Discover Shopify Hydrogen and Shopify Oxygen: The Future of Shopify Storefront

Read on to learn more about the endless possibilities, and how you can leverage these solutions to boost your ecommerce store’s performance.

Oxygen and Hydrogen empower developers and merchants to effortlessly create truly original online experiences for customers. These developments will define the future of ecommerce. In 2020, Shopify processed nearly $120 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume and had 450 million people go through a checkout. Once these new upgrades are fully rolled out, these numbers are expected to rise significantly.

With a completely redesigned and improved look for the platform, merchants can look forward to developing even more engaging websites. Indeed, custom Shopify development has been significantly simplified. These efforts will be further enhanced by the launch of new developer tools and substantial infrastructure investments. As a result, stores that are hosted on the platform will be much faster and a lot more user-friendly overall.

Let’s now look at the specifics of how Shopify Hydrogen and Shopify Oxygen will benefit merchants and developers.

Shopify Hydrogen
Shopify Hydrogen is a new React framework that allows developers to create genuinely unique custom Shopify storefronts. Hydrogen is built on both React and JavaScript and offers merchants powerful tools and components. This additional functionality allows you to build a memorable and distinctive store from the ground up.

These sophisticated tools also facilitate the development of ecommerce sites that are both lightning fast and remarkably dynamic. Shopify Hydrogen also consists of a rich catalogue of React components such as the shopping cart, variant picker, and content gallery. These exciting elements, which integrate seamlessly into any custom Shopify storefront, will compel customers to keep returning to your site.

Thanks to the Shopify Hydrogen framework, developers no longer need to worry about the complexities and pitfalls of customisations. Instead, they can now focus on what really matters: building effective and unforgettable store experiences.

Shopify Oxygen
Shopify Oxygen, the platform that will host custom Hydrogen storefronts, is also launching soon. Shopify has been heavily investing in its global infrastructure, which will provide Oxygen with over 100 server locations worldwide. Importantly, merchants who are using Oxygen and Hydrogen will have the ability to store any format of content on their stores. Keeping all data on one platform streamlines information retrieval.

As well as the exciting news about Oxygen and Hydrogen, Shopify announced a range of other developments that will come as good news to ecommerce merchants. This includes:

Online Store 2.0
Online Store 2.0 is the most comprehensive overhaul of Shopify’s Liquid template language ever. This has been introduced to make it even easier for merchants to develop bespoke features for their stores.

Support for Additional Metafields
Merchants will also receive extensive support for additional Metafields. This opens up more possibilities for adding custom attributes to products.

API-Powered Storefronts
Shopify is investing in API-powered storefronts, enabling Shopify programmers to utilise the feature-rich platform using their own framework and language.

Faster Checkout
Checkouts on Shopify have been enhanced, giving any store the potential to process tens of thousands of transactions per minute.

Shopify Scripts
Shopify scripts have been rebuilt, allowing Shopify development experts to design distinctive checkout processes for Shopify Plus brands.

Dawn: A New Open-Source Theme
Dawn is Shopify’s first open-source theme. It has been designed with the sophisticated new Online Store 2.0 features built in. Dawn is also 35% faster than Shopify’s most popular theme and will act as the new standard for theme development.