Commerce platform Shopify is releasing new features for its Winter Edition rollout, including an AI-powered media editor to enhance product images, improved semantic search and a better way for merchants to showcase different variants of a product.
Many companies, including Meta, Google and Amazon, have allowed advertisers to generate backgrounds using generative AI since last year. Similarly, Shopify wants to help merchants edit their product images’ backgrounds and scenes using this tech. In the Magic Media Editor, merchants can select a type from seven styles — Minimal, Vibrant, Natural, Urban, Regged, Refined and Surreal — or type a prompt to generate a new background.
Apart from this, merchants can match an image’s background style with an existing image to maintain brand consistency. The tool can also remove unwanted backgrounds from the images.
Shopify has experimented with generative AI-based tools for merchants in the past. Last June, it launched the Sidekick bot to help merchants navigate different parts of the platform.
The company is also rolling out a semantic search, which goes beyond matching keywords from the search query. For example, a customer can ask a query like “warm clothes for winter” to get various results of thermal wear.
Shopify is also rolling out tools for better merchandising, so merchants can showcase different variants of a product. The company said that based on the change of variables, the product creation and classification tool supports 2,000 variants.
The company has also launched a new app for combined listings to manage that. The app, available for Shopify Plus customers, allows sellers to maintain unique descriptions, galleries and URLs for different variants of products.
Additionally, Shopify is launching headless storefronts — where businesses can use different custom front-end solutions while using Shopify-specified APIs to access a back end — for B2B merchants.
Shopify raked in $1.7 billion in revenue with a 25% year-on-year growth for Q3 2023. The company laid off 20% of its staff (more than 2,000 people) in June 2023 and sold its logistics business to Flexport in exchange for 13% stock.
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