Well we LOVE a good party and boy, did we have a good time at our very first Shopify Winter Editions Decoded in-person event!
Velstar and partners hosted a night of insights, networking, and great conversations in London’s Marble Arch.
Massive thanks to our our Velstar experts, Kerry Mullin and Simon Blake, as well as our partners Inventory Planner by Sage and Recharge, and last, but certainly not least, our fireside panelists, Velstar’s Greg Hughes, Shopify’s Yael Weiss and NEOM Wellbeing’s Clare Jerome - What.A.Cast!
We wanted to offer a ‘decoded’ version of the Shopify Winter Editions, helping to provide a better understanding of what some of the brilliant new upgrades on Shopify are and how to use them, and our panel certainly delivered!
From B2B ecommerce businesses, supplying flooring and car parts to D2C brands selling beauty and wellness products, and everything in between, our experts, like a good foundation, have you fully covered.
Whether you’re in digital marketing, an AI enthusiast, ecommerce manager or just interested in learning more about Shopify, there should be something for everyone.
Our Key Takeaways
Our Director of Organic Search, Kerry, went through some of the great new capabilities to achieve better visibility, including:
Combined Listings for SEO Optimisation
Utilising combined listings ensures that a single authoritative page represents multiple variations of a product (e.g., different colours or sizes) through indexable URLs. This approach eliminates duplicate content, prevents keyword cannibalisation, and strengthens overall search visibility, improving ranking potential for targeted queries.
Meta Objects & Smart Collections for Enhanced Search Visibility
Shopify now supports meta objects, allowing businesses to add structured metadata to key website entities. This enables better indexing and inclusion in Google’s Knowledge Graph, helping search engines better understand product pages and improve discoverability.
AI-Powered Smart Collections & Taxonomy Attributes
Shopify's built-in AI (Shopify magic) now automatically suggests taxonomy attributes when uploading products and writing descriptions. This functionality enhances categorisation, tagging, and collection creation, ensuring users find relevant products more efficiently while improving SEO through structured data alignment.
Next up is Simon Blake, our Client Services Director, outlining some of the key features unifying the B2B customer experience.
B2B Self-Serve Accounts
Shopify has introduced ‘self-serve account’ features to the platform portal, allowing customers to pay invoices, see statements, account balances - basically, all that fun admin stuff that needs to be done, can now be done more easily outside of working hours.
Automating Account Setup & Branded Login Pages
Shopify has increased the speed at which customers can place orders through a ‘cash account’ while credit checks are being run in the background, which allows customers to trade from the get-go, before moving over to a credit account. Additional features for trade customers are branded login pages to give a more personalised experience.
Draft Orders & CSV Uploads
‘Draft order’ is a feature that sends orders to be reviewed before going straight to shipping, allowing businesses to review the order placed to help reduce returns from incorrect ‘basket adds’. This also allows for locking in prices for a specified period of time too. In reference to CSV uploads, this allows for files to be uploaded easily, recreating the previous order. (Another time-saving feature!)
To Sum Up
Shopify’s recent updates are far from ‘boring’, some of which can significantly improve performance and we recommend checking out the Editions here - even if it’s just to watch the quirky videos!
If you’d like to be invited to our next in-person or online events in the future, make sure to subscribe to our mailing list below.
