Shopify Lowers Developer Fees, Upgrades Checkout, Gateway Options

Shopify has rolled out several new updates to its shopping platform, including reducing the developer revenue share to 0 percent for the first $1 million the companies earn annually, a press release says.

That’s a decrease from the 20 percent developers had to pay before, and will go into effect as of August 1.

The other changes include adding more customization options to the stores so that merchants can showcase brands in new ways and integrate apps, adding “Theme Stores” and developer tools.

Another update is the introduction of Payments Platform, a way to integrate third-party payment gateways into the checkout process. This increased flexibility for customers is designed to increase sales for merchants.

There’s also the effort Shopify has made to get its GraphQL Storefront API expanded across the world, with the release saying the company has expanded hosting regions to every continent, which will allow for faster response times.

And the release says there will be a new feature called Hydrogen, which will let developers make custom storefronts. There’s also Oxygen, which will be the hosting platform for custom storefronts.

Shopify has also added new support for Metafields, allowing merchants to add their own attributes to things such as products or product variants — and the company plans to add more options for customers and orders later in the year.

Shopify will also be adding “custom content” features, letting merchants store content of any format in Shopify.

And checkout will be sped up, with the shops to gain the capacity to handle “tens of thousands” of purchases per minute, according to the release. There will also be new features allowing customizing at checkout for companies.

In terms of companies cutting down their revenue share fees, Google recently did the same thing, PYMNTS writes, with the firm planning to lower its fee to 15 percent for each company’s first $1 million per year, as of July 1. This option will be available to all developers regardless of size or revenue. Sameer Samat, Google VP of Product Management, said 99 percent of developers around the world will see a 50 percent reduction in fees.