[Yawn]
This year we’re getting a range of thoughtful, iterative improvements, and honestly, I’m okay with that!
It’s 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.
As you wind down the year and prepare for a well-earned break, let’s take a look at what Shopify has to offer this festive season. This year, Shopify is leaning into the idea of being ‘boring,’ with no flashy new features to steal the show or revolutionary updates to shake up the ecommerce industry. Instead, we’re getting a range of thoughtful, iterative improvements, and honestly, I’m okay with that!
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—but things have just gotten 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 & 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's Draft Orders Receives 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 the price 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.
However, be cautious with the price lock-in, as while it prevents the draft order price from increasing, it also stops it from decreasing if the product goes on sale.
Lastly, marketing teams will love the latest upgrade too. 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.
But here’s the hidden benefit that for merchants and customers who utilise Shopify Markets multi-currency feature.
Klarna is now available as a payment option within Shopify Payments for the UK market (as well as Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain), making it easier than ever for you to offer the option to "buy now, pay later" to your customers. But here’s 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 undoubtedly had a negative impact on conversion rates. Now, it’s fully integrated into Shopify Payments. 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 are of course nice to have, but they do fall into the ‘better late than never’ category.
- Merchants who have opted to use Shopify’s new customer accounts functionality can now benefit from the ability to add their logo and brand style to their account login pages!
- Merchants offering Bundles will also be pleased to know that those bundles are now clearly communicated within order confirmation emails and order history. No more confused customers!
- And 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 reason 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.
- And 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, and what she really would love is the ability to save a styled theme section as a sort of ‘component’ and then to apply that saved component to a separate page, with all settings & content already applied! And if you update that ‘component’ anywhere, it updates globally.
- While Aaron Davidson wants a nice simple feature, the ability to filter pages and products by which template is applied to them so you can quickly and easily see all the pages that are 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. And while we’re talking about discounts I personally would love the option to automatically add the free product to the cart when setting up a Buy X, Get Y discount.
- While Don Page suggested 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.
- And finally Anil Rai would love to see further improvements to Shopify's CLI to allow agencies such as ourselves to automate deploying & testing themes and allow us to integrate CI/CD Pipelines.
Many of these challenges we've faced and have had to provide workarounds or solutions that improve our client's day-to-day life managing their store. Why not reach out to us today to talk to us about how you can get the best out of your Shopify store?
