🧠 Smarter fulfillment with order routing

Good day! This is Shop Pulse, on a scenic ride through the e-commerce landscape. Fewer updates to cover compared to last week but it’s a ride you don’t want to miss! Here’s what’s up this week

• Smarter fulfillment with order routing 🧠

• Creator economy on Shopify 🛍️

• Disappointing news for Shopify partners 😞

Smarter fulfillment with order routing

Shopify shipped a sh*t ton of features and improvements last week. We couldn’t cover all of it but among the ones that deserve a callout is the sleeper launch of smart order routing.

Smart order routing is a killer feature for anyone with multiple fulfillment centers (generally a Shopify Markets user). It will route an order to a specific fulfillment center(s) based on the routing rules set by you.

You can choose from the 4 prioritization rules out of the box:

1. Ship from closest location - Reduces shipping and delivery time

2. Stay within destination market - Avoid customs & duties by shipping from the same market instead of the closest location

3. Minimize split fulfillments - Fulfill orders in the least number of packages

4. Use ranked locations - Prioritize shipping from warehouses instead of storefronts, for example.

This feature will be available on your dashboard once you set up 2 or more active locations (retail stores, warehouses, popups, etc.) for your inventory.

This seems to be a powerful new feature to help brands automate their fulfillment process to lower shipping costs, prevent customs and duties, and improve delivery times for their customers.

Creator economy on Shopify

High-profile creators are increasingly recognizing Shopify as the premier destination for launching their personal stores.

Mr Beast, the most recognizable Youtuber ever, has relaunched his merch store, on Shopify - that too while using a free theme called Publisher!

Grammy-winning artist, Drake, has also chosen Shopify (again) to unveil his new store, 'Drake Related'.

These launches goes to show Shopify's dominance in the e-commerce space. With the rapid pace of shipping new features and improvements, ease-of-use and ability to provide seamless shopping experiences, Shopify is not just the perfect choice, but it’s the only choice.

Perhaps this meme shared by Harley earlier this week sums up the sentiment best.

Disappointing news for Shopify partners

The much-anticipated Shopify Unite is no more.

At least not how we once knew it.

In case you’ve been living under a rock or are new to the Shopify ecosystem, Unite was THE event. It was the go-to place for meeting fellow Shopify app developers, agencies, and even the Shopify team in person.

Shopify have confirmed that Unite will no longer be held in physical locations and will be transformed into a virtual event in early 2024. This is a departure from their vision just one year earlier where Unite was going to go from one big event at one location to branching out into smaller events at multiple locations.

There is a glimmer of hope though since the official announcement states that “we’ll continue to share opportunities to connect IRL, starting with some new formats coming soon”.

In the meantime, community members are stepping up to organize their own physical events to fill the hole left by Unite’s departure.

Here’s hoping we get to meet up in person soon!

Pulse Check ⚡️

1. Overstock buys Bed, Bath & Beyond’s IP & digital assets for $21.5 million, then rebrands itself to Bed, Bath & Beyond.

2. Shopify’s search and discovery app can now work with headless (that’s still a thing?!) stores.

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)