As part of our Winter Editions Decoded event, our Commercial Director, Greg, hosted a fireside chat with Shopify’s Senior Partner Solutions Engineer, Yael Weiss and Neom’s Technology Product Manager, Clare Jerome. Below is a bit of a summary of what was discussed from a Shopify perspective, before moving on to NEOM and their experience on Shopify.
Integrated Cart Checkout Solution & Shop Pay
The focus of this edition (the far-from-boring one) was, quite simply, to enhance quality and speed.
Shopify understands that checkout is the most sensitive stage of the funnel, where customers are most prone to abandoning their carts—making speed essential. By addressing quality and speed separately, Shopify has made the cart 50% faster in terms of load times while also increasing the ‘lifespan’ of the cart. This means customers can leave and return later without losing their basket, allowing them to pick up where they left off.
Checkout Blocks
Checkout Blocks is a first-party app built by Shopify for Shopify, enabling customised checkouts. Previously available only to Shopify Plus users, this feature is now accessible to all accounts, creating a broader impact, particularly for businesses with smaller revenues.
Shopify Markets / Markets Dashboard
A new Markets dashboard (still in early access) has been added to the main navigation, serving as a centralised command centre for managing cross-channel and cross-border operations. It allows businesses to set up multiple channels across different markets, whether for B2B or retail. Additionally, it inherits stored defaults, eliminating the need to configure each market from scratch.
AI and Shopify
Shopify Magic (Shopify’s built-in AI) has already been mentioned (in Kerry’s talk, linked here), but it is clear that Shopify is highly committed to incorporating AI into its releases and platform capabilities. To focus on three AI features in particular:
- Sidekick: Essentially your business consultant—(maybe something like the Microsoft paperclip (Clippy) from the 90s?)—Sidekick gets to know your business and offers advice on leveraging the platform.
- AI-Powered Help Centre: If you're unsure how to do something, this tool helps point you in the right direction, saving time and enhancing the user experience.
- Product Classification: The capability to know how to predict the classification of products and categories which can help brands manage labels and inventory.
About NEOM Wellbeing
NEOM is a wellbeing brand divided into two areas: a ‘home’ range, offering products such as diffusers and candles, and a skincare range, including face creams and hand balms.
NEOM has been with Shopify since 2018 and Clare highlighted the reasons are endless, however to name three, stability, flexibility, and scalability.
From a stability perspective, NEOM experiences significant fluctuations in traffic and order volumes at key trading times of the year, and the ability to maintain system performance and avoid order flow losses provides crucial peace of mind.
Regarding scalability and flexibility, NEOM has grown significantly over the past seven years, and Shopify has supported this growth by offering the scalability and flexibility the brand needed.
NEOM has leveraged many of the features Yael covered, as well as Shopify’s extensive app library, which provides solutions for any challenges encountered. Thanks to Shopify’s customisation capabilities, NEOM has never encountered a roadblock.
NEOM has partnered with Velstar for approximately 18 months. The original brief—now much broader—was to redesign and redevelop three of its D2C sites using the Shopify 2.0 theme. This coincided with a brand refresh, including a name and domain name change. By utilising Velstar’s SEO services, the transition was seamless, ensuring no loss in organic search rankings, and the design team worked closely with NEOM to craft the website before brand guidelines were finalised, while improving the user journey along the way.
Custom rebuilds were a priority, and thanks to Velstar’s efforts, NEOM’s ecommerce trading team can now set things up with ease, an improvement from previous experiences. Additionally, optimisations in checkout accessibility have resulted in a +30% increase in checkout conversion rates, alongside improvements in site speed.
Looking Ahead to 2025
Looking ahead, the biggest challenges for NEOM—and where Velstar’s support will be most needed—include:
- Global economic volatility and the pressure to offer discounts without impacting margins.
- Customer expectations around seamless experiences across online platforms, brick-and-mortar stores, and social channels.
- AI adoption, as brands rush to keep pace with advancements and determine the best investments in time and resources.
If you’d like to learn more about what we do at Velstar, and chat to us about the latest Shopify updates, get in touch with us here and see how we can help you!
