leverage online insights to drive consistency, confidence and conversion in your offline selling.

You can catch up on everything via our dedicated webinar available. Now our support advisors will drop the link into the chat for those interested in learning more. And lastly, we have a shipping highlights, hands on. We released offset by Shopify and the Shopify app store on Earth day, April '20 second for all Shopify stores.

The app, offset by shopify, calculates the cost to neutralize your shipping emissions from the shipments that you deliver that contribute to climate change every month. Offset calculates the total emissions generated by ships orders, and your monthly cost to offset the emissions. Did you know the average cost per shipment is 0.005 cents in US dollars are just half a. The cost to offset your emissions is charged through your monthly Shopify invoice, and the funds are used to purchase carbon credits, which offset your emissions through deforestation protection projects.

Find the app and the Shopify app store and click to add to your store. When you first install offset, you'll find a monthly estimate of your offset costs based on the latest data from your store and Shopify averages on your Shopify invoice, you are charged the cost to offset emissions from any order that is considered delivered within the past 30 days. So what does that mean?

If there is tracking information available, then an order is considered delivered when the tracking information says it's delivered. Now, if there is no tracking information available, then an order is considered to be delivered 20 days after the order was placed. If an item is restocked or an order is canceled within those 20 days, then you are not charged for offsetting emissions from the shipment of those products.

If you have shot pay enabled on your store, then any order using that payment method does not generate a charge through offset shot pay offsets all delivery emissions by default. And the offset cost is covered by Shopify. To note, if the cost to offset your emissions for the past 30 days is less than 1 centimeter in us dollars, then the charge is round it up to 1 centimeter US dollars.

If you and your business and in turn your customers want to do what they can to fight against climate change, download the offset app. Now it will only take a few minutes to pay a nominal charge on a monthly basis to make a meaningful impact. Now, let's just take a breath and let that all sink in today was a very full session on a wide variety of product features we launched throughout 2020.

If you have any outstanding questions we weren't able to address today, please start by visiting our Help Center. This is where you can learn more about all of these features and their terms of use. You can search in the health center, just like you can within Google for easy to follow step by step instructions on how to apply these features to your Shopify store. If you need store specific help or weren't able to find your answer in the help center, our support team is always available.

24 seven. You can find them via the link above. And one last tip leverage one another's knowledge and experiences. Join the conversation after today's webinar on the compass board in the Shopify community. Don't hesitate to bring your questions here as well. Start your own thread or join the one specific to today's events tocsin.