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Shopify 2024 Releases: Closing Gap with Amazon for SMBs
Last modified: May 6, 2024
The debate about selling on Shopify or Amazon has been ongoing among SMBs. While Shopify is known for preserving margins and showcasing branding, Amazon has a powerful conversion rate and a massive, loyal audience.
Shopify continues to enhance its platform, making a compelling case for SMBs to consider it as an alternative to Amazon for their eCommerce needs.With its latest releases, they aim to close the UX gap and win more attention from retailers.
AI Powering Shopify's Enhancements
Shopify’s Winter Editions releases heavily feature AI capabilities, such as Shopify Magic and Semantic Search. These AI-powered tools aim to provide SMBs with advanced merchandising and creative production capabilities, as well as better customer insights for targeting.
While AI output still requires critical evaluation and refinement, these features offer resource-strapped SMBs valuable shortcuts and opportunities to leverage Shopify’s rich customer data.
Shopify Lightens the Development Load
Great developers can create custom UX solutions on Shopify, but it often involves third-party tools and potential bugs. Shopify’s Winter Updates bring several desirable functions into the app itself, reducing the need for developer resources.
Several new Shopify apps, like Combined Listings and Subscriptions, bring desired functionalities natively into the platform, reducing the need for third-party tools and developer resources that many SMBs lack.
Combined Listings simplifies product variant merchandising, while Subscriptions enables flexible recurring orders and bundling, solving long-standing pricing and conversion challenges for SMB retailers.
Prioritizing Experimentation and Testing
Shopify marketers should prioritize testing Shopify’s latest releases, especially Magic’s image editing capabilities, Combined Listings for product catalog ads, and Subscriptions for retention and LTV growth. These releases solve lingering headaches for SMBs, help create better user experiences, and save back-end development resources.
The Subscriptions app, in particular, offers recurring order functionality and customizable subscribable bundles, providing flexible pricing and improving customer retention.
Shopify’s theme updates also offer new customization options, and developers can start experimenting with the preview mode to plan future implementations.
Conclusion: Shopify’s 2024 Releases: Closing Gap with Amazon for SMBs
Shopify’s latest releases address many concerns for SMBs, providing better user experiences and saving valuable development resources. While it might not be enough to convince SMBs to abandon Amazon completely, these improvements can help retailers maintain margins and create attractive customer experiences on their owned platforms.
As Shopify continues to enhance its platform, SMBs now have a more viable alternative to Amazon for their eCommerce needs.
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