About v8.0 release

The new Broadcast 8.0 release introduces several new features to improve your merchandising and store settings. Here are some of the updates and changes you'll see in Broadcast by category.

Sections

We are excited to announce the addition of three new sections to our theme, designed to enhance your experience and provide more options to merchandise your store:

Collection links: Spotlight

A dynamic new section designed to visually engage your shoppers and seamlessly guide them to your top product collections.

The collection image changes when you hover over the collection links with an animated transition. For desktop shoppers, clicking on the link will direct them to the collection page.

On mobile, tapping on the collection name changes the image. A call-to-action button is placed over the image:

This new section is all about creating a smoother, more visual path to purchase:

• Elevated Browsing: The instant image change provides a richer, more interactive browsing experience that has been proven to capture attention more effectively than static links alone.

• Clearer Path to Purchase: By visually connecting your collections to their best imagery, you make it immediately clear what a shopper will find when they click, reducing friction and encouraging exploration.

• Feature Your Best: Use the prominent image placement to highlight your must-have products, best sellers, or seasonal collections.

Social video

We've introduced the Social video section—a powerful, dedicated space for you to showcase engaging, real-life product videos. Hover over the video to instantly play the video. The badge button lets you control the playback and display a social profile address:

This section is designed to integrate the powerful social proof of video directly into your shop, helping customers feel more confident in their purchase decisions:

• Boost Shopper Confidence: By featuring authentic videos. Demonstrate to potential buyers how your products look and perform in real-life settings. This transparency helps build user confidence and trust in your brand, often leading to better conversion rates.

• Broadcast uses Shopify-supported .MOV and .MP4 formats directly to this section. Note: Videos are uploaded to your Shopify store and are not streamed from external social platforms.

This section offers the best of both worlds. Upload high-quality, branded videos that are specifically designed to look and feel like popular social reels. By pairing your own professional content with the familiar video format and an optional social handle in the Badge text, you effectively leverage social trends while maintaining full control over your brand messaging.

Section settings

Customize the overall presentation using Broadcast's many section options, including:

• Text size and alignment for any introductory text.

• Layout settings, including full-width padding.

• Video aspect ratio to match your video content style, suitable for both wide and tall videos.

• Display style on desktop and mobile, letting you choose between a classic Grid or a swipeable Slider.

• SEO heading tag setting for the optional section heading.

Banner with video (overlay)

A visual way to show off the brand's personality. This new banner section lets you place a video over top of your main banner to add some animation without occupying the entire banner space:

A modern design element to showcase your brand. Use the section settings to completely customize the section layout and elements.

Add common blocks to include optional messaging or call-to-action buttons:

Product pages

In this release (Version 8.0), Broadcast now fully supports Shopify's new API changes for handling products with a high number of variants (e.g., more than 250 variants or combined listings).

High variants

Historically, themes would attempt to load all product variants at once, which caused significant slowdowns, especially on product pages for merchants with a large inventory of options.

Broadcast 8.0 directly addresses those performance issues:

• Faster Product Pages: By adopting Shopify’s new, optimized variant APIs, Broadcast no longer requires loading every single variant at once. This results in significantly faster load times for product pages that have many color, size, or material combinations.

• This enhancement ensures that your store is prepared for Shopify’s increased variant limits, allowing you to confidently scale your inventory and product complexity without sacrificing site speed or the shopper experience.

• Seamless Shopping: Your customers will enjoy a smoother browsing experience, especially with complex products, resulting in reduced customer frustration and higher conversion rates.

For Developers & Agencies: We have audited and updated all theme code that previously relied on loading a complete list of variants via the legacy product.variants Liquid object, ensuring full compatibility with the new, performant API structure.

Quick Add

We've added the Mini-button back as an option for mobile devices in Broadcast 8.0. Now, you can choose between a mini-button and a regular, full-sized button.

• The "Mini-button" displays a smaller, shopping bag icon:

• The "Button" option will display a full-sized button in the product card:

In the Broadcast 8.0 Theme Settings, you can toggle between the two choices under "Mobile style".

Theme settings → Product grid → Quick add

Try Broadcast 8.0

For additional examples and to try Broadcast for free, visit our demo stores and download the latest version of Broadcast:

Shopify Theme Store - Broadcast

Existing customers can update for free. To preserve your live published theme, use the Shopify Update tool. The update tool will download an additional theme to your theme library and only copy the settings from your live theme. This is the safest and easiest method of updating your theme.