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Shopify Unite 2022: B2B, Checkout & Hydrogen

· 7 minutes reading time

Portrait of Mark Chang, shoplab founder and CTO

Mark Chang

Founder & CTO

Summer of '22 is no exception when it comes to showcasing a number of new features Shopify has been working on. The event is part of Shopify Editions, a collection of product updates for all Shopify products. We too are excited about the announced changes and would like to share our thoughts on the highlights of the event with you.

Shopify Audiences

Two overlapping circles holding dollar signs, surrounded by rays - the Shopify Audiences key visual

Image © Shopify

Customer acquisition and targeting have always been known issues from a brand perspective. Shopify wants to change that with its new feature called Shopify Audiences. With the powerful machine learning tool, you now decide to create a network of shared audiences across different websites. Basically, this means shops can now share audiences to target the perfect customers for your brand and reduce the cost of conversions.

Facebook and Instagram ads are currently supported, but more platforms are planned to be included in the near future. Even though this feature is only available for Shopify plus, it could be of great help in finding targeted audiences and better scaling stores.

More information : Shopify Audiences

Shop cash

Shoppers using the Shop app rejoice because this year Shopify plans to give away millions of dollars in Shop Cash rewards. This is also a great opportunity to attract new customers who are already using the app by creating offers and promoting your brand on your platform.

This feature is still in its early stages and you can apply on the official Shopify website.

More information : Shop Cash Boosts on Shopify

Finding customers

The above features are accompanied by a variety of apps aimed squarely at improving targeting. These include Twitter Shopping, which now lets you feature products right on your Twitter profile, and Dovetale, your one-of-a-kind affiliate marketing manager. With it you can send gifts and samples, build new relationships and track your sales.

Sources:

Dovetale in the Shopify App Store

(The Twitter Shopping app is no longer available in the Shopify App Store.)

B2B on Shopify

Say goodbye to complicated spreadsheets and countless hours creating the perfect spreadsheet for your B2B business.

Shopify now integrates everything directly into the admin interface without the need for a third party. Mapping that into your theme and your processes is part of our Shopify development work. You can now wholesale and sell direct from a single shop, set custom prices for wholesale buyers, and use the new interface to easily manage your connections. The best part is that it can even be extended with specific apps, leaving room for improvement as developers come up with new ideas.

More information : B2B on Shopify

Tap to pay on iPhone (US Only)

“Tap to Pay on iPhone is a new payment feature that lets you use contactless credit and debit cards, as well as digital wallets like Apple Pay, without any additional hardware. Powered by Shopify Payments, you can use your iPhone and accept payments anywhere your customers are."

This is an improvement on the Shopify POS and makes it easier for stores to leverage physical retail. Whether it's an event, market or festival, shops can now open a temporary retail location and take advantage of this payment method.

More information : Shopify POS

Shopify Markets

Shopify Markets key visual: product cards with German, US and Japanese flags priced in euros, dollars and yen

Image © Shopify

Shopify Markets is a new global conversion hub released by Shopify. With insights from nearly a billion orders, this platform estimates business growth of around 40%. If you want to boost your international business, this is the right place to find new ways to scale and connect with new customers.

More information: Shopify Markets

New ways to convert buyers

Last but not least, the Shopify checkout has been enhanced. That means you can now use apps to change the checkout process and add branding, loyalty programs, featured products, and more. This feature is exclusive to Shopify Plus and promises full security and speed.

Another topic of conversation is the new and flexibly integrated Buy It Now payment feature for Shop Pay, which now benefits from full fraud protection for US customers.

Finally, you can now combine discounts for the same order, making it easier to convert customers and increase your sales. Scheduled for release in a few weeks, this feature allows you to get creative and find the perfect combination of products for your customers.

Purchase Options

It all comes down to choosing the right app for your store, because Shopify has now released a number of apps that support pre-orders, subscriptions, and try-before-buy. Variety is important, and preparing for a product release can make a significant difference to your customers.

More information : purchase option apps in the Shopify App Store

Hydrogen & Oxygen

The Shopify Hydrogen logo: the Hydrogen mark in black with a blue-to-violet gradient above the HYDROGEN wordmark

This is good news for customers and developers, because development just got easier. With a React-based framework developed by Shopify, businesses now have the right tools to offer headless ecommerce with pre-existing components, libraries, APIs, and quick deployment options, all hosted on the Shopify platform. What such a setup looks like in practice is covered under headless commerce.

If you want to put these changes to work in your store, your team for that sits at a Shopify agency in Munich.

This update comes along with a bunch of changes to the meta fields that are now more diverse, a pack of 8 new free themes and 10 premium themes and tokengated commerce, for every NFT enthusiast who loves the World Wide Web and eCommerce improve and contribute to well-being.

ShopifyQL Notebooks and Customer Engagement Tools

This section is dedicated to all data scientists who are looking for new ways to analyze business numbers. With a new query language designed for trading, you can now access all data and generate useful statistics from a single interface. You can use existing templates or create your own. Unfortunately, the feature is also tied to Shopify Plus, but used correctly, it can give you a powerful advantage over the competition and help you understand the core principles of shop management.

Accompanying the data collected, Shopify helps with customer engagement tools: email, chat, marketing automations, and segmentation, which allows you to “grow your customer list and capture key customer data with the ability to place forms on any page.” .

More information: ShopifyQL Notebooks and Customer Engagement Tools

We believe the world of commerce is evolving and Shopify wants to be a pillar in this ever-growing world. The featured features are part of an elaborate chain of changes aimed at improving the performance of everyone in this industry.

Some of the features have yet to be unveiled, so here is a list of useful links to the new features:

Finding customers

  • Shopify audiences (Shopify plus): published
  • Shop cash: early access [ register now ]
  • Twitter Shopping (app): no longer available
  • Dovetale (app): [ get the app ]
  • Linkpop: released [ learn more ]
  • Marketplace kit: released [ learn more ]

Convert shoppers

Create your story

Build Relationships

  • ShopifyQL Notebooks: early access for partner stores [ learn more ] - official release coming in the coming months
  • Customer Engagement Tools: released [ learn more ]
  • New products and features: [ learn more ]

Run your business

Scale and Build

- Built for Shopify: released [ learn more ]

Check out all the details of the event on the official site: Shopify Editions Summer '22

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We've gathered the most asked questions with answers to help you better understand our services.

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Let's have a call and clear things up.

Yes. We have worked exclusively with Shopify and Shopify Plus since 2020, and turning down other platforms is what got us here. The trade is deliberate: a team that sees the same platform every day knows which problems have a native solution, which need an app, and which need custom code - so less of your budget goes into rediscovering that. It also means we follow Shopify's own conventions instead of porting patterns over from Magento or WooCommerce, which is what keeps a store upgradeable after we hand it over.

Strategy & consulting, custom Shopify theme development, custom app development, store migrations, UX/UI design, integrations & middleware, ongoing store management, and AI e-commerce readiness. Most projects combine three or four of those: a migration usually arrives with an ERP integration and a redesign attached, and a redesign usually surfaces a performance problem. Everything runs through one team, so a design decision and its development consequence get settled together rather than negotiated between two agencies.

Absolutely, and it is one of the most common ways clients start with us. We audit the current store first - conversion path, page performance, and the templates that carry the most revenue - then redesign against what the audit found rather than against a moodboard. Your products, customers, orders and URL structure stay where they are, so rankings and store data are not at risk. Redesigns can also ship in stages: the pages that sell first, the rest afterwards, so you see the effect before the whole budget is committed.

Yes, from scratch rather than by reskinning a marketplace template. A custom theme means the sections your merchandising team actually needs, editable in the theme editor without a developer, and no inherited code for features you will never use. That last part is the performance argument: off-the-shelf themes carry the union of every use case they were sold for, and you pay for it in Core Web Vitals on every page load. We build against your catalogue and your content model, then hand over documentation so your team can run it.

Yes - WooCommerce, Magento, Shopware and other platforms, in a staged, low-risk process. Products, variants, customers and order history come across, and every indexed URL gets a mapped 301 so the rankings you already earned survive the move. What decides the timeline is rarely catalogue size: it is data structures with no direct Shopify equivalent (bundles, configurable products, customer-specific pricing) and the systems your store talks to. We inventory both before a cutover date is set, which is why our migrations do not end with a redirect list written the night before launch.

It depends on scope: focused improvements often take 4-6 weeks, while full custom builds or migrations typically run 8-16 weeks. A store moving onto a configured theme is usually live in 4-8 weeks; a fully custom storefront runs closer to 10-16. You get a timeline with defined milestones before we start, and those milestones are staged releases rather than one launch date at the end - so a delay in one area does not push everything behind it. What moves a timeline most is late scope additions and integrations nobody inventoried at the start.

Always. We design mobile-first because that is where most e-commerce traffic sits, and where most of the conversion loss happens. Every store is tested on real devices rather than a resized browser window, and measured against Core Web Vitals - largest contentful paint, interaction latency, layout shift - before it goes live. Image handling, font loading and third-party scripts get the most attention, because apps are usually what turn a fast theme into a slow store. Performance is a launch requirement here, not a follow-up ticket.

Yes. Store management plans cover Shopify and app updates, iterative improvements, testing and technical support, on a monthly scope you can adjust as priorities change. Most stores need the first weeks after launch more than they expect: real traffic finds edge cases staging never produced, and the analytics only start telling the truth once volume arrives. After that, ongoing work tends to be conversion iterations on the templates that carry revenue, seasonal campaign support, and keeping the theme current as Shopify ships platform changes.

Definitely, and we will say so when a rebuild is not the right call. We often work in focused iterations - a conversion audit, performance optimization, or redesigning the handful of templates that carry most of the revenue - shipped as staged releases with measurable outcomes instead of a big-bang relaunch. For a store that already converts this is usually the better economics: you keep what works, spend where the data points, and avoid the risk window a full replatform opens. A rebuild earns its cost when the underlying theme or data model is the actual constraint.

Book a free strategy call - about thirty minutes, and you keep whatever comes out of it. We ask what you run today: platform, catalogue structure, connected systems, and what should be better after the project. From there you get a written proposal covering scope, timeline and pricing, with named work blocks rather than one number. If the call shows that what you need is smaller than an agency project, we will tell you that too. It is a cheaper conversation for both of us than finding out in month two.

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