We are excited to announce the release of our latest Shopify theme, Paper v5.0.0. This update includes many exciting new features, enhancements, and bug fixes that will help you create a fantastic shopping experience for your customers. Let's take a closer look!
1. Enhanced cart options
Gain more control over your customers' shopping experience with new cart options. You can now customize cart actions, cart button functionality, and even include an optional "Continue shopping" button.
Now you can set different actions when customers add an item to their cart:
- Open drawer - this is the default, after adding to cart the slide-out drawer opens.
- Show cart alert - a bit more minimal and less intrusive approach. The cart alert is a small box that appears in the top right corner.
- Redirect to cart - after adding to cart customers are automatically redirected to the cart page. This is a great option if customers are typically only purchasing a single item. By redirecting customers to the cart page you are pushing them towards the checkout flow.
2. Clearly marked sold-out options
Enable sold-out indicators by using a new setting that displays a strike-through for sold-out options. This will help customers understand product availability at a glance, without having to click into each option.
3. Flexible section visibility
Customize the display of your store on both desktop and mobile devices by setting the visibility of each section. This powerful feature has been introduced for almost all sections. With this new setting, you can display different sections on mobile and desktop devices.
4. Customizable "Add-to-cart" text
You can now customize the "Add-to-cart" text on a product-by-product basis using metafields. This allows for variations such as "Pre-order" instead of the standard text.
5. Optional audio cues
Paper now offers a new optional feature that allows you to add thoughtful and subtle audio cues to create a unique app-like feel on your store. When customers add items to their cart, it's usually an exciting moment. With this update, we hope to improve that experience by adding a serotonin-boosting "click" sound.
We value your feedback and will continue to improve this feature. We may also explore additional customization options in the future.
6. Video support for the Collage section
The Collage section now supports videos. You can set the videos to autoplay and control the button visibility to toggle the sound on or off.
7. New header display options
New header options are being introduced. We now have a total of three. Choose from three main header options - Standard, Sticky, or Dynamic.
- Standard
- Sticky: will be visible at all times while scrolling
- Dynamic: will be shown while scrolling up and hidden while scrolling down
8. Improved size-chart options
With the updated product block, you can easily integrate an intuitive size guide alongside your product options. You can use this to open a drawer of content, which can be displayed alongside your option label.
9. New preset
Our newest Preset Play is now available. It has a more colorful vibe, specifically tailored to merchants who sell toys and children's products.
10. Higher lighthouse scoring
Before publishing this update, we spent some time polishing our Lighthouse score. Based on our testing, pages with simple content consistently score in the high 90s for accessibility and SEO ratings.
getting ready to submit our next theme update pic.twitter.com/pnUD6qPPMG
— Thomas (@kimurathomas) March 30, 2023
11. Upgraded sliders
Experience seamless navigation with theme sliders that now work with trackpads and mouses on desktop devices.
12. Revamped animations
Previously, we noticed that some content appeared almost broken, as there was a delay before things would animate into view.
Animations have been completely reworked. We believe that our original implementation was a bit too much, especially for the typical merchant using Paper. We’ve revised all our animations so that they are less intrusive and, in turn, improve the perceived performance of page loads.
13. Progress Bar with Currency Support
Our cart progress bar now works with currency conversions. If customers use the currency conversion the progress bar will also convert to a new number based on what you've set in the theme.
14. More resources for developers
As part of our v5.0.0 release we're also working on a number of additional resources geared towards developers. We want to make Paper the number 1 theme to use for agencies and Shopify experts. Our first step towards this mission is the release of the Paper toolkit. You can read more about this in our blog post: Customizing the Paper Shopify Theme as a Developer.
Take a look at our changelog for a for list of changes.
Founder, Brickspace Lab Thomas is the founder of Brickspace Lab, a Canadian-based digital agency that specializes in the design and development of Shopify themes. Thomas has worked with hundreds of Shopify clients and has spent many years in the depths of ecommerce.
