Everything We Announced at Unite 2017 (And What It Means For Merchants)

by Braveen Kumar
Shopify Unite 2017

On April 20, a thousand Shopify Partners from around the world gathered together in San Francisco for our 2nd annual Unite conference: a two-day event to discuss all things Shopify, commerce, and technology.

Unite is about connecting with our partner and developer communities who build the powerful apps, beautiful ecommerce themes, and stores for our merchants.

The conference opened with keynote presentations from Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein, CEO Tobi Lütke, and Director of UX Lynsey Thornton who presented our partners with a challenge:

Help Shopify find new and innovative ways to make commerce better and easier for everyone.

With that in mind, here are all the announcements we made at Unite this year, and what they mean for you as a merchant.

Making it easier to sell anywhere

Soon partners will be able to build sales channels of their own, meaning more options for you. With additional improvements to the mobile shopping experience, you will soon have even more options for where to sell and optimize the ways your customers experience your brand. 

Highlights:

  • More channel integrations: Expose your products to massive new audiences like Wish, Kik and soon, Buzzfeed! Learn more about Sales Channels here.
  • New Chip & Swipe Reader: There's never been a better time to sell in person, the sleek new card reader lets you accept credit cards securely from anywhere you do business. Get yours here (available to U.S merchants).
  • Introducing Shopify Pay: We’re bringing mobile checkout from 16 fields down to 2 with Shopify Pay. It will be made available to every store using Shopify Payments, at no additional cost. Learn more about Shopify Pay here.
  • Enabling in-game purchases: In-game transactions are already popular in the world of gaming. But the Unity Buy SDK will make physical product purchases possible in-game too. To see this in action, watch the Alto’s Adventure demo in the video above.

Improving discounts

We also announced some new ways to make discounts easier to manage.

Highlights:

  • Improved discounts: In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create and manage discounts more easily, get a new discounts report as well as the ability to combine conditions and edit discount codes.

Simplifying your marketing insights

Unite is proof that Shopify’s app ecosystem is an essential part of what makes Shopify great. With the new developer tools, we can enable our partners to develop even more useful apps that integrate more directly with Shopify.

With these tools, our partners can now build amazing apps and experiences that can help you surface useful marketing data and get more insight into how your Shopify apps are contributing to your business.

Highlights:

  • Marketing made simple: Marketing is a main concern for many merchants, and we see data as a key way to help them optimize and improve their marketing efforts. Merchants benefit from having more insight into their marketing efforts, and the Marketing Events API will help them know exactly what's working and what’s not without having to wade through data.
  • Apps in Shopify Mobile: This summer, merchants will be able to interact with and use apps on Shopify Mobile, bringing the power of third party apps into the palm of your hand.
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