Will Shopify’s 2024 releases help SMBs gain ground on Amazon?
Google “Shopify vs. Amazon” and you get over 51 million results. Whether you should sell on Shopify or Amazon (or both) is a debate that has been raging in the SMB community for years.
Working with dozens and dozens of ecommerce brands, I’ve heard both sides of the debate: Shopify is good for preserving margins and communicating brand ideals; Amazon is a revenue machine. Those who end up focusing on Amazon do so because of Amazon’s converting power and huge, loyal audience – but also partly because Shopify simply doesn’t have the user experience functionality to make its websites as attractive as Amazon. But with each wave of releases, Shopify is closing the UX gap (both front-end and back-end) and making its case to earn more attention from retailers.
Earlier this year, Shopify took another big step forward by rolling out more than 100 releases for Winter Editions, which our team quickly dug in and started testing. Most marketers I know don’t have time to process all the releases, so here’s my CliffsNotes-level opinion.
Creative & UX Director at DMi Partners.
AI is front and center
Whether it’s even more functionality in Shopify Magic or separate implementations like Semantic Search (intended to help marketers understand customer intent insights, not just keyword matching), Shopify’s releases share a common AI theme.
The benefits for Shopify-based advertisers are twofold: First, the features give the platform more flexibility and provide small SMBs with shortcuts for advanced merchandising and creative production. Retailers who don’t have graphic artists or photographers on hand, for example, will immediately want to delve into Magic’s image editing capabilities. If you have the resources to do your own human-produced work, I recommend using Magic only to speed up the little things – good artists still churn out better creative work than AI.
Second, given Shopify’s wealth of customer data (which, while it doesn’t touch Amazon’s, is a lot deeper and richer than any retailer’s first-party data pool), it’s a smart move to invest in synthesizing that data effectively enough to help advertisers with targeting. I don’t expect the results to be perfect yet given what we’ve experienced with other AI releases in marketing, but it will be worth getting familiar with the tools now as the algorithms improve.
As with all AI features, the usual caveats apply: test before you deploy, take a critical look at the output, and be sure to refine your methods to give your tools the right input as you learn how they work.
Shopify eases the development burden
Great developers can put together almost any UX and data solutions on Shopify, but that often comes with the complications (read: bugs) of implementing third-party tools. Shopify’s Winter Updates bring several desirable features to the Shopify app itself, reducing the need for developer resources that many SMBs don’t have.
A key example of this is the Combined Listings app, which allows store managers to merchandise product variants such as colors, styles, sizes and more without having to create duplicate product pages or connect third-party apps. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve answered questions from SMBs wanting to figure out solutions for this outside of the Shopify app, so this is a very welcome (and long overdue) update. In an advertising age where product catalog ads are becoming common (and effective), the ability for retailers to create variations on product pages at different levels is important.
If you have developer resources available, make sure they are aware that Shopify has released a feature that allows them to experiment with new theme blocks. These themes, which have new features to play with and handy customizable presets, aren’t ready for release yet, but developers can and should get started with them in preview mode to start planning how to use them when they be officially launched. . Considering how fast marketing is innovating right now, I highly recommend taking every opportunity you have to get up to speed with new features as quickly as possible, so jump in and start playing.
Prioritize testing these releases
The updates to Magic to speed up image editing and the Combined Listings app are two of the biggest releases of the bunch, and Shopify marketers should get familiar with both as soon as possible to make their lives easier. The Combined Listings app is best used in conjunction with a brand’s collection page, where each product gets its own URL, media gallery, and description field.
The other release I’m most excited about is the Subscriptions app. Stores that sell off-the-shelf products don’t need to invest too much time in this, but for brands with larger catalogs that rely on growing customer retention and LTV, subscriptions are a big deal. The simple side of the features is the recurring order/subscription functionality for individual products. On the more complex side, store managers can create customized subscription bundles (up to 30 products) that, among other things, provide much-needed flexible pricing on products that are often sold together. This solves a huge frustration for SMB retailers (and customers) on Shopify, as artificially rigid shipping and blanket order pricing often resulted in multi-product orders being mispriced and causing conversions.
Well-resourced retailers have sometimes been able to put together third-party solutions for this, but subscriptions (which essentially supercharge Shopify’s merchandising functionality) represent a (very) long-awaited native solution that levels the playing field quite a bit. One important note: you must be using Shopify 2.0 and have a compatible payment gateway (e.g. Shopify Payments, Stripe, PayPal) to connect subscriptions. If you’ve been waiting to implement them, subscriptions may be reason enough to take the plunge.
Overall, Shopify’s latest releases solve many lingering problems for SMBs, both in helping create better user experiences and saving back-end development resources. It may not be enough to convince SMBs to get all their products from Amazon, but it is a significant improvement in helping retailers maintain their margins by creating compelling customer experiences on their own platforms.
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