E-commerce giant Shopify has launched a number of new features in the UK and Europe via its Summer 24 Edition with improvements in payments, the way discounts are applied, and more AI functionality.

Shopify POS Terminal has been developed for merchants with physical retail stores and aims “to break down any barriers when buying from the same brand from different channels”. Following the earlier debut of POS Go, an all-in-one mobile device “for reliable, fast and simple on-the-floor selling”, POS Terminal is a new payment hardware solution with a fully-featured customer display that guides shoppers through the buying process in-store. 

The company said that “across both POS Go and POS Terminal, retailers can offer one-tap digital receipts to all Shop Pay users, and easily capture additional information at checkout, such as email or the staff member who made the sale”.

It’s also introducing the ability to apply discounts to a cart in-store with POS. Through Combined Discounts, merchants have the flexibility to add multiple order discounts, product or shipping deals to the cart all at once. 

And there’s a feature to enhance in-store promotional activities further with ‘buy X get Y discounts’ using POS. The company said “this feature addresses the challenge merchants face of creating more personalised and engaging promotions that offer incremental opportunities beyond traditional discount tools. By setting up BXGY discount codes as smart grid tiles for easy access during the checkout process, they can streamline operations and provide a seamless customer experience in-store”.

The company has also rebuilt its analytics solutions to work “harder, smarter, faster and more intuitively for merchants, providing them with insights in real-time”. Each card on a merchant’s dashboard is “powered by a detailed pre-built Shopify report, [so] merchants can quickly answer their most frequent questions, such as week-on-week sales comparisons, or average order value changes during a promotion”.

Plus it has built “a unified command centre with Markets”. It said that over a quarter of its merchants are based in EMEA and account for 6% of all e-commerce in the top five EMEA markets. So it’s “reimagining the Markets solution from the ground up. Markets will act as a merchant’s central command centre within the Shopify Admin that enables businesses to expand via cross-border, B2B or physical retail selling through POS, all from a single location”. 

And it’s “embracing AI” as well, rolling out new features to its AI image generation feature in Media Editor. It can now seamlessly modify media in the Online Store Editor, Email Editor and across the Shopify Admin, and extend functionality into the Shopify Mobile App.

Meanwhile, Shopify Magic avoids the time and human error involved in manually tagging products. It’s designed to “instantly suggest personalised and intelligent recommendations for merchants’ product attributes [and] will auto-populate relevant form fields”.

Part of this includes the new Suggested Replies feature that “creates a pre-written AI generated response that merchants can review, edit and approve, saving them time and bringing the customer closer to a sale”.