Recently, Shopify revealed the Winter 2026 Edition, which highlights over 150 of the company’s most recent features, products, and updates, with a major focus on AI and automation throughout ecommerce.
It details several recent features that Shopify has introduced, or is planning to introduce, that give merchants more power, control, and options than ever before when it comes to running their store.
Sidekick
One of the major features that the Winter Edition covered is Sidekick, an AI-powered Shopify expert. Among the most useful parts of this feature is the fact that it can create customized apps that are designed specifically for your business’s needs. Some examples of these apps that Shopify provides in the Winter Edition include:
- Task trackers
- An app for recommending products that a company needs to reorder
- Event prep apps
- An app that checks cancellation and return eligibility for orders
It also lets you build workflow automations by simply describing what you want to automate, and then Sidekick takes over and builds it. The feature also generates reports, builds customer segments, creates design updates, and helps you edit images.
Also, Sidekick Pulse delivers you personalized next steps and recommendations for your business, using data from your own store. Beyond that, it also helps save you time and effort by streamlining tedious tasks.
Agentic Storefronts
With AI chats and agents increasingly becoming a part of the ecommerce world, Shopify highlighted the fact that it helps merchants sell directly in AI chats, using Agentic Storefronts and built-in tools that syndicate your products to platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, with others coming soon.
All you need to do is set your data up a single time, and the Shopify Agentic Storefronts feature will surface your products to buyers using these AI chats for shopping research or recommendations. You also have control over how your brand appears in AI chats, as well.
Optimizing Your Store With Testing, Design, and Tools
A big portion of the Winter 2026 Edition also includes the various updates and features that help you optimize and improve your online store. First, the company offers Rollouts, which is a feature that lets you perform A/B testing and schedule theme changes with ease.
Next, merchants can use SimGym to test their changes or updates with realistic shopper behavior, to ensure they’re happy with the changes and updates before going live. The AI agents will even offer recommendations for things to improve before you decide to implement the changes for real.
You can also unify the design experience by making changes to products, collections, markets, metadata, and more, all without leaving the theme editor, and even generate themes on the Shopify mobile app.
If you currently operate a WordPress site for your business, you can transform it into an online store with the Shopify plugin, which lets you easily add products, a cart, and a checkout. Some of the other notable updates the company has made in this area include:
- Adding 250+ Horizon theme improvements
- Creating up to 2048 variants per product for more customer choice than ever before
- Hiding products from search results, but still making them accessible with a link
- Automatically give discounts to target certain important customers
- Improving the theme search and discovery process
- Allowing customers to change their emails
- Letting customers sign into your store with their social accounts
Marketing Improvements
It also outlines many marketing improvements Shopify has made recently. Chief among them is the recent announcement of the Shopify Product Network, which lets merchants fill product gaps and expand their product catalog with offerings from other sellers, and earn commission in the process.
The Winter Edition also covers SMS marketing, auto-translate for Shopify Forms, an expansion of Shop Campaigns, dynamic product sections in emails, segmentation tools, and more.
Enhanced Operations
There are also several large updates for operations teams, including:
- Flexible inventory transfers
- The ability to sell in person rapidly with Quick sale in the mobile app
- New metrics and widgets for the Apple Watch
- AI-driven chargeback management
- Password-free logins
- The ability to run flash sales without overselling
Analytics also get a major boost as you can view heatmaps in your analytics, exclude bot traffic from your analytics, use precise time and date controls, and view analytics organization-wide or filter by store to compare data from one to another.
The shipping has also been improved, as merchants have more options than ever when it comes to partners, carriers, and labels.
Finance Tools
The Winter 2026 Edition also details many of the modern financial tools and features that Shopify offers to ecommerce brands. This includes continuous funding with Shopify Capital, automatic transfers in Shopify Balance, and the ability to offer Shopify Balance cards to your staff, with spend controls in place.
It also details an increase in the cap for Shopify Credit rewards, dynamic credit limits, same-day ACH transfers and the fact that Shopify Capital is now available to merchants in Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands.
You can also enjoy real-time fraud alerts via SMS for your Shopify cards, and you can file and track disputes from both Shopify Balance and Shopify Credit.
Developing With the Power of AI
Finally, the Winter Edition goes through developer features, with many of them centered around AI and agentic commerce. It mentions building commerce agents to bring shopping into AI conversations, as well as offering improved discovery for Built by Shopify apps.
Merchants can also search over one billion products via the Shopify Catalog, bring a checkout to any agentic flow, and code faster with Shopify Dev MCP, which validates the API in real-time. Shopify’s bulk operations API is now faster, there are clearer requirements for the app store, and you can launch seamless admin workflows with just one line of code.
