Developer previews

When a new feature is accompanied by a backwards-incompatible change to our APIs, or a significant change to the online store or Shopify admin, it is included in a developer preview. You can then test the feature by creating a new development store and enabling the developer preview from your Partner Dashboard.

Each developer preview can include several new features. When you enable a developer preview, you select the preview that includes the features that you want to have access to.

To learn more about development stores, their features and limitations, and how to enable a developer preview, refer to Create a development store.

For backwards-incompatible changes, the timeline for developer previews is tied to the API release schedule. When a stable version introduces a backwards-incompatible change, the feature associated with the change won't be available to a merchant's Shopify admin until 9 months later, when that version of the API is the oldest supported stable version. So you have 9 months to preview a feature and prepare for it before it is released to merchants. To learn more about the API release schedule, see Shopify API versioning.

Shopify Markets is a cross-border management tool that helps merchants identify, set up, launch, optimize, and manage their international markets - all from a single store. With the developer preview, new development stores can access Shopify Markets.

You can test this feature with a Shopify Markets developer preview store. After setting up your Shopify Markets developer preview store, you can access Shopify Markets by going to Settings > Markets.

Learn more about Shopify Markets.

Learn how to create a development store.

Hydrogen is a front-end web development framework used for building Shopify custom storefronts. It includes the structure, components, and tooling you need to get started so you can spend your time styling and designing features that make your brand unique.

The Hydrogen developer preview offers the following:

• Preview experience: You can explore a preview experience of Hydrogen on an online integrated development environment.

• Templates: Hydrogen provides the following templates to help you get started:

  • Hello World: A minimal template for developers who want to build their Hydrogen storefront from the very beginning
  • Demo Store: A full-featured template that demonstrates an opinionated, production-ready Hydrogen storefront with the full purchase journey out-of-the-box

• Shopify-specific components, hooks, and utilities for commerce : They're accessible, performant, and ready for use. They also help to reduce the initial complexity and boilerplate needed for building a custom storefront.

The Shopify Plus Global Nav developer preview enables you to test how your embedded apps will look on Shopify Plus stores that feature our global navigation.

By testing your app with the global navigation preview, you can see how your app behaves in a smaller viewport and make sure it's compatible with Shopify Plus shops.

Refer to our guide on how to embed your app within the Shopify Admin using App Bridge.

Learn more from our community forum.

Learn how to create a development store.

The Localization Extensions developer preview enables you to use the GraphQL Admin API to return a tax ID that was collected during checkout.

You can test this feature with a Localization Extensions developer preview store.

Learn how to use the GraphQL Admin API to return a tax ID collected during checkout.

Learn more about localization extensions through our community forum.

Learn how to create a development store.

The Duties and Taxes developer preview gives your development store the ability to charge duties calculated by Shopify during checkout, which avoids surprise charges for customers upon delivery.

Using the 2020-04 version or higher of our REST or GraphQL Admin APIs, you can fetch duty amounts charged on international orders through checkout. Using the GraphQL Admin API, you can create refunds that include the duty on an entire order or individual line items.

Refer to our guide on how to use duties using the GraphQL API.

Learn more about duties through our community forum.

Learn how to create a development store.

For our Shopify Unite 2019 annual developer conference, we released a special edition of developer preview, which included the following features:

• New online store design experience

• Order editing

• Support for 3D and video media for products

• Selling in multiple languages

• Tax exemptions

• New fulfillment workflows

• Shipping profiles

Going forward, all developer previews will be published as needed. You can learn about the features in each developer preview in the API version release notes.

The fulfillment service SKU sharing developer preview gives fulfillment service apps the ability to stock and fulfill product variants alongside a merchant's locations.

This preview introduces the permits_sku_sharing parameter when creating or updating a fulfillment service. Setting permits_sku_sharing to true allows the merchant to assign fulfillment orders to both the merchant's locations and compatible fulfillment services.

When a fulfillment service app sets permits_sku_sharing to true, some existing behaviour will break. When a product variant's fulfillmentService parameter (REST & GraphQL) is set to manual, it no longer means that the variant is stocked only at a merchant-managed location. Therefore, apps that use the fulfillmentService parameter in this way should instead use the location parameter on the Fulfillment Order resource to determine which location or fulfillment service fulfills a given product variant.

Learn more about the building a fulfillment service app using fulfillment orders.

Learn more about managing fulfillment orders using the GraphQL Admin API and the REST Admin API.