As a Shopify Partner* I get advance news about the latest developments on the ever-growing e-commerce platform.

There’s a couple that have really stood out for me, in particular because they will prove to be game-changers for some of my clients.

1. B2B

The first is a powerful B2B extension to the standard DTC (direct to consumer) platform. They’ve been testing it for 6 months and have now made it a standard feature AND it’s available in the UK.

So let’s see why this will be so important.

Imagine you’re selling a food product and there are two strands to your business: consumers and professionals. You know the big money is in selling to the trade, whether that’s executive chefs, food retailers or catering wholesalers. But you need consumers to prove that your product is something people want. You have to be able to sell to both.

Imagine that you are managing your inventory in Shopify and this works absolutely perfectly whenever anyone buys anything on your online store (and through your POS if you use it). But what happens when you made a great trade deal? Each time your customer makes a purchase you have to put through a manual order for them to make sure the inventory keeps track. What if they order something that’s out of stock? Do you manage two inventories?

Not any more!

Now that Shopify has released this new B2B feature, it can all happen completely seamlessly. Trade customers can have accounts, bespoke terms, re-ordering made easy, reminders and so on. And you can even run inventory forecasting to ensure you will have enough stock to meet demand.

There is just one catch, the B2B feature is only available on Shopify Plus so it’s for businesses ready to scale or start-ups with great investment. But as it’s a part of the platform that enables scalability it really will be a game-changer for many.

2. YouTube sales channel

This would work so well for products where instructional videos are a key part of the customer experience. This could be a food product like the example above, or a beauty or cosmetics product where there is plenty of scope for content creation. Any business that naturally lends itself to video content will really benefit from being able to tag and sell their products in YouTube. It’s one of the number one places people still go when searching ‘how to’ and, like other channels, you want to make it super easy for them to buy the product that you’re demonstrating right?

There’s loads more developments in the latest release of Shopify* but these two caught my eye and I’m really looking forward to implementing them in my clients’ stores soon!