It’s that time of year where Shopify is touting their newest rollouts and improvements, and we are sharing with you all things pertaining to boosting conversion rates in your online store. Speed, branding, and efficiency are all critical aspects of the customer experience in eCommerce. This winter, Shopify has made it their focus to bring all three to the forefront in the form of site speed and checkout pages. Let’s dive in.
Site Speed Improvements
Shopify is making bold claims about major improvements to global infrastructure which directly leads to faster site speeds for you - that’s a major win in our book! Vanessa Lee, Vice President of Product at Shopify, writes in her blog post on the topic that Shopify has focused on the following three features to make this possible:
- Reducing network transit time
- Reducing the time the application takes to create a response
- Reducing the time the databases take to retrieve data
She discusses how Shopify has dramatically increased the number of their “storefront renderers” that exist globally, basically acting as numerous servers worldwide that more easily connect international purchases and store conversions. With less distance for traveling information to cover, Shopify has raised their Time to First Byte. What does this mean for you? More value! You won’t have to ever worry again about losing your customers’ attention spans to slow site speed, meaning your eCommerce business can thrive.
New Checkout Editor
Shopify is rolling out a brand new “checkout editor” which revolutionizes checkout pages. This new feature allows you to highly customize your checkout pages in an intuitive and easy manner with either just a few clicks or a drag and drop of the mouse. Exclusive to Shopify Plus, this new feature is a favorite of the Shopify winter ‘23 edition. When designing your payment page, easily continue your branding to the final moments of the customer experience with the ability to:
- Add your personalized logo
- Select any color scheme or apply custom color combos from your brand style guide
- Select from more than 200 fonts
The checkout editor also boasts great custom content and marketing tools, such as additional fields that enhance the payment process, in-checkout upsells and promo code add-ons, shipping fees management, and loyalty programs, all of which can be added and reorganized with the drag and drop feature. Bonus time! When you add these features, they will automatically be included in your set branding style. Finally, the checkout editor allows you to preview your page in desktop or mobile format, meaning you can sell online with confidence that you’re equally reaching all audiences.
Single Page Checkout Design
Modern technology is all about two things: speed and efficiency. If you can’t keep up, you will get left behind. Luckily, Shopify is always brainstorming new ways for their technology to get faster and their UX to get ever more streamlined. What is the newest frontier? Creating a great checkout page.
Unless using a one-click payment method such as Shop Pay or Apple Pay, the guest checkout and payment process has traditionally been a long and arduous one for eCommerce sales. It is filled with redundant fields for multiple payment options, typing in long credit card numbers, clicking through to the next page sometimes only to find there’s been a glitch and you have to begin again from square one. We’ve all been there, and you know how frustrating it is. When compared to the lightning fast technologies developing around it, it’s no wonder Shopify chose to focus big energy on improving this important aspect of the customer journey. An upcoming launch has been announced that will change eCommerce businesses as we know it: the one-page checkout design.
It may sound simple: a single page checkout design where all fields pertaining to purchasing an item will be present on one page. However, the benefits are sure to be tenfold. No more waiting for several page loads, no more lost payment details, no more starting from scratch. Just conversions, loyal customers, and great checkout page design - not to mention, no more cart abandonment. We’re here for it!
Always Evolving
Part of what makes Shopify the most competitive website platform for your online store is their tenacity and dedication to providing their users with the best possible eCommerce website experience they can muster. When you build a store with Shopify, you gain peace of mind of knowing any update that can be made to improve your site's infrastructure will be made, and that is a good feeling.
If you’d like to discuss any of the Shopify Winter ‘23 Edition conversion boosting rollouts and how you can implement them in your own store for maximum success, drop us a note in eCommunity or contact us here! We’d love to chat you through taking full advantage of all that Shopify has to offer to boost your eCommerce business and online sales.