Reels Rises as TikTok faces bans 🚫

Hello and welcome to Shop Pulse - your weekly source for the latest Shopify and e-commerce insights, delivered straight to your inbox like a perfectly timed flash sale.

Let's dive into this week's trending topics:

1. Reels rises as TikTok faces bans 🚫

2. Roundup - merchant feature updates ✨

3. Roundup - developer feature updates 👨🏻‍💻

Reels Rises as TikTok faces bans 🚫

Montana has become the first US state to ban TikTok amid growing concerns from governments worldwide.

As a wider ban looms large, Instagram seems to be solidifying its position by rolling out a bunch of new features for Reels:

1/ Trending Content on Reels 📈
Dedicated space for trending audio and hashtags on Instagram Reels to help creators to access popular content and stay current with trends.
2/ Gifts Monetization Expansion 🎁 
Instagram is expanding its Gifts monetization feature to more countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, New Zealand, and the UK.
3/ Enhanced Editing and Insights 👀
A unified editing tool to bring together audio, video, stickers and text for a much-improved editing experience. Along with new performance metrics for Reels like “total watch time” and “average watch time”.

What should you be on the lookout for as a brand? 🔍

1. With the expansion of gifts to more countries, you can incentivize user-generated content, drive product awareness, and build stronger creator relationships from even more countries.

2. The new “total watch time” and “average watch time” metrics will help you understand how well your content is performing, allowing you to fine-tune their content strategy and double down on what works.

3. Diversify your acquisition channels if you’re too leveraged on TikTok. With a potential US-wide ban being talked about, if you’re too dependent on TikTok, you are likely to feel a huge hit in the coming weeks.

Roundup - merchant feature updates ✨

1. Easily track discount statuses across sales channels

   Merchants could already sync discounts with specific sales channels. The new update allows you to check the status (synced, not synced, or inactive), so you can see which discounts require action at a glance.

2. Improved draft orders with tax info

   A very straightforward update that now calculates any duties and import taxes on draft orders, which makes it easier to sell internationally.

3. Markets Pro enhancements

   • Markets Pro has now expanded to 150+ countries.

   • Carrier rates will be corrected by Markets Pro using DHL Express rates in case of incompatible configurations.

Roundup - developer feature updates 👨🏻‍💻

1. Speed up development and testing with more test data

   New commerce primitives for gift cards, selling plans and meta fields will be populated for development stores. This should help remove the manual work of adding test data for these features.

2. Deep linking for theme app blocks

   Developers can now create deep links for their theme app blocks. In other words, a one-click link to quickly navigate to the app block in their theme preview.

3. Javascript comes to Functions

   Shopify has now started supporting writing Shopify functions using Javascript, earlier support was only in Rust. While Shopify can support any language that can be compiled into Web assembly, adding Javascript is still a huge plus for Shopify app devs since most of the developers in the ecosystem are familiar with Javascript.

Pulse Check ⚡️

1. Catch Shopify’s president Harley on a podcast with Greg Isenberg: Making the Most Out of Life and Business with the President of Shopify

2. Rob Solomon, founder of GoFundMe steps down as chairman and CEO and returns to digital commerce as co-founder and CEO of Kite

That's a wrap for this week! Join us over on Twitter to chat about all things e-commerce. It's like attending the coolest virtual shopping party – no long lines, pushy salespeople, or shopping cart collisions in sight (@theshoppulse)