Important Product Updates for Shopify Partners and Developers

June 2022

Help merchants find new customers with Shopify Audiences

Shopify Agency Partners can now use Shopify Audiences to help Plus merchants with one of their biggest pain points: finding new customers who are ready to buy.

As TJ Ferrara, co-founder of BUBS Natural, explains: "Shopify Audiences has helped us regain confidence with top-of-funnel advertising and reach qualified buyers with return on ad spend as high as 3x. The ability to leverage Shopify’s understanding of intent and create audiences focused on our products significantly enhances our acquisition efforts."

For now, Shopify Audiences is available to Shopify Plus store owners operating in the United States or Canada who use Shopify Payments. If you're excited to find new customers for your clients, check store eligibility, and more, click below to visit our complete rundown on Shopify Audiences.

Get started with Shopify Audiences

Easier localization with Custom Content by Market API

We have released Custom Content by Market within the GraphQL Admin API.

This feature enables developers to support localized and custom content, including regional spelling or preferred terms. For example, a “Sweaters” menu title for a market based in the United States and a “Jumpers” menu title for a market in the United Kingdom. The feature also allows developers to display promotional content based on the buyer’s market. For example, a custom Thanksgiving announcement bar in October for Canadian buyers.

Review the new API

Coming soon: New parameter included in app proxies forwarded requests

Starting July 4th, app proxies forwarded requests will include a new parameter.

Thelogged_in_customer_idparameter will be added to forwarded requests, which will add logged in customer’s information to the app proxy page. Thelogged_in_customer_idof thelogged in customerwill return blank if there is none.

Action Required

Prior to July 4th, please check the app proxy page to ensure the newlogged_in_customer_idparameter will not impact or break your existing setup.

Learn more about proxy requests

Developer tip: Handling 422 errors

A 422 Unprocessable Entity error is returned when your request body contains data that is not compatible with the endpoint you are trying to interact with. A 422 error can be returned from a variety of scenarios, such as:

• Trying to write a read-only field
• Entering an integer where a string is expected (or boolean, etc.)
• Missing permissions/scopes for the operation being performed
• General formatting issues (commas, parenthesis, etc.)
• Missing fields/values – Some operations require a field to be specified (like an object id) in either the payload or the endpoint URL. For example, missing fulfillmentOrder id when performing a fulfillment action on an order with multiple fulfillmentOrders

If you encounter this error, carefully reference your payload data against our documentation and ensure that all fields are correctly formatted before trying again.

See Shopify’s API responses and error codes

Developer tip: Using development stores

Development stores are one of our most popular tools within the Partner Dashboard. They are used for testing and installing your apps and themes, providing example stores running your app for your listings, or as a template to create a store for a new Shopify merchant and to hand off and earn recurring revenue.

Development stores are different from stores merchants create in several important ways. To start, as a Shopify Partner, you can create an unlimited number of free development stores. You'll start earning referral commissions on development stores after you transfer the store to the client. Also, there's no time limit on how long you can work on a development store. Clients only begin to pay for their stores once you transfer ownership and they select a paid plan.

However, before you get started, there are some features and limitations to development stores that partners should know about.You can review them here.

One more thing: Our support team often sees questions about connecting an existing store to your partner account. We can't retroactively affiliate an existing merchant store to your dashboard to earn revenue share. You must create the development store from within your partner dashboard first and then successfully transfer it to the client in order to receive revenue share.

Check out our latest video and help center resources about creating development stores:

Videos

• How to transfer a Shopify development store
• How to create a Shopify development store

Help Center

• Creating development stores
• 中方通过lding stores for merchants

Read about creating development stores

Highlights from NYC developer workshop

On April 6, we brought the Shopify Developer NYC community together for the first time in almost two years for a night of learning and networking.

Developers new and old joined Shopify for an "Introduction to Building on Shopify" workshop followed by a developer panel discussion with some of Shopify’s top developers in the ecosystem. At the event, attendees were able to learn everything about apps and themes, to growing and scaling your business on Shopify.

We look forward to holding more workshops and seeing you soon in a city near you.

Check out our workshop video

Join us for Shopify Partner Town Hall

Save the date! Our next Shopify Partner Town Hall will take place on Tuesday, June 28th at 12:00 pm EDT. Our quarterly event provides Shopify Partners with important updates and news. We’ll share more information about our speakers and topics soon.

Register now

May 2022

在这个版本的月度产品通讯for Shopify Partners and Developers, you’ll find the most important updates you need to know to continue your work with your app users.

Best practices for mobile optimization

As more shoppers continue to use their phones to make purchases, it should come as no surprise that Shopify merchants too are using their mobile devices to start and run their businesses.

"We regularly chat with businesses using Junip and Shopify who don't have a computer, they run the entire company on their phone," says Stuart Arsenault, CEO at Junip. "I think for all businesses mobile-first is nice to have, but for the entrepreneur segment specifically, it's a need-to-have."

There's a lot that goes into making a mobile-first app solution. To help developers stake their piece of the fast-growing mobile commerce market, we've outlined three best practices to consider when building a mobile-first solution.

Read more about mobile optimization

Adding more information to theme cards

In order to help merchants make informed decisions about which theme may be best for their store, we have been testing ways to display useful theme information.

This new design provides information on industry category, features and catalog size which can help merchants more quickly find themes that may suit their needs. Merchants can quickly toggle between theme presets to see different color and visual treatments on the theme card listing.

This change will roll out across the theme store in the coming weeks.

Learn more about theme cards

New sync flag for the Shopify CLI serve command

We've shipped a new sync flag for the Shopify CLI serve command which allows theme developers to synchronize updates between the remote theme and the local development theme.

Now, developers using the Shopify CLI can capture changes that were made on the theme editor and apply these to their local development theme. Also, the feature is bi-directional, so developers can choose to overwrite the remote theme with changes made to the local development theme.

This new feature launched in April with CLI version 2.15.2. Developers just need to update their version to get access to sync functionality.

Learn more about the update

New testing assets and documentation for theme developers

Theme developers will now be able to access new testing tools and set up a testing environment which is very close to the environment that the Shopify theme review team uses to evaluate submissions. This will assist developers in auditing their theme and identifying issues before they submit their theme for review, thereby ensuring that the review process is faster and more streamlined. By testing and resolving issues, as well as checking that all features are present in your theme prior to submission, you can set yourself up for success on the Shopify Theme Store.

Learn more about testing themes

Case study: The Shopify 2021 App Challenge was the perfect opportunity for success for eVouch

Auckland, New Zealand, based developer Eugene Yao knew word-of-mouth was an effective marketing tool, and if scaled with social media could help ecommerce brands reach new audiences. In this post, he shares how he used the Shopify App Challenge to scope, build, and deploy an app in just eight weeks.

Read how they did it

Helping merchants find apps through search

We’re continuing to make improvements to the Shopify App Store search experience, to help merchants more easily find apps that meet their needs and requirements. A recent change we made helps logged in merchants find new apps.

When a merchant is logged in, and searches for an app they already have installed, our search results will not show that app by default. There is a toggle in the left navigation that allows the merchant to choose to show “Already installed apps.” So, if a merchant searches for “grow order value,” they will see new apps that may help them achieve this goal.

We are testing ways to help surface apps when searched for by the specific app name, and will refine the search experience further to help drive more high intent installs.

Inspiring merchants with your theme

Are you ready to build a Shopify Theme? You can now connect directly with our Theme Partnership Team by completing ameeting request formon theTheme Developer Landing Page. The Theme Partnership Team will share opportunities to build beautiful performant themes that fill merchant gaps and determine how to support publishing your theme to the Shopify Theme Store.

With Shopify’s 0% revenue share model, there has never been a better time to build themes for Shopify.

中方通过ld themes for Shopify

April 2022

在这个版本的月度产品通讯for Shopify Partners and Developers, you’ll find the most important updates you need to know to continue your work with your app users.

Read on for more information. If you’d rather receive these updates via email, please sign up for our monthly What’s New with Shopify email below.

Fulfillment Orders making the fulfillment process much easier for partners and merchants

We are deprecating the Fulfillment API, in favor of Fulfillment Order, so you can build for the future of fulfillments. Access new features like local delivery & pickup, fulfillment holds, multi-managed inventory, subscription models, with more exciting features coming in 2022.

Read our migration guide

Offer fixed price or percentage discounts on app subscriptions

Developers can now offer timeboxed discounts by a fixed price or percentage (e.g. X% off or $Y for a set number of months) for app subscriptions natively using the Billing API.

Developers will no longer need to use workarounds to offer app discounts to merchants.

Time limited discounts allow merchants to trial the fit of a paid app for their stores at a reduced price, and help developers acquire new merchant subscribers.

Discounted amounts will also clearly be shown to merchants in the app charge confirmation flow.

App discounts will be available on the2022-04GraphQL Admin API.

Learn how

App Trial Extensions

App developers can increase the number of trial days offered to a recurring app charge by using the new appSubscriptionTrialExtend offered without merchants accepting a new app subscription.

This will enable developers to provide new merchants additional time to trial products. App trial extension is currently available in the unstable version of the GraphQL Admin API.

Learn how

Shopify Community forums for partners

More than a forum, Shopify Community is your place to connect with brands and makers, fellow partners and commerce shakers.

Ask and answer questions about developing for Shopify, including Shopify APIs, Online Store 2.0, Subscriptions, Markets, Retail and more.

• Get questions answered from fellow partners and from Shopifolk
• Help merchants solve problems and build new connections
• Take part in Developer Community AMAs

All active Shopify Partners can access the private partner space within Shopify Community. To join visitcommunity.shopify.comand look for the Partners Discussion board.

Join the discussion

Shopify store admin domains are changing

We are consolidating Shopify’s admin domains under a single domain admin.shopify.com, which reduces page reloads when merchants navigate the Shopify admin. You will notice this new domain and unique store extension in place of the usual myshopify.com URL. This will only change the URL that a merchant uses to access their store, it will not have any impact on the URLs in the APIs.

What are the impacts to admin URL structures?

ThecurrentURLs are formatted as follows:

• Store Admin: [store-name].myshopify.com/admin/[page or resource path]
• Stores List: accounts.shopify.com/store-login

ThenewURLs will be formatted as follows:

• Store Admin: admin.shopify.com/store/[store-name]/[page or resource path]
• Stores List: admin.shopify.com

Be the first to test the new domain.

Include one of your test stores to this pilot sign-up sheet and see how your apps and themes perform in the new domain.

Apply for early access

Add a Hero Video / Image and Demo URLs to your App Listing

Adding a Hero Video or Image to the Hero section of your App Listing can help merchants make the decision to install your app.

Short videos showcase the impact of your app to the merchant’s business. Good videos explain what an app does, how it helps merchants and how to use it. Videos should be no longer than 2-3 minutes, and can be embedded from YouTube.

If you don’t have a video, you can use an image instead, to convey the key benefits, functionality and unique value offered by your app.

Demo stores help merchants make informed decisions, by seeing how your app works. As a Shopify Partner, you can use a freedevelopment store.

If you don’t have a video or image, or a demo store, consider adding these today. You can do so in the App Listing area of your Partner Dashboard.

Learn more about app listings

Women Coding the Future—Gift Egwuenu

Women Coding the Future is a one-hour talk celebrating women in development. We’re partnering withSheSharp 非盈利基金会,促进多样性nd inclusion in technology and entrepreneurship, to present a series of incredible women building and contributing code, helping to shape the future of developer communities.

In this edition, join us for a chat withGift Egwuenu, Developer Advocate atCloudflare.

Gift sharesWriting Clean Code for Humans, where she provides examples of bad coding practices and explains how every developer should be able to write clean, easy-to-understand code. We’ll also hear more about her experience with web development, Jamstack, and developer lifestyle videos.

Register now

Updating App Listing Pages

We’re making improvements to App Listing Pages, to help merchants make more informed decisions. Recently we added new partner details to App Listing pages, including:

➡️ # of apps in the App Store by the developer

➡️ # of years developing for Shopify

➡️ Avg. app rating (for all apps combined)

We’re testing new improvements, with an experiment underway to make it clear to merchants if an app is a free or paid app.

March 2022

在这个版本的月度产品通讯for Shopify Partners and Developers, you’ll find the most important updates you need to know to continue your work with your app users.

Read on for more information. If you’d rather receive these updates via email, please sign up for our monthly What’s New with Shopify email below.

Shopify Flow for Advanced Plan Merchants

Every month, over 1 billion flows run on Shopify stores, automating workflows such as marketing processes, improving order and inventory management, and streamlining customer service queries.

Previously exclusive to Shopify Plus merchants, coming soon, Flow will be available to merchants on the Advanced Plan. With a significantly bigger audience there’s never been a better time for developers to build a Flow connector that can kick-off or execute an action from an automated workflow.

中方通过ld your connector

Level up your app with theme app extensions

As more merchants adopt Online Store 2.0 themes, it's important for app developers to provide a seamless integration experience with merchants’ storefronts through theme app extensions.

中方通过lding with theme app extensions simplifies the process of adopting, managing and uninstalling apps without the need for theme specific solutions, or custom code removal processes.

中方通过ld with theme app extensions today

Upgrade to v.18.1.1 of Shopify App Gem!

Version 18.1.1 replaces the deprecated EASDK redirect with an App Bridge redirect when attempting to break out of an iframe. This happens when an app is installed, requires new access scopes, or re-authentication because the login session is expired. To learn how to update your app, refer to our upgrade guide on Github.

Upgrade App Gem

Shopify Partner Town Hall—2022 Kickoff

Join us for the first Partner Town Hall of 2022, on March 10 at 12 pm EDT.

Learn more about our mission to empower Shopify Partners to help merchants succeed. We'll cover how we're making app and theme discovery safe, simple and more personalized, how merchants are becoming more global and more mobile, and what partners and developers can expect from us this year.

Check out the agenda and learn more about speakers taking part in our Ask Me Anything.

Register now

New Shopify POS space coming soon to your Partner Dashboard

Soon you’ll have access to a new and personalized area within your Partner Dashboard purpose built to help you support brick and mortar merchants using Shopify POS.

You’ll have access to new resources, new insights, and relevant guidance that will help you drive increased revenue for your clients.

A snapshot view of your retail clients

See which of your clients are using Shopify POS so you can support their ability to drive increased revenue online and in-store.

Resources picked just for you

Your customized Shopify POS dashboard features content and tools to help you grow as a Shopify Partner.

A survey to help us understand how we can help you with Shopify POS

When you unlock this new area of your dashboard we’ll ask a few questions to customize your Shopify POS dashboard for your needs.

Help merchants sell globally, with Shopify Markets in GA

Shopify Markets is now in General Availability, meaning merchants can more easily sell to anyone on the internet from a single store.

This means that international storefront experiences now revolve around the customer’s country. It’s important that apps and themes that introduce customer-facing components are aware of the country context in order for the relevant content, currency and pricing details to be shown.

There are two key areas to consider to ensure your app or theme is compatible with country-based contextual storefronts:

1. Use dynamic URLs to support subfolders. Failing to do so will result in buyers seeing the incorrect currency and price in checkout
2. Use country instead of currency

For more information, please view our resources about internationalization at Shopify.dev.

Get started

Improved search experience in the Shopify App Store

We’re making search smarter and more personalized to help merchants find the right app for their query. About half of all search queries are for app brand names, with the rest a mix of categories and use cases. Here’s some improvements we're making to search on the Shopify App Store:

• Recommending app names: When a user enters the initial letters of a search that matches unique app names with high confidence, those apps may be shown. This allows the user to quickly click directly to the app’s listing page.
• Improving search term suggestions: We've made improvements to increase our coverage of queries, and added better support for non-English search terms.
• Showing suggested categories: We’ll show personalized recommended categories to merchants, based on various aspects of their business, from tenure to size and industry.
• Showing past search results: We’ll show past searches for logged in merchants.

We’ll continue to improve the search experience to make it as fast and as frictionless as possible.

Channel Attribution now available in Beta!

New fields are now being used for sales channel attribution on the Orders, Checkout, and Draft Orders APIs. Passing the correct information to these fields will now improve the accuracy of order source reporting up to the sub-channel level and reduce the time merchants spend organizing and fulfilling orders from marketplaces.

Learn more

February 2022

在这个版本的月度产品通讯for Shopify Partners and Developers, you’ll find the most important updates you need to know to continue your work with your clients and app users.

Read on for more information. If you’d rather receive these updates via email, please sign up for our monthly What’s New with Shopify email below.

How we’re improving discoverability on the Shopify App Store

We’ve started rolling out a series of updates to make the Shopify App Store experience even better for merchants and developers. This includes more app education and storytelling, a stronger visual point of view, and additional surfaces for apps to get discovered.

Learn More

Merchant Tech Stack Series

The first in a series of features in Modern Retail has been published. These will showcase Shopify merchants and the apps they use. In the first feature, learn how specialty bike helmet maker, Thousand built an ecommerce tech stack that powered global growth.

Learn More

The Future of Commerce

DownloadThe Future of Commerce in 2022report和一个出色的窥商务trends that will shape the year ahead.

Want to learn more about how your merchants can thrive in the new retail landscape? RSVP forThe Future of Commerce Trends Briefing, a digital event featuring a live Q&A with Shopify and merchant experts.

Register Now

Updates to Facebook and Instagram order and fulfillment workflows

A new checkout experience on Facebook and Instagram rolled out to merchants on January 31.To ensure your app is compatible,update order and fulfillment workflows to capture payments.

As Shopify merchants transition to Shopify Payments for checkout on Facebook and Instagram, orders placed on checkout that were previously processed by Facebook Payments are now transitioning to Shopify Payments as the payment gateway. As a result, how orders are processed will be changing and we are recommending changes to your app to minimize order automation issues arising following theecommerce migration.

Learn More

New ways to refer customers to Shopify Plus and Shopify POS

There’s an easier, faster way to refer merchants to Shopify. Now all referrals are located in one convenient place. Navigate to the Referrals tab in your Partner Dashboard to get started.

Make a Referral

Migrating templates to Online Store 2.0

Online Store 2.0 is an end-to-end overhaul of how themes are built at Shopify. With sections on every page, app-powered blocks, flexible data storage, and robust developer tools, the process of building a theme on Shopify is easier than ever before. We recently launched three free new themes built with Dawn that layer in significantly more customization settings and new sections onto the Dawn repo.To unlock the full advantage of these improvements,migrate your themesto the updated requirements of Online Store 2.0.

Find additional resources for building fully-featured themes below and speak to your merchants today about the best option for their business.

• Check out this article tolearn more about new themes
• Learn options for updating to an Online Store 2.0 theme in this video fromCoding with Jan
• RSVP for our upcoming deep dive webinar for partners onMetafields + Storefront Filtering

Learn More

Channel Attribution is now available in Beta!

Channel Attribution is here. Passing the correct information to these fields will now improve the accuracy of order source reporting up to the sub-channel level as well as reduce the time merchants spend organizing and fulfilling orders from marketplaces.

This feature has been highly requested by merchants and will allow them to more accurately tie orders to the sales channels they are coming from.

Learn More

That’s all for this month. To stay up to date with changes that impact the Shopify platform and app development, subscribe tothe Shopify developer changelogby email or by RSS for real-time updates as they happen.

January 2022

在这个版本的月度产品通讯for Shopify Partners and Developers, you’ll find the most important updates you need to know to continue your work with your clients and app users.

Read on for more information. If you’d rather receive these updates via email, please sign up for our monthly What’s New with Shopify email below.

Revenue share reset

Shopify reset the revenue share for registered app and theme developers on December 31st at 11:59 pm ET. This means regardless of what you made in 2021, Shopify will not be taking any revenue share on the first million dollars of revenue earned in 2022! If you haven’t registered for the new revenue share plan yet or want to learn more, please visit thepartner help center.

Learn More

More information about new payout methods and associated fees

Shopify recently introduced new payout methods in collaboration with Hyperwallet, with industry-leading currency conversion fees secured to benefit Shopify Partners & payout coverage for more than 200+ regions & countries around the world.

Select between Local bank transfer, Wire transfer & PayPal, and receive your payout in another currency, including your local currency in most cases.

Payout method availability depends on your region & payout amount. Since Shopify always issues payouts in USD, non-USD payouts are subject to a fee applied & retained by Hyperwallet. Read more about the payout methods & fees in our updated Partner Help Documentation.

Learn More

App challenge showcase

The App Challenge 2021 is officially in the books and we wanted to share some of the apps that really blew us away.

Last Month we re-launched the app challenge page to showcase those apps for everyone to see.

需要一些时间去检查一下。不要忘记to sign up for the next challenge while you’re at it!

Learn More