Shopify has been busy shipping!

Greetings! This is Shop Pulse - the Shopify newsletter that is more refreshing than the first sip of coffee in the morning, and less bitter.

Shopify has been quite busy in the previous week, shipping a whole bunch of updates for both merchants and developers. Jump to the section you’re more interested in 👇️ 

• Merchant updates roundup

• Developer updates roundup

Merchant updates roundup

Code editor insights

The code editor now proactively spots errors and potential issues in your theme code. This will help merchants tackle issues before they impact their business.

Redesigned staff permissions

The permission selector has been redesigned which can help merchants find specific permissions or even bulk-select them based on the category. Merchants can now also grant granular access to specific apps, which wasn’t available before.

Unified media library

Shopify is working towards media centralization with unified files and content. All your media will be visible in one place where you can see where it’s being used, when it was added and its size. This will speed up the process of updating any assets since you just have to change them in one place!

New fields in Shopify Flow

A whole bunch of new workflows are now possible with PurchasingEntity and DiscountApplications. For example, you can check if a Scripts discount was applied to an order or which company placed an order.

Increased dynamic sources

Dynamic sources allow you to show specialized information on your store like part numbers, release dates, product ratings, etc. The number of these dynamic sources has now been increased from 50 to 100 for templates and from 20 to 50 for static sections.

Asset URLs to be served from store’s domain

Shopify is updating the URL format of assets (images, JS and CSS) to shop.example.com/cdn/… from cdn.shopify.com/…

This will improve page load times on the order of hundreds of milliseconds (that’s a lot!), better security and less Shopify branding on merchant domains.

Developer updates roundup

Theme check in code editor

This is the theme dev equivalent of the code editor insights update for merchants. Shopify says these can identify issues like parser blocking scripts, inconsistencies between translation files and missing templates.

Limit increase for Shopify functions

This is a massive improvement for any app devs working with Functions. The maximum size of the input query has been increased to 64,000 bytes from just 3000 bytes earlier. You can also access upto 10,000 bytes of metafield value, which is a 10X increase!

In other words, apps using Functions can now store many more configurations instead of having to create hacky workarounds for the earlier limitations.

Merchant Asset URLs update

This is the dev-specific information from the Asset URLs update covered in the merchant section above. Devs need to make sure that their app or theme code is free of any hard-coded assumptions of the old URL format of cdn.shopify.com/

Read / Write for Dependabot secrets

Shopify’s GitHub app will now request read and write permissions for Dependabot secrets which will allow Dependabot to trigger preview deployments on Oxygen.

Developers will find this super helpful as they can quickly validate whether or not automated updates can be safely merged.

Pulse Check ⚡️

1. Postscript launches SMS Sales - a 2 way conversational SMS sales channel with a human touch.

2. African payment service provider Nomba raises $30M, backed by Base10 Partners and Shopify

3. Previous youngest Billionaire Austin Russell owns Forbes

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)