[Yawn]
This year we’re getting a range of thoughtful, iterative improvements, and honestly, I’m okay with that!
It is time for the Shopify Winter Editions 2025, but don’t worry, you haven’t missed the festive season just yet. There’s still time to overindulge in mince pies, bore your relatives with the finer points of B2B ecommerce, and enjoy your favourite Christmas tipple while rewatching Die Hard.
Shopify is renowned for driving innovation, forever pushing the envelop on what an ecommerce store can do for your business. Their Winter Editions is often the epitome of this – showcasing groundbreaking new ideas, and game-changing software solutions. So what do we have in store for us this year...?
Well, the Shopify Winter Editions 2025 is largely a collection of upgrades and improvements to existing services. Some might even call it 'boring'... but in fact, I'm okay with that! And in this article, I want to dive into exactly why these refinements come at such a perfect time – and of course, how you can start putting them to use.
So let’s talk about those refinements and what they mean for you.
The Shopify Checkout: Now Even Faster Than Ever!
The Shopify Checkout has already been recognised as the best-converting checkout. Now it's even better.
The Shopify Checkout has already been recognised as the best-converting checkout in an independent study conducted by one of the Big Three global management consultancies. So, if your ecommerce store is hosted on Shopify, you’re already on solid ground—things have just got even better, and you didn’t need to lift a finger to benefit from these upgrades.
Starting on the product page, accelerated checkout buttons now load up to 58.8% faster and support additional functionality including Functions and Bundles. A fantastic upgrade to boost conversion of those spontaneous purchase decisions.
On the cart page, load speeds have increased by up to 50%, providing a smoother and faster cart-to-checkout experience. Once the customer reaches checkout, they can now start interacting over one second sooner, thanks to new animations and the asynchronous loading of customisations.
Speed optimisations at checkout are bound to boost your conversion rate and you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of it. Sounds pretty exciting to us.
Shopify Draft Orders Get Some Quality of Life Upgrades
Meanwhile, customer service teams everywhere will be excited by the host of improvements to Shopify’s draft orders functionality.
Meanwhile, customer service teams everywhere will be excited by the host of improvements to Shopify’s draft orders functionality.
Checkout customisations with Shopify Functions will now apply to draft orders, meaning your customer service team no longer needs to manually calculate discounts for customers when creating a draft order. You can also guarantee the price you set to the customer by locking it in on the draft order until the order is completed—even if the original product price is updated in your catalogue.
Just look out for the little lock symbol to confirm you've locked in that price for your customer.
Remember, be cautious with the price lock-in, as while it prevents the draft order price from increasing, it also stops it from decreasing should the product go on sale.
Lastly, here's an upgrade to delight your marketing team. Now, customisations built using Shopify Extensions will appear in draft order checkouts. These customisations are often key drivers for increasing average order value by offering smart upsells directly in the checkout.
Shopify Payments and Klarna
Staying on the subject of the checkout, Shopify Payments has also received a nice quality-of-life upgrade.
There are benefits within benefits for merchants and customers who utilise Shopify Markets multi-currency feature.
Klarna is now available as an option within Shopify Payments for the UK market (as well as Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain), making it easier than ever for you to let your customers 'buy now, pay later.'. Here is the hidden benefit that (for some reason) Shopify isn’t shouting about in this year's Winter Editions.
With previous Klarna integrations, the 'buy now, pay later' option only worked in the store's base currency, which will no doubt have limited conversion rates for some merchants. Now, it’s fully integrated into Shopify Payments, meaning that customers who choose Klarna can complete their purchase using their local currency!
That’s a significant CRO-boosting feature for merchants to be excited about.
The Better Late Than Never?
Now, let’s have a little fun… and take a look at some of the announcements that – while nice to have – fall into the ‘better late than never’ category.
- Merchants using Shopify’s new customer accounts functionality can now add their logo and brand style to their account login pages!
- Merchants offering Bundles will also be pleased to know that those bundles are finally clearly communicated within order confirmation emails and order history. No more confused customers!
- Finally, for merchants using Shopify’s native Subscription app, there’s no need to worry about overselling products anymore, as the app now respects your inventory settings. Yay—no more orders for sold-out products! That’s probably one of the reasons why most subscription brands use Recharge.
What Features Are You Looking for in Summer Editions 2025?
After reviewing the latest announcements, our team got together to discuss the quality-of-life upgrades we’d like to see from Shopify in the future. So, to wrap up this article, let’s take a look at what’s on our Christmas list for next year.
- We’ve seen a host of new upgrades for Draft Orders, but let’s hope that’s not the end. Personally what I’d love to see is the ability to add subscription products to a draft order! For a subscription-focused brand, such as Symprove, Draft Orders is currently rendered redundant without this feature.
- Our developer, Quim Ora, has been working closely with bundles for Careline 365 recently, and would like to see the ability to turn a Bundle into a subscription product.
- While we’re talking about bundles, please introduce the ability to migrate bundles from one Shopify Instance to another - this would be great for development environments.
- Our designer, Charlotte Slade, is always busy working in the theme customiser. What she’d really love is the ability to save a styled theme section as a sort of ‘component’... and then apply that saved component to a separate page, with all settings and content already applied! And if you update that ‘component’ anywhere, it updates globally.
- Aaron Davidson wants a nice simple feature: the ability to filter pages and products by the template applied to them, so you can quickly and easily see all the pages using a certain template.
- Cristina Alemany has been working closely with some of our international clients recently, and she’d love to see the ability to create a discount that only applies to a specific market. This would be a huge upgrade for Markets. Also on the topic of discounts, I’d personally love the option to automatically add the free product to the cart when setting up a ‘Buy X, Get Y’ deal.
- Don Page said he’d love to see improved rules within smart collections. Currently, you can only use ‘not equal to’ when using product type. But why can’t we say ‘Product Tag’ is ‘not equal to’? And please can the product count on smart collections only show active products?!
- Our frontend developer James Kam-Radcliffe would love to see a Shopify to BitBucket integration that works similarly to the Github integration.
- Finally, Anil Rai would love to see further improvements to Shopify's CLI – to allow agencies like ourselves to automate the deploying and testing of themes, and allow us to integrate CI/CD Pipelines.
Many of these challenges we've faced on a frequent basis – and so we’re well experienced at developing workarounds and solutions, ensuring that our clients can manage their online businesses with ease. Why not reach out to us today, o talk about how you can get the best from your Shopify store?
