Smarter analytics with Shopify Benchmarks 🧠

Welcome to Shop Pulse, where we serve up the freshest Shopify and e-commerce news faster than your favorite online store's next-day delivery! Here’s what we got for you this week:

• 🧠 Smarter analytics with Shopify Benchmarks

• ⬆️ Checkout gets an upgrade

• 🎨 Is another App Store redesign coming soon?

🧠 Smarter analytics with Shopify Benchmarks

Shopify has just dropped a new feature that is a game-changer for all the data nerds working at big brands - Shopify Benchmarks

Benchmarks are industry-specific metrics that help you gauge your store's performance compared to similar businesses in the same industry.

Shopify Benchmarks are based on cohorts of stores with similar order volume, primary market, and product categories sold in the past 30 days.

The first iteration of Benchmarks covers online store conversion, average order value, retention rate, and time to fulfill, ship, and deliver.

With this feature, Shopify is tapping into its power - data from millions of merchants on Shopify. This way, you can make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts and resources rather than relying on generic industry standards.

Shopify Benchmarks is available to all stores except in Europe, as long as you have sold at least 1 product in that category and assuming there are enough similar stores in your cohort for a meaningful benchmark.

⬆️ Checkout gets an upgrade

Shopify first confirmed one-page checkout earlier this year in their Winter Edition ‘23 on February 9th.

Almost 3 months on, we are now seeing the early rollout of this as more and more brand owners are confirming this on Twitter.

There are also a couple of important updates coming to checkout extensibility.

1/ New checkout UI components: Date Picker to help build customization for specific delivery dates, and Disclosure to create UX that shows more information about products.

2/ Checkout branding: Support for custom fonts which are also applied across checkout, customer accounts and UI extensions to keep the checkout experience consistent.

Checkout is only going to get better from here on out!

🎨 Is another App Store redesign coming soon?

Heads up Shopify app devs, this one is for you.

The Shopify developer changelog has an announcement about an update to “search relevance” on the Shopify App Store which is likely to affect your search rankings.

This updated algorithm will rank apps higher that merchants find most relevant and reduce the impact of keyword stuffing.

Though the change was first announced in a blog post dated February 27th, the changelog entry of April 26th hints that the new Shopify App Store algorithm might only now be taking effect.

Driving external traffic to your app store listing could be even more crucial now. Trending apps with traction are likely to rank higher! 📈

With the “Built for Shopify” status launch to be expected soon, this seems like the first step that suggests Shopify might be redesigning the app store again.

Pulse Check ⚡️

1. Shopify Collabs has launched an onboarding update with new features including a dashboard view, brand profile setup, and Collabs Network to share products and brand profiles with creators.

2. Shopify and Melio have launched a bill pay tool for US merchants that helps manage expenses and vendors, allowing merchants to put time back into their business

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)