The Biggest Developer Updates for Summer ’22 — Shopify News (2022)

As Shopify developers, your innovation, problem-solving, and new technology drive business for millions of brands around the world—including ours. We’re constantly updating our platform to give you the tools you need, but with dozens of updates every year, we know it can be hard to keep up. After all, it’s not easy to keep track of every API update and new feature release while you’re busy building highly performant apps, themes, and custom storefronts.

We wanted to fix that. So today, we’re launching Shopify Editions, a brand-new way to explore the products and services that merchants need to grow their businesses and the latest APIs and integrations to help you get them there.

Twice a year, we’ll release a new Editions experience, highlighting all our latest product releases with context and guidance to help you quickly understand the updates that matter most to you and your clients.

To help you accelerate your building, we’ve made a dev mode just for you, with features designed specifically for devs to build best-in-class commerce experiences anywhere. (Be sure to check out the full Edition, too.)

Be the first to know about the latest product releases

For our first Shopify Editions release, we’re highlighting the importance of building meaningful relationships between merchants and customers. We call it Connect to Consumer (C2C): the natural evolution of D2C commerce. Businesses need to know how to create unique, personalized experiences that keep customers returning again and again, and we’ve got just the tools to help.

New ways to build great apps

Built for Shopify

Our goal is to make the best commerce apps in the world, and we can’t do that without you. That’s why we created our Built for Shopify program, so you’ll have all the necessary tools and docs to create an app that feels like it’s part of Shopify. Our App Design Guidelines will show and tell you exactly what a high-quality Shopify app should look and act like. And once you’ve created an app that meets these enhanced standards, it’ll be eligible to be featured on our highest-converting surfaces in the Shopify Admin and App Store. It’s a win-win—your apps get more visibility, and merchants get access to the best commerce apps imaginable.

Shopify Functions

Shopify Functions give you the flexibility to extend Shopify in ways never possible before and fast enough to scale up for the largest flash sales in the world. Although we’re starting with discounts, shipping and payment method Functions, we plan on adding support for order routing, shipping rates, checkout and cart validations, return validations and more in the future. Functions are distributed in an app and easily configured directly in the Admin, so merchants never have to touch a line of code. In the past these kinds of customization capabilities were locked to Plus, but they’re now available to all merchants via the Shopify App Store.

Checkout Extensibility

Extend the power of checkout and Shop Pay with flexible customizations deployed for the first time through custom app or the Shopify App Store. Checkout Extensibility, now in Developer Preview, is uniquely designed to be secure, fast, and upgrade-safe. We shipped Checkout UI extensions and Shopify Functions so you can surface new functionality, Checkout Branding APIs for merchants to customize styling, and Pixels to track events. Apps built with checkout UI extensions are exclusively available to Plus merchants.

Pre-orders and more

We’ve added new capabilities to the Selling Plans APIs that allow for deferred payment collection and deposits. Pre-orders help merchants predict demand so they can better manage inventory production, increase sales by letting customers reserve in advance, and build excitement for a new or existing product. Pre-order demand continues to grow as merchants look to streamline their inventory. Help merchants succeed by taking advantage of new purchase options like pre-orders and try before you buy.

B2B on Shopify

Starting June 27th, Shopify is majorly upgrading the way merchants sell wholesale. B2B on Shopify is integrated into the core, and includes a new set of B2B APIs to provide better ways to connect with wholesale customers, with new primitives like company profiles, price lists, and net payment terms. Merchants can now harness the full power of Shopify with access to our most customizable features for their B2B business (such as themes, discounts, and Functions) and personalize the buying experience for their wholesale customers.

ShopifyQL Notebooks

Exclusively for Shopify Plus members, ShopifyQL Notebooks lets merchants craft their own data stories to answer their most important business questions. With the new GraphQL Admin API, developers can directly query Shopify’s analytical data to generate business insights without dealing with data transformation. No more mismatching between your reports and Shopify data.

Segmentation

Allow your clients to better segment customer data using the Segmentation API, fully managed using requests to the GraphQL API. Your merchants can now use data passed through your app and segment groupings based on purchasing behavior, location, or marketing preferences.

Return

You asked, so we’re building it! Return APIs, now open for early access beta, will help your clients manage orders more efficiently by giving them greater visibility into essential returns data across platforms.

Improved dev tools

Developer Experience

Looking to build your first Shopify app? We’ve simplified the writing and pushing of an app in our CLI and also improved the navigation and app distribution process in the Partner Dashboard. We also shipped new getting started app templates as well as a sample app, so you can build faster.

Embedded App Improvements

We’ve shipped huge improvements to make apps look, feel, and perform like they’re a part of Shopify. App Bridge apps now load nearly two times faster on mobile devices, their navigation can be integrated into the Shopify admin, and they can leverage full-screen mode, to showcase advanced functionality.

Data Protection

We’re shipping changes to help you build apps for an increasingly privacy aware world—with secure access to the data you need. In the 2022-10 release, APIs will redact customer personal data by default and allow you to apply for necessary access to customer personal data throughout the life of your app. These changes enable your app to better support a business’s path towards compliance with privacy and data protection rules.

Next-level storefront building

Hydrogen + Oxygen

Build fast, headless storefronts with a React-based framework built by Shopify, for Shopify. From pre-built components and starter templates to hooks and utilities that map directly to Shopify’s APIs, Hydrogen gives you the tooling you need to accelerate development. When you’re ready to get your storefront in front of customers around the globe, deploy directly to the edge with Oxygen: a built-in global hosting solution that’s just a simple “git push” away.

Pixels

We’re giving you the ability to develop marketing and analytics solutions with secure, accurate, and privacy-conscious customer behavior data. Subscribe to behavioral data published by Shopify and other partners to give clients the power to measure conversion and behavior using client and server-side pixels.

Marketplace Kit

Marketplace Kit is a platform that empowers all partners and developers to build marketplaces with Shopify. Our collection of APIs, tools, resources and documentation gives you everything you need to quickly, easily, and seamlessly build commerce features for a world-class marketplace on any surface.

Prettier plugin

Prettier is a code formatter that supports several programming languages out of the box, including JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS. With this new plugin, Prettier can now support Liquid, meaning more consistent code styles and less time spent editing Shopify themes.

App-owned metafields

Apps can now use metafields to store data that only they have access to. With app-owned metafields, the read/write access is restricted to your application and is accessible through the Liquid app object within your theme app extensions. This makes it possible to design conditional app logic for different plan levels.

Liquid for Themes

Our all new Liquid references allow you to build themes even faster. Quickly prototype your use case directly in our docs with interactive code blocks featuring autocomplete and syntax highlighting, type information, and object property previews.