Just a few short weeks ago Shopify served up a few BIG, announcements at their annual Shopify Unite Conference, and I’m busting to get you all in the loop.

Shopify Stores 2.0 is dropping later this year, but what does that mean for your Shopify eComm stores?

• If you love have sections to populate your home pages then you’re going to love Sections Anywhere. Goodbye bulky page builder apps (like Pagefly), sections everywhere means you’ll have flexibility to create adaptable content rich pages….everywhere #gamechanger

• App code. Uninstalling apps and being left with code crumbs will be a thing of the past for those on Shopify 2.0. Theme app extensions will make it easier to extend and manage apps within themes without app code need to bury itself in your theme files.

• You know that checkout that you could never edit or customise #upsell anyone? Shopify 2.0 changes that. (not sure yet what that means for Shopify Plus where they could do that already!)

• Did someone say FAST? New themes are being released ready to bring the power of 2.0 to you, themes are promising to be sleek and fast, with limited bloat coding.

• New (FAST) Base Theme. New merchants to Shopify will get loaded up with base default theme Dawn. We’re still testing it but reports are that its faster and Google (and humans) love sites that load fast.

• Built in Metafields support. Store owners will be able to create unique attributes for products and product variants.

My advice right now for current store owners? Don’t upgrade your theme right now. But plan for it. Reach out to your Theme developer and ask when their 2.0 version will be ready for stable release (Shopify's deadline for all theme developers is by the end of 2021)

Out of the Sandbox (OOTS) has stated that they expect initial releases by end of August. Keep an eye on the changelog (https://help.outofthesandbox.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011640187) for info.

Kerri #out.