6 August 2026

Shopify Winter Editions 2026: Major Announcements

Shopify unveils its Winter Editions 2026, featuring major innovations in artificial intelligence, B2B, and the developer experience.

Our Shopify team has selected the most important announcements to help you grow your B2C, retail, and B2B businesses!

Sidekick: AI Integrated into Your Shopify Admin

Shopify is taking another step forward in AI integration with Sidekick, a smart assistant that transforms the day-to-day management of your Shopify store. Available for Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus plans, Sidekick offers a range of complementary features.

Custom Application Development

Describe your needs in natural language, and Sidekick will generate a custom app right in your admin panel. Need an app to identify products that need to be restocked based on your sales velocity? A tool to generate checkout links with discounts and QR codes? A system for personalized discounts for your VIP customers? Sidekick has you covered.

Please note: These applications work exclusively through the Admin API (orders, products, customers, discounts, content, analytics) and remain invisible to your end customers.

Workflow Automation

Building on its app-building capabilities, Sidekick simplifies the creation of your Shopify Flow automations. Describe your workflow in French, and the AI builds it automatically, saving you valuable time.

Smart Theme Editing

Right from within the theme editor, Sidekick becomes your design assistant. It can modify global settings, adjust colors, typography, and spacing, or even create a specific look (“Make my store look more vintage”). Changes are suggested in real time—it’s up to you to approve them.

Reusable Prompts (Skills)

For your recurring tasks, save your best prompts as “Skills” and reuse them with a single click: generating social media posts, writing product descriptions, sales reports, inventory forecasts… No more retyping prompts!

Skill Example: “Forecast sales for the next 90 days, including a table of expected orders, projected revenue, and reorder quantities.”

A Word from Our Experts

Shopify comes with a long list of built-in reports, and for the past few months, it’s been possible to request insights directly from Sidekick to generate KPIs or trends with a simple prompt! Shopify is stepping up its game and offering more and more features through Sidekick, including the ability to create apps and workflows without having to code.

Be careful, however: the code for the apps we’ve built isn’t accessible, and we believe this generation of apps should be tested in development environments and thoroughly verified with a developer or architect to ensure there are no unintended consequences.

This will save a lot of time when using the store, with the ability to trigger pre-recorded prompts on topics such as the following, for example:

Product Development Assistant

Complete Guide to Content Creation: SEO-Friendly Title, Description, and Metadata
Suggests relevant collections and tags

Automatic SEO Optimization

Analyzes and improves titles, descriptions, and image alt text
Generates optimized meta descriptions

Smart Inventory Management

Alerts for Out-of-Stock Items and Excess Inventory
Suggests restocks based on purchase history

Agentic Commerce: Your Products in AI Conversations

Availability: Coming soon

Shopify is launching “Agentic Storefronts,” a new way to showcase your products directly within conversations with AI agents. Your products become natively discoverable in ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity, with other channels coming soon.

This feature allows you to control how your brand is presented to millions of users who conduct searches via conversational assistants, thereby opening up an entirely new distribution channel.

Product distribution through AI agents will begin in France in a few months. Until then, we need to refine the content of our product listings so that they are indexed and directly available on AI platforms.

Here are a few steps you can take to improve your search engine optimization:

Rich, Structured Descriptions Write detailed descriptions using natural language, not just SEO content stuffed with keywords. AI understands context: “perfect for,” “ideal if,” “suitable for people who.”

Complete Metadata Fill in all the fields: clear title, vendor, product type, and relevant tags. AI systems rely on this structured data to filter and make recommendations.

FAQs and Rich Content Use metaobjects or product pages enriched with FAQs, care guides, and style tips. AI systems draw on this content to provide answers.

Rollouts

A/B Testing and Theme Planning

Availability: Coming soon

Shopify natively integrates A/B testing and theme change scheduling with “Rollouts.”

This new feature, accessible directly from the admin panel, lets you schedule theme changes and test different versions in real-world conditions, without requiring a third-party app.

This saves time and ensures reliability for your seasonal campaign launches and the ongoing optimization of your customer journeys.

SimGym: Test Your Website with AI Customers

The “Shopify SimGym” app revolutionizes the pre-launch testing phase. It simulates the behavior of real shoppers using AI agents that browse your store, analyze the user experience, and provide you with concrete recommendations before your store goes live. Based on billions of real Shopify purchase data points, SimGym identifies potential friction points and helps you optimize your conversions right from the start.

Quick editing from the Theme Editor

Shopify simplifies the workflow for content creators with direct editing from the theme editor. Edit your products, collections, markets, metafields, and other elements without leaving your workspace. This integration significantly streamlines day-to-day management and eliminates the need to switch back and forth between different sections of the admin panel.

POS Hub: Next-Generation iPad Hardware

Shopify introduces the POS Hub, the only hub designed specifically for Shopify Point of Sale. This new hardware connects multiple devices simultaneously to your iPad via reliable wired USB connections, permanently eliminating Bluetooth disconnection issues.

Technical Specifications:

Stable wired USB connections with built-in monitoring and automatic updates

Compatible with all Shopify card readers: POS Terminal, Tap & Chip, WisePad 3, and Chipper 2x

Apple MFi certification ensures performance, security, and compatibility

Keeps your iPad connected and charged during sales

iOS Updates Without Service Interruption

You can connect multiple wired USB devices to the iPad at the same time

A professional solution that meets the needs of retailers with high standards for point-of-sale reliability.

Marketing: Native Email and SMS in Shopify

Shopify now includes a comprehensive email and SMS marketing solution with flexible pricing tailored to e-commerce. Create and manage your campaigns directly from your admin panel, without the need for third-party apps.

Key Features:

Sending Segmented Emails and Text Messages from Shopify

Ready-to-use templates for your communications (updates, follow-ups, etc.)

Quickly create on-brand emails with Sidekick’s help

Embedding products that can be purchased directly in your emails

Performance tracking: click-through rates, conversion rates, analysis of preferred channels

This centralization simplifies your marketing stack while providing you with precise audience segmentation.

Developer Experience

Filtering Bot Traffic in Analytics

Shopify now automatically excludes bot traffic from your statistics, providing you with more accurate conversion rates and more reliable analytics.

Checkout Kit for the Web

Integrate the Shopify checkout into any agentic flow using a JavaScript library that displays as a pop-up or in a new tab. Also available in Swift, Android, and React Native for a complete omnichannel experience.

Universal Shopify Catalog

Search among billions of products across all Shopify merchants using the MCP or REST tools. Soon, select partners will have access to a direct catalog feed, opening up new integration possibilities.

Shopify Dev MCP: Develop Faster

Shopify’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) validates every API call in real time, detects errors before you see them, and generates production-ready code. An AI assistant that significantly speeds up development.

Shopify Functions Replaces Scripts (June 2026)

In June 2026, Shopify Functions will permanently replace Scripts, offering faster execution and greater feature parity to ensure a smooth migration. Start preparing for this transition now.

Cross-Environment Commands for Themes

Run CLI commands across multiple environments simultaneously, enabling batch operations across different stores. This saves a significant amount of time for agencies and developers managing multiple projects.

Transfers API

Model actual transfers—including those from locations not tracked in Shopify—using the new Transfers API. Better management of complex inventory flows.

Conclusion of Winter Editions 2025

The Winter Editions 2025 marks a turning point in Shopify’s evolution, featuring widespread adoption of generative AI, enhanced B2B capabilities, and a significantly improved developer experience.

These innovations position Shopify as an increasingly comprehensive and powerful platform for merchants of all sizes.

To give you a concrete idea of how the platform has evolved since the launch of the first edition in 2022, the team has listed the major new features announced over the course of each semester:

Summer ’22 (first edition): Launch of the “Connect-to-Consumer” concept, featuring over 100 features for selling anywhere (social media, B2B, cryptocurrency, international markets) and contactless payment on iPhone.
Winter ’23 : Unified checkout page, global infrastructure twice as fast, reusable content objects, and AI-powered automatic product description generation.
Summer ’23 : Complete overhaul of the admin panel, a new visual drag-and-drop store builder, a free app for creating product bundles, and advanced payment customization.
Winter ’24 : Bulk variant management, smart intent-based search (for Plus accounts only), point-of-sale terminals in the UK and Ireland, and improvements to international multi-currency sales.
Summer ’24 : Large-scale rollout of the Sidekick AI assistant, unified marketplace management for physical, B2B, and international sales, stackable in-store discounts, and payment extensions for all plans.
Winter ’25 : 50% faster payments, subscriptions integrated across the entire platform, ROI measurement for email campaigns, and the launch of the point-of-sale solution in France.
Winter ’26 (Renaissance AI Edition): Over 150 updates focused on artificial intelligence, including a proactive assistant, AI-powered custom application generation, a new enterprise-grade hardware terminal, and a catalog API for chatbots