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On March 21st, we kicked off Unite, our first ever Partner and Developer conference, at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The two-day event brought together hundreds of Shopify Partners and Developers from around the world—including New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and India—to discuss the future of Shopify, commerce, and technology.

Here’s a roundup of all the big news, and what it all means for you as a merchant.

Sell wherever your customers are. That’s long been the first rule of survival for any business.

And for the past decade that meant establishing a presence on social networks—Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter—and building excellent mobile experiences.

But over the last two years, messaging apps have started to outpace social networks when it comes to where we spend our time.

The era of conversational commerce is upon us and it's transforming messaging apps into so much more.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to start selling on WordPress, the wait is over. Now, it’s easier than ever to add ecommerce to your WordPress site, and give it all the features and security that come with Shopify.

Forget about instant messages, post-it notes, and email threads a mile long.

With Timeline, we’re introducing a better way for you and your team to communicate, collaborate, and solve problems. This new feature gives you the ability to post comments and notes right in Shopify, bringing all your team communication together in one place while supplying context in a way email and chat apps never could.

Traditionally, most ecommerce websites use SSL encryption technology to protect a shopper’s personal information during the checkout process. While this checkout process is secure, all other traffic to the ecommerce website uses the old, insecure HTTP protocol. This has been the common practice for about twenty years.

It’s time for an upgrade.

Say goodbye to long lineups at the post office!

Starting today, you can buy and print USPS shipping labels directly through Shopify which will save you both time and money.

When you buy your shipping labels through Shopify you’ll receive preferred shipping rates that we've negotiated on behalf of all Shopify merchants. For example, the cost to ship a 5lb package from New York City to Chicago is $16.20 if you walk into a USPS location today. When you use Shopify to buy and print that label, you would pay just $11.26 on our Basic plan, $10.53 on Pro, and $9.80 on the Unlimited plan (a 40% savings).

Starting today, Amazon Webstore owners can seamlessly migrate their online store to Shopify.

As Amazon’s preferred migration partner, we've worked closely with the Webstore team to make moving to Shopify simple. In a few steps, merchants can transfer their customer and product data - with zero downtime or service interruptions - and begin taking advantage of an extended 30-day free trial.

Shopify merchants can now create orders and accept credit card payments through the Shopify Admin, making it easier to sell wholesale, take orders over the phone, and more.

Order creation was designed for businesses that need the flexibility to create custom orders. This new tool makes it easy to build orders in Shopify using existing products, new line items, one-time discounts, and customizable shipping rates.

Pinterest and Shopify have partnered to make it easy for businesses to sell their products on Pinterest using Buyable Pins. This new type of Pin — announced earlier today — includes a “Buy it” button that lets consumers checkout and pay for products they discover on Pinterest using Apple Pay or their credit card.  

At Shopify, our goal has always been to make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy from your online store. For years we’ve provided our merchants with a simple and secure online checkout that, to date, has processed over $5 billion in sales for hundreds of thousands of individual businesses.

But the web is constantly changing. So today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Responsive Checkout, a brand new ecommerce checkout experience for online stores.

Responsive Checkout is the result of mobile-first thinking and is designed to help you capture more sales – allowing you to spend more time running your business and less time chasing abandoned carts.

It’s a product born out of thousands of hours of usability research and millions of dollars in real transactions carried out by stores using our early release version.

Preview Responsive Checkout on your store

or check it out on the Shopify Crafted store.

Last week represented the first time in history that more people used mobile phones and tablets to visit online stores than using computers. Looking at data from over 100,000 ecommerce stores that use the Shopify platform, we saw 50.3% of traffic coming from mobile (40.3% from mobile phones, 10% from tablets) and just 49.7% from computers.

We have been watching and talking about the mobile commerce trend for years, but now there’s no disputing it: mobile commerce is now the default way that people shop online.