At Shopify’s annual partner and developer conference, Shopify Unite 2021, the Canadian e-Commerce company’s “biggest set of infrastructure investments” was on full display.
The themes explored during the conference included tooling, infrastructure, and technologies that enable the future of commerce. It also announced platform enhancements that provide merchants with more control over the performance and look of their online storefronts.
The New Payments Platform
One of their biggest announcements was the launch of their new Payments Platform. By using the Payments Platform, third-party payment gateways can be integrated into Shopify Checkout, allowing merchants to add them as payment options for their customers to use. Payment gateways can be set up as Shopify apps.
This new platform is set to take the place of Shopify’s current legacy integration points.
A company spokesperson revealed:
“This opens Shopify to a broader ecosystem of gateways that offer niche functionality and brings new business value to merchants by helping them sell more, in more places”.
The Payments Platform has been optimized to function with Shopify’s new checkout technology stack and offers developers only one path to integrate with Shopify.
All payment partners can provide merchants with enhanced experiences by leveraging app extensions, APIs, and “built-in merchant experiences” for a more personalized onboarding flow.
Each payment gateway will be built directly on the payments platform. This means that payment partners will have access to new checkout and payments features as they continue to innovate.
Platform Expands Possibilities
Shopify has also been hard at work, updating its payments process. Its payments and checkout platform, Shopify Checkout, can now process tens of thousands of transactions per minute.
With their Online Store 2.0, merchants are able to add both new design and functional capabilities. One example is a cart tool that estimates the cost of products, after taxes and discounts. This gives more control over their brands.
Opportunities abound for merchants to improve their online storefronts to not only draw in more customers but also boost their bottom line. Here are just some of the benefits of Shopify’s latest enhancements:
- Improving the payment process increases sales
Making Shopify Checkout faster significantly reduces customer friction and allows merchants to process more sales in a shorter amount of time. Also, by allowing payment providers to create payment gateways as Shopify apps, it enables sellers to choose the best payment solutions that fit their business needs.
- Customizable Features Makes Shopify More Appealing To Sellers
The new updates enable merchants to market and sell their products freely on Shopify.
- A Reduction In Revenue Share Rate For Developers Could Encourage Innovation
By keeping a greater portion of their revenue, developers may be encouraged to come up with new integrations and solutions that will continue to enhance Shopify’s platform and attain new clients.
Introducing Checkout Extensions
In order to enable developers to custom-build checkout experiences, Shopify has introduced checkout extensions, APIs, a set of extension points, and UI components, all necessary to build apps for checkout.
These tools allow developers to build more flexible solutions for checkout, without the threat of hacking.
With checkout extensions, developers will have access to:
- Extension APIs: These are a series of APIs that will allow developers to build robust checkout customizations into apps. Although still in the development status, these APIs allow access orders to change checkout line items, discounts, meta fields, customer information, cart attributes, and the buyer journey.
- New Extension Points: These new extension points will enable developers to build experiences for various parts of checkout.
- A Component Library: The app will utilize this component library to develop custom experiences and insert them at various extension points.
- New APIs: These APIs allow developers to have full control over certain components, like the Branding API, which allows the changing of the colors, typography, and spacing.
Zero Percent Revenue Share
Shopify is serious about equipping and supporting developers with the tools needed to create the best solutions for Shopify merchants.
The company announced a zero percent revenue share on the first million dollars that a developer makes annually on the Shopify App Store. Essentially, if they make less than $1 million USD per year in the Shopify App Store, developers can register to no longer pay revenue share. Every year, those numbers are reset.
This means more money in the developer’s pocket, to invest in their business, grow their resources, and continue to build more solutions for Shopify merchants.
Better Commerce, More Entrepreneurship
One thing is for certain, Shopify wants to support its entrepreneurs. By investing heavily in tools for developers and customization for merchants, they want to enhance the e-Commerce experience now and in the future.