Category: Personal

Diving Deep into Shopify Winter ’24: Key Updates on Subscriptions, Variant Capacity, and Themes Blocks

On January 31st, Shopify unveiled a comprehensive update with over 100+ enhancements in the Shopify Winter ’24 Edition, focusing on reinforcing the core pillars of their platform for an improved merchant experience.

Key Areas of Upgrade in the Winter ’24 Edition:

  • Conversion
  • Channels
  • Marketing
  • Operations

These updates are meticulously designed to bolster the success of Shopify merchants, making the platform more robust and versatile. The Complete Edition details all updates.

This blog post is crafted with merchants in mind, aiming to demystify the updates in a clear and digestible manner. We will zoom in on three significant enhancements: enhanced subscription features, an increased limit for variants and Product Swatches, and the latest updates to the Shopify theme block. Practical examples from demo stores will be provided to showcase the tangible benefits of these updates, illustrating how they can be leveraged for merchant success.

1. Shopify Subscription App –

You can now boost customer lifetime value and ensure predictable revenue by offering products as subscriptions with Shopify’s new, free Subscriptions app.

Shopify’s new Subscriptions app allows merchants to directly manage and offer subscription models from the Shopify admin, enhancing customer retention and revenue stability. This feature simplifies setting up recurring payments and custom subscription options, offering a seamless integration for businesses looking to adopt or expand their subscription-based offerings.

  • Offer auto-billed subscriptions (renew weekly, monthly, or yearly) with discounts.
  • Allow your customers to cancel, skip, or pause subscriptions
  • Use customizable email templates for order confirmations or payment reminders
  • Access reporting to analyze your store’s subscription performance
  • Easily transfer existing subscription contracts to Shopify Subscriptions

shopify-subscription

How to Set Up Your First Subscription Plan

  • Installation and Initial Setup: Once the app is installed, a setup guide will appear, prompting you to create your first subscription plan. This plan will be available as a subscription option in your store.
  • Creating Your First Subscription Plan:
    • Plan Name: Initially, add a name to your plan under “Plan Title.” Note that this title is for internal use and won’t be visible to customers.
    • Purchase Options Title: This is what your customers will see. It should clearly describe the subscription or plan, helping customers understand the value and content of the subscription.
  • Selecting Products for Your Subscription: Choose products from your store’s catalog to include in the subscription plan. For demonstration purposes, we’ve selected a gift card, but you’re free to select any product(s). Multiple products can be included in a single subscription plan.
  • Discount & Delivery Options: Offer discounts to your customers based on the delivery frequency of your choice. You can set up various delivery frequencies and corresponding discounts to encourage more frequent purchases and loyalty.
  • Subscription Summary: On the right side of the setup page, you’ll find a “Summary” section. This provides an overview of your subscription plan, including selected products, discounts, and delivery settings. This section helps you review and ensure all details are correct before finalizing the plan.

subscription app setting

After setting up your subscription, follow these steps to integrate it into your store:

  • Add the Subscription Widget to Your Product Page: This allows customers to subscribe directly from product pages.
  • Customize the Widget: Adjust its style and text to match your store’s theme for a seamless look and feel.

For a step-by-step guide on adding and customizing the widget, check out our theme integration tutorial.

subscription app widget

Now we can see the subscribe purchase option on the product page –

About Subscription App Policy –

If you have set up a subscription, then a new purchase options cancellation policy is added to your store. This policy is linked in the checkout footer as a subscription policy. If the policy in the Shopify admin settings is blank, then a generated template is displayed to customers. Add or edit your store policies to update the subscription policy that’s displayed to your customers.

2. Products Variant Capacity – Opening the door to complex products.

Shopify has released a developer feature that people have been asking for years: they’ve increased the variant limit from the existing 100 variants to a staggering 2,000 variants. Currently, merchants are not allowed to create a product that creates more than 100 variants between all their product attribute combinations (size, color, and other product purchasing attributes). We know brands with diverse product lines who have shied away from Shopify because of this limitation. Now, this enhancement empowers businesses to showcase a broader range of product variations and not be limited to certain product attribute combinations on a product page.

Unfortunately, this increase will not be automatically built into Shopify admins but rather accessible via Shopify’s updated Product APIs. The feature is currently available in developer preview and is set to roll out to select merchants gradually throughout 2024. Even so, with this release, we see Shopify moving in the right direction and hope that, over time, this will become available on a larger scale.

3. Theme updates: Theme Blocks – Expanding theme flexibility

Perhaps the most exciting—albeit still yet to be released—feature mentioned in Editions is the nesting blocks functionality.

theme blocks in customizer

Developers working in the Liquid storefront can now define reusable atomic blocks and include them in multiple theme sections. They have their own schema that supports the application of HTML tags, classes, and merchant settings, among other things, and can even be nested inside other theme blocks!

theme blocks

To create a theme block, all you need to do is add a ‘block.liquid’ file to the /blocks folder of your theme. Sections and blocks can opt-in to receiving theme blocks as children in their schema and render them by using the new {% content_for blocks %} liquid tag. Similar to presets in sections today, block presets allow you to define as many starting points for each individual theme block as you want, including multiple configurations of nested blocks. This makes it easy to create many starting points by reusing the same blocks.

Pulling theme blocks out of sections and giving them their own home is step one in the vision toward a more flexible editing experience. Theme blocks make a ton of sense to us. Building small, reusable blocks is a foundational part of developing software, and it’s great to see Shopify extend those principles to the storefront.

Theme blocks are in developer preview right now, which means you need to create a new development store in the Partner dashboard with the Theme block preview enabled to try them out. Also, check out the reference theme, which covers theme block structures and files.

Now is the time to harness these advancements and enhance your store’s performance to drive conversions. Whether you’re delving into subscription models, broadening your product range, or refining your theme with blocks, seize the opportunity to prepare for these changes.

Keep an eye out for further updates as these features evolve and redefine the future of commerce on Shopify. For assistance in implementing these updates, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. We’re here to support your eCommerce success.

jQuery not defined – Gravity Forms

Some solutions are given here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23786388/js-error-on-gravity-forms

If we are embedding gravity form in template files and form is outside wp loop, then we need to call gravity_form_enqueue_scripts( $form_id, $is_ajax ); function to force stylesheets and scripts to load in the header.
Documentation: https://docs.gravityforms.com/gravity_form_enqueue_scripts/

Marriage

I was going through some articles on medium and I came across this article.

I am quoting some paragraphs from the article because I believe this is so true and I should keep this in my mind always

Marriage will not always make you happy, but it will do something even better. It will give you an opportunity to find happiness in peace, in letting go, in learning what’s worth fighting for, in figuring out how to love an imperfect person, in seeing what commitment is and what compromise feels like.

Marriage won’t do the work for you. That work is yours—always and forevermore. The real work is not about finding the right person. It’s about becoming the right person.

8 Hours Sleep

I have been working on a night shift for last five years. And sleeping during daytime is not as relaxing as we sleep at night. But to my surprise, I slept continuous 8 hours in last two days (it rarely happens)! and it was really kinda achievement for me. Very much relaxing and refreshing! After a very long time, I got this much long sleep (without any interruption).

Night Shifts and My Team

I’ve been working in night shifts for past 4.5 years and looks like now I’ve become habitual. I don’t feel sleepy during night (If I have got good sleep during my daytime). Things are going fine with me so far but my new team members are struggling to work in night shift. I really love my team members because everyone in my team is so much hardworking and dedicated. And I feel bad as they are falling sick. In recent one month, half of my team was struggling with health issues due to night shift. I am trying to adjust their working hours like few hours their local time and remaining hours on PST. But with this schedule, I get myself alone at PST hours and get so much pressure to work on multiple things at the same time (because no help (team members) available at that time). Confused what to do 🙁

Difficult Decision

Firing/Letting someone go is one of the most difficult decisions for management. Today I sent a goodbye email to one of our developers. I tried to be very much polite and positive and also explained about the reason of this difficult decision.

I give enough chances to team member to improve and even work with them to improve their skills, offer learning sessions over weekends and try my best to keep them in the team. But if team member does not show enthusiasm and willingness to improve, we had to take this decision. 🙁

When You Realize You need a break

Today, I was reading a blog post “Surviving Burnout” on dev-human.io. After reading that blog post, I realized that breaks are so very much important in life. And the very fact you should learn how to say no in life, politely though. It has been more than three years since I went out for a long vacation or a sabbatical for that matter. I have simply been coding and working on projects continuously (even during the weekends) to achieve the work deadlines. But I guess, amidst all this, we must realize that the run for these deadlines is never really going to come to a standstill.

I remember the time when having hundreds of assigned to-dos used to give me a lot of stress. No matter how hard I tried to finish all those to-dos and managed to bring those hundreds to few, but after 2-3 weeks it would all be same again. However after reading this post, I realized that I share one of the three symptoms that were mentioned in the post, i.e., “Forgetfulness.” Since I am a web developer turned into a Team Leader & Manager, I would struggle hard with managing my things, calendar events, note takings, and writing training process for employees etc,. Also owing to my work responsibilities (where I have to manage different team members and different teams), I would skip my important dates and prioritized tasks or would end up forgetting and assigning tasks to my team members. I often wondered if it was due to my bad management, but I believe that my forgetfulness had been contributing to it as a significant reason. I first kept on ignoring this for a few weeks, and then soon did I realize (actually after a few months, to be honest) that – this was certainly something that I could not afford to ignore. Because it was not only creating problems in my professional life, but was also affecting me as a person.

I soon visited a doctor, and he advised me to sleep properly and even gave me some medicines to ease the condition. However in midst of all, I realized that the medicines were not the things that I ever needed, I just needed the sleep (a good sleep, I’d say). As the time passed by, I started feeling better and my management skills were soon improved by a great extent. Not just that, I was also getting better at defeating my forgetfulness. But I do realize this very fact now that whenever I take too much of stress or make myself buried with too much of work, those symptoms tend to crawl back. I do admit however that I tend to spend too much time in front of my workstation.

Anyways, after reading that blog post, I feel that I should bring some changes to my work style or tweak it to a level. And I should finally learn to say no. And, and… I should seriously stop getting stressed due to too much of my work.

It’s like – instead of doing everything by myself and hesitating to delegate difficult tasks to my team members, I should try to trust them some more and should delegate tasks to my team members. And yeah, communicate more and more with people within the society.