Shopify Editions Winter '26: what's new and what it means for growing brands

Shopify's Winter '26 Editions (the "RenAIssance Edition") landed on 10 December 2025, bringing 150+ updates across the platform.

If you're running or rebuilding a Shopify store in 2026, the big theme is clear: Shopify is pushing hard on AI-led productivity, faster experimentation, and more ways to sell where customers already are, from the Shop app to emerging AI chat surfaces.

Here are the updates we think matter most, and how to turn them into practical wins.

1. Sidekick gets more hands-on (and more proactive)

Sidekick is positioned as Shopify's AI-powered expert, and in Winter '26 it's presented less like a Q&A bot and more like a collaborator that can recommend next steps and help you execute.

Notable additions:

• Sidekick Pulse: proactive recommendations using market trends and your store data
• Custom app generation: prompts that generate custom apps for the Shopify admin
• Natural-language theme edits: Shopify describes "talking to your theme", for example asking for design changes inside the theme editor

How to use this:

• Treat Pulse as a weekly trading meeting: pick one or two recommendations, measure impact, repeat
• If you've got repetitive admin work (stock checks, returns rules, internal trackers), explore whether a small custom admin app could remove manual steps before you buy another SaaS tool

2. Faster, safer storefront changes: Rollouts and SimGym

Two items stand out for teams who want to move quickly without breaking conversion:

• Rollouts: schedule theme changes and A/B test directly in admin (the Editions page includes a "Get notified" callout, so treat this as something to watch and plan for)
• Shopify SimGym app: simulates shopper behaviour with AI agents using data from billions of purchases, and gives recommendations before going live. Shopify notes SimGym is available in AI Research Preview

How to use this:

• Put an experimentation queue in place now (three to five hypotheses maximum). When Rollouts is available to you, you'll have tests ready to run
• Use SimGym-style simulation as a pre-flight check for higher-risk launches (big theme refresh, pricing logic, navigation restructure), then validate with a real A/B test

3. Big merchandising and theme workflow wins

A few quality-of-life changes here are genuinely meaningful for scaling teams:

• Manage store details in the theme editor: update products, collections, markets, metafields and more without leaving your workflow
• Theme generation on mobile: generate, preview, and publish on the go via the Shopify mobile app
• Up to 2,048 variants per product
• Unlisted product status: hide from search and collections while keeping a direct URL live
• Horizon theme improvements: Shopify points to over 250 enhancements

How to use this:

• If you've been splitting products to work around variant limits, it's worth rethinking your catalogue architecture
• "Unlisted" is perfect for VIP-only drops, influencer seeding, soft launches, or B2B-only items that shouldn't appear in consumer browsing

4. Agentic Storefronts: Shopify's bet on commerce inside AI chats

One of the most talked-about announcements is Shopify Agentic Storefronts. This feature is designed to help you manage how your brand appears to users shopping in AI chats, making products discoverable in ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity, with other channels coming soon.

How to use this:

• Start with fundamentals that translate well to AI-led discovery: clean product titles, strong attributes, consistent taxonomy, and structured merchandising
• If you sell across multiple markets, keep an eye on how this intersects with localisation (pricing, shipping promises, product compliance), because the discovery surface may not look like your traditional storefront

5. Retail improvements that support omnichannel

If you have physical retail, Winter '26 includes practical POS and payment updates, with Shopify being explicit about plan and region availability:

• Same-day delivery with Uber Direct on POS: Shopify Plus, US, Canada and France only
• Markets for retail: unique pricing and product publishing per location (requires POS Pro)
• Expanded in-person payments: including Tap to Pay in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Czech Republic
• QR code payments: iDeal, Swish, Twint, Mobilepay, USDC
• Tap to Pay on iPhone expansion: Germany, Ireland, Spain, New Zealand

How to use this:

• If you're blending online and stores, Markets for retail is a big deal: it supports cleaner pricing and assortment logic by location, which reduces staff workarounds and customer confusion

6. B2B: more workflows move into Shopify

Shopify's enterprise roundup calls out B2B processes that can now happen directly in admin, covering payments, terms, EDI/ERP connectivity, and buyer experience improvements.

Highlights include:

• Pay by ACH via Shopify Payments for B2B customers in the US, including automatic matching and reconciliation
• Store credit for B2B tied to company locations
• Pickup in store for B2B
• ERP systems integration: syncing companies, orders and payment terms to systems like NetSuite, Brightpearl, Fulfil, Sage, and Acumatica via pre-built integrations
• Shopify also positions its ecosystem as a network, including Shopify Collective and Shopify Product Network opportunities

How to use this:

• If you're doing wholesale: map your order-to-cash process and identify what can move into Shopify now (payment capture, terms logic, pickup, credit, and integrations). It's usually worth it just to reduce manual reconciliation and fulfilment delays

7. Shipping and ops: small changes that remove day-to-day friction

Winter '26 also includes a set of operational improvements that are easy to overlook but often pay back quickly:

• More global shipping carriers: buy labels in admin for Royal Mail (UK), Australia Post, and DHL Express (Canada)
• Default package per variant for more accurate rates and faster label buying
• FedEx return labels in admin (US only)
• Dev and ops tooling: Bulk Operations API supports all Admin API mutations, accepts 100MB files, and allows up to five concurrent operations

How to use this:

• If you ship from the UK, the Royal Mail label purchase support is worth revisiting your fulfilment workflow, especially if you're still stitching together third-party tools for everyday label ops

Our take: what should you do next?

If you only do three things after reading Editions, do these:

1. Get your experimentation plan ready so you can use Rollouts and A/B testing efficiently when it's available to you
2. Clean up product data (titles, attributes, variant structure, merchandising logic) to benefit from higher variant limits, unlisted products, and new discovery surfaces
3. Pick one operational pain point (B2B payments, shipping labels, ERP sync, theme workflow) and modernise it. These are the changes that quietly free up team time every week

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At Deploy, we work with brands on both Magento and Shopify. If you're weighing up how these updates affect your roadmap, or whether Shopify is the right fit for your next phase of growth, we're happy to chat.