Sometimes it's hard to keep track of all the Shopify updates and changes, especially this October when all the timelines were full of the Shopify × OpenAI partnership (i.e., instant checkout) or the Shopify × Lovable collaboration (i.e., vibe-coding your store).
Besides these headlines, there were 34 other updates, out of which I picked 5 that I found most useful as a regular Shopify merchant.
1. Variant limit increased from 100 to 2048 variants
This was one that was kind of expected, as it was already announced on Shopify Winter Editions 2024. One of Shopify's weaknesses when comparing it to other platforms was the low variant limit – only 100 variants. It sounds like a lot, but if your product has three variant options and each variant option has five variants, you would be out of luck because that was over the limit (125 vs. 100).
But from now on, every Shopify store has access to the new 2048 variant limit, which gives enough space even to complex products.
2. New unlisted product status
The second one may sound like a small change, but I am sure many merchants will take advantage of it. There is a new product status called "Unlisted", so you can choose from one of the three statuses now:
- Active: The product is visible on the storefront and purchasable by customers (if in stock).
- Draft: The product is not visible anywhere, and neither accessible through the URL.
- Unlisted: The product is not visible on the storefront and store search, but accessible through the URL.
Why am I so excited about the unlisted status? I see so many use cases when this will be a game changer:
- Free gift products that cost $0, and you don't want customers to add them to the cart manually (we plan to implement this logic in our Gift Box app).
- Special deals that you don't want to be visible or findable on your storefront.
- Out-of-stock products that you don't want to be visible on the storefront, but you still need the URL active to prevent a 404 error.
3. Local payments as part of the Shopify Payments gateway
I am really happy to see Shopify expanding in Europe and improving the level of the platform localization/internationalization. One of the key aspects is payments (i.e., how customers can pay in the checkout).
If you are doing business in the Nordics/Germany, you need Klarna; if you are in Austria, you need EPS; you can exist in the Netherlands without iDEAL; for Poland, you must have BLIK and Przelewy24, etc.
The problem was that to add some of these to your Shopify checkout, you needed to create an account with another payment gateway like Mollie, and it could get very complex with payouts.
But now you can easily add any of these local payments as part of the Shopify Payment integration just by switching the toggle! For now, this is available only to merchants in some countries like France, Germany, Poland, the Nordics, Benelux, etc., but I hope Shopify will be rolling out local payments to more countries soon.
4. Editing compare-at prices in the Shopify Markets catalog
This one used to be an absolute pain. If you wanted to edit the compare-at price for any market besides the main one, you had to export and import a CSV file, which was very complicated and took a lot of effort to make it right. Remember the infamous Reebok pricing error? I wouldn't be surprised if the cause of the error was this exact CSV file.
Anyway, now you can easily update and edit all your compare-at prices for all markets without leaving your store admin.
5. Bot filtering in session-based reports (no more Council Bluffs traffic)
Having bot traffic from Iowa, Council Bluffs, skewing your conversion reports can be extremely frustrating and lead to bad decisions. So Shopify finally added a simple way to filter it out.
You can now add a filter called "Human or bot session" to your session-based reports and filter out any bot traffic. The only drawback is that you need to do it manually in all your reports. My recommendation and preference would be to filter it out automatically in all reports, just like GA4 does.
That's all for October, and I hope you find these updates as useful as I do. If you want to stay on top of the changes and updates in the Shopify ecosystem, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn or on our YouTube channel.
