Shopify Unite is Shopify's biggest annual event, where Shopify's updates are announced and various events for partners are held. Following last year, this year's event was held online only due to COVID. Here's a brief summary of the main topics.

"Shopify is growing by leaps and bounds. In 2020, over 450 million people made payments on Shopify, generating approximately $120 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV)."

App Store Fee

• 0% commission on sales under $1M starting August 1, 2021
• A one-time registration fee will be charged upon app registration.

Online Store 2.0

• A wider range of store modifications possible without modifying code
• A new set of developer features including sections on every page, a new editor, and theme app extensions
• New default theme Dawn released
• Expanding hosting regions to all regions with CDN logic running on 100+ servers, hosting platform Oxygen to be launched in the future
• Ability to add metafields and custom content properties themselves

Shopify Checkout Extension

• Process tens of thousands of purchases per minute for any store with Shopify Checkout
• Added Checkout extension to allow developers to build apps securely
• Easily build your own checkout experience with Shopify Plus
• Launch of a payments platform that provides merchants with new sales growth opportunities by integrating third-party payment gateways into Shopify Checkout

Developer-Entrepreneurs

• Developer Console Released
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub Integration
• Updated App Store search functionality and introduced app advertising

Storefront API update

• Multi-currency, store pickup, meta field updates
• Storefront API schema update

Hydrogen

• Launching a development kit with React components