At its Unite 2021 merchants conference, not only did Shopify unveil its vision for the future of ecommerce but the company also announced its largest set of platform investments to date.
The ecommerce giant scales with merchants at every stage of their business as it believes a merchant should never have to replatform to achieve their desired tech stack, business logic or buyer experience. For this reason, Shopify has decided to further invest into API-powered storefronts so that developers can quickly unlock its feature-rich platform.
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At the same time though, the company has expanded its ecommerce hosting regions to every continent and Shopify commerce logic is now running in over 100 plus server locations that will directly serve API requests for custom storefronts.
With these additional server locations, online stores created on its platform along with its GraphQL Storefront API can now be accessed within just 50 milliseconds by every buyer on Earth.
Building and hosting custom storefronts
Shopify also previewed Hydrogen which is a new React framework that aims to simplify the experience of building custom storefronts. It does this by including commerce-specialized components such as a shopping cart, variant picker and media gallery that help to remove the complexity of building custom storefronts so developers can instead focus on building experiences that make brands stand out.
At Unite 2021, Shopify also previewed a new way to host Hydrogen storefronts directly on its platform called Oxygen which is fast, global and optimized for ecommerce.
CEO of Shopify Tobi Lütke provided further insight on the company's recent infrastructure and platform investments in a press release, saying:
“The internet is the world’s largest city, and Shopify is building its commerce infrastructure. Especially over the past year, we saw independent businesses succeed by showing up creatively and uniquely in this city. The future of commerce on the internet relies on creative expression at every touchpoint. Together with developers, we are building the infrastructure to make this possible.”
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