What you need to know about Shopify’s Online Store 2.0

At this year’s Shopify Unite, they announced one of their biggest updates in company history: Online Store 2.0. This presents new opportunities and makes new themes more flexible than ever before.

These updates are set to roll out soon so it’s important to know what changes are happening to Shopify Plus and how they can benefit you.

What you need to know about Shopify’s Online Store 2.0

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Web Storefront Solution

Hydrogen is one of Shopify Unite’s most exciting announcements! It is Shopify’s solution to taking some of the load out of building a functional web storefront.

The Introduction of Hydrogen and Oxygen

Hydrogen is a developer toolkit featuring scaffolding to help developers get stores up and running in just a few clicks! You can also build your site’s foundation with a set of React components. This is an incredible addition to Shopify Plus as it allows you to focus on styling the visual elements of your site, and developers now have a quick and easy way to build custom storefronts.

Oxygen hosts Hydrogen storefronts directly on Shopify for an efficient, dynamic, and global eCommerce solution.

Updated Theme Architecture

Online Store 2.0 aims to create new opportunities for developers to build themes and integrations that can be easily customised to suit merchants and their business needs.

Sections on Every Page

Previously, developers were somewhat limited as the flexibility of sections was only available to the home page. Now, with Online Store 2.0, you can add sections to any page.

You have the opportunity to create template files that map to different:

  • Product pages
  • Collection pages
  • Custom pages
  • Blog posts
  • and more!

Flexible Store Content

To create a more flexible and customisable user experience, Shopify has made several improvements to its store content.

Improvements to Meta Fields

This will make you and your developers happy–no more hardcoding into themes or relying on APIs!

What isn’t available in the core store editor can now be added via meta fields. Shopify has now given meta fields:

  • A more flexible type system which will become more tailored to commerce data over time.
  • A standardised system that will make working on custom themes easier.
  • Presentation hints, where Storefront API and Liquid users can render merchant data with far less custom code.

Payment Gateway Integration

Shopify Checkout has been updated to ensure it can keep up with high-quantity sales and continue to be one of the best eCommerce solutions. Shopify Unite mentions all merchants will soon have access to checkout extensions, including extension APIs, new extension points, a component library and new APIs to control visual elements of your checkout.

As of June 29, 2021, developers can sign up for beta access to Shopify’s first post-purchase checkout extension. This will allow merchants to upsell products or offer future discounts prior to buyers exiting your store.

New Developer Tools

To help support developers with the Store 2.0 changes, Shopify Unite announced a rollout of new developer tools. These tools create swift integration as well as aid in the development, testing, and deployment of your themes.

Theme Check

Theme check is a language server for Liquid and JSON, scanning themes for errors and highlighting best practices for Shopify and Liquid. You can integrate this tool with text editors, including Visual Studio Code, which will identify errors in your theme code, such as Liquid syntax errors, missing templates, performance issues, and a whole lot more!

GitHub Integration

Shopify is set to introduce a new integration with GitHub to ease the tracking and management of theme development. You will be able to connect your GitHub account to an online store. This will allow you to:

  • Push and pull changes to a GitHub repo
  • Have that GitHub repo in a constant in-sync with the current state of selected themes
  • Have developers review and merge changes to GitHub before populating to a live theme.

This years’ Shopify Unite announcements are some of the biggest to date, putting optimisation and ease of customisation at the forefront of Online Store 2.0. Our developers are keen to dive in and discover how these updates can improve Stead Lane’s best practices and client builds.

Wanting a Shopify Plus Website Build?

Our team of experienced developers have upgraded, redesigned, and built websites that suit client needs and goals. As the first Shopify Plus Partner in Queensland, we are also one of the most trusted agencies in Shopify Plus builds. Contact us today to find out more!

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Covid-19 is having a devastating effect on small, medium and large businesses. Not only is the situation tragic for individuals but causing immense pressure across many business sectors as we all navigate through this. Whilst none of us can control the macro environment, we can review and implement various tactical initiatives during this time. To help companies do this, we’ve compiled the data for our diverse portfolio to provide insights that will hopefully be helpful to eCommerce businesses and those who work with eCommerce brands.