Shopify redesigned the home feed of its Shop App to create a swipeable shopping experience, curated for each shopper based on their interests and the brands they follow.
President Harley Finkelstein wrote:
“The experience has been fully redesigned. Virtual window-shopping, curated for each individual shopper. Shopping should feel immersive. It should tell a story. It should feel inspiring. With the new feed, we’re putting shoppable video front and center. That means: More storytelling. More personality. Shop has always been about making buying easier and selling simpler. Now it’s becoming something more. We're making Shop the definitive destination for discovery. And it looks incredible.”
Does it actually look incredible?
For now, I give it a solid “meh” because it just feels like a swipeable product grid without the entertainment. In order to turn Shop App into an actual TikTok Shop-like discovery-focused shopping experience — if that's what they want to do — it needs merchants to upload short form videos, and that might take some incentivizing.
Wait, but doesn't the feed “put shoppable video front and center”?
Yes, but every video I saw was either a product shot video without a story or Shopify merely placing a vertically cropped version of the merchant's cover video behind a carousel product grid. That's not the type of video content that keeps people swiping.
This current version of Shop App feels less like “storytelling” and “personality” and more like “swiping through thumbnails of products I'm not interested in.”
Also, while we're talking about the UI: Shopify, why is there a permanently affixed back button on the home feed in the bottom left corner that leads to nowhere? Hide that button until I click forward. And where did the Search bar go? Search is out, videos are in?
Remember when Amazon tried to build a TikTok clone?
Amazon launched the Inspire feed in September 2022, which featured vertical TikTok-style short-form video feed within the Amazon mobile app to help drive product discovery. The new Shop App home feed feels like a worse version of that.
Inspire eventually shut down over lack of interest. Turns out people don't just want to scroll shopping videos all day. They like them mixed into their entertainment content as well.
Back then I wrote about Inspire:
“A big difference though between Inspire and those other apps is that users are gravitating towards TikTok and IG for all sorts of entertainment — not just shopping — and then discovering products as part of the overall experience. Whereas Inspire is a predominantly product-based feed with no other types of entertainment.”
It feels that the Shop App has followed a similar path as Inspire, and may be headed towards the same fate. Not to say that the Shop App is going anywhere, as it serves multiple purposes, but I don't imagine that the home feed will look like this a year from now, as it's not a good experience.