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From new themes to new developer updates, here's everything you missed from Shopify's Summer Editions 2025.
In case you missed it, Shopify have just released the latest installment of their biannual Editions showcase.
We’re constantly finding ways to innovate on Shopify, and Editions provides us and the wider ecommerce community with an all new set of tools that allows us to innovate faster or in new ways than before.
So let’s look into what this Edition had in store for us.
Here’s a quick run down of the updates, if you want more detail read on.
So with that in mind, let’s fully dive into the most recent Shopify Editions - the Horizons Edition.
Shopify Editions is Shopify’s twice-yearly event and platform update, where the company announces and releases a comprehensive set of new features, improvements, and tools for the Shopify ecommerce ecosystem.
Rather than rolling out the changes as they happen throughout the year, Shopify consolidates major updates into these biannual Editions. This makes it easier for merchants, developers, and partners to see what’s new and plan how to take advantage of the latest innovations. Plus, releasing so many updates at the same time makes more of an event out of the whole process - feeling like a celebration of the platform.
The most recent editions - Winter 2024 - looked at a number of minor quality of life improvements to the Shopify platform, allowing certain features to work with others and just generally tidying things up rather than introducing any groundbreaking new tech.
Winter 2024 was well received, with some highlights including…
However, Winter Editions 2024 lacked the flagship upgrades of previous editions and did leave us wanting more. Spoiler alert, Summer 2025 more than delivered on that front, so let’s look at some of the biggest improvements Summer 2025 Editions - The Horizons Edition - introduced.
As Shopify President, Harley Finkelstein, posted on LinkedIn, this Edition was all about expanding what's possible and removing the barriers that slow you down. Safe to say, Shopify more than delivered on a bunch of the flagship features, but did they deliver on what we wanted? Here’s all of the core updates you need to know about.
As it was the name sake of this Edition, you’d expect it to be a big deal, and the new “Horizons” Shopify themes certainly delivered on that front.
Whilst the inclusion of 10 new free themes is nice enough on its own the fact that they’re all built with theme blocks built in means that users can customise and make edits to the existing themes with the theme editor, giving you more flexibility. This is great for new stores, or those who don’t have developer experience.
Plus with the AI Block generator this makes it even easier to tailor existing Shopify themes to your needs - a massive time and money saver on all of those small edits you need to make to your site.
Additionally, Shopify has also made updates to the Shopify Skeleton theme, which we actively use within our development team. It's a great base for clean modular websites, and it’s certainly given us some new ideas for our own Shopify theme.
When it comes to developing or maintaining a new store, we can’t say that we’re particularly experienced at using Shopify Sidekick - Shopify’s AI assistant. We tend to stick to using our own acumen and not relying on AI tools to suggest edits.
However, it’s clearly a popular tool amongst users who have less experience in website development. And Shopify certainly sees the value in it too, having consistently made improvements to the tool since its full introduction in December of 2024. Much like other AI tools, such as ChatGPT and deepseek, Sidekick now includes a multi-step reasoning process to provide data-driven strategies based on an analysis of your business, basic levels of image generation, and the option for users to share their screen with voice chat - allowing Sidekick to respond out loud.
Shopify has just generally made Sidekick better in every aspect. Additionally, Sidekick is now available in 20 different languages, meaning users from around the world can implement the tool into their work flow. Great for new store owners without dev support.
An update tailored for developers? Yes please!
A new developer dashboard allows web developers to create web and UI extensions end-to-end without having to deploy them first. The platform also allows developers to build on localhost without tunnels, test in dev stores that simulate the different Shopify plans, and pair with the Assistant via MCP.
For those of you less clued into the specifics of developer language, essentially, this all makes it easier to build high-quality Shopify apps with less code, faster. This is a game changer for developers working with multi-store setups.
As is usual with Editions, there are a few big updates and many smaller, general quality of life updates too. This time around, there was an update to the checkout load speed, the introduction of Apple Pay within the checkout, and a number of marketing updates for App developers. But here are some of our other favourites…
Using Shopify’s Ajax API, which allows for real time updates to products without having to reload pages, you can now introduce the option for customers to apply discount codes before the checkout process. This gives them visibility into what the actual price of their order is going to be. This has been a long awaited feature and it’s certain to boost conversion rate across all stores.
The newly updated discount Function API now allows developers to create unified Function extensions. A single Function processes one discount (either code-based or automatic), but can apply savings across three discount classes - product, order, and shipping - at the same time.
This update means we can unify different campaigns across a singular message, as a different code can give us a percent off an order or product, whilst also providing free shipping.
So the code “FREE15” could combine product and shipping discounts into a single code.
For brands struggling with high return rates, this update just might save you.
Some stores previously allowed customers to purchase with store credit, which could be acquired through a number of different means. But for stores who struggle with high returns, you can now issue refunds as store credit directly from the Shopify admin or POS. Whilst you still have to deal with the shipping and order processing costs, this keeps revenue within your organisation and keeps customers coming back.
There’s always an update that tends to fly under the radar. In the Winter ‘23 Editions, that was the introduction of parent and child product listings. This time around, the Bulk Data Management in Shopify CLI is the winner for us.
This allows for the easy exporting and importing of store data without the need for custom scripts, which is amazing for clone stores and migration projects, we can see ourselves using this one straight away.
One of the biggest pain points for Shopify merchants regardless of the plan they’re on is the limit placed on the number of variants allowed per product. Currently, Shopify limits products to 100 variants, which sounds like a lot but is surprisingly easy to exceed.
If a plain T-Shirt comes in 10 sizes and in 10 different colours that’s 100 variants, so it’s not hard to imagine how a product could exceed even 1000 variants or more. There are ways to get around this, but it’s curious that Shopify teased support for 2000 variants in a previous Edition, yet it hasn’t been rolled out yet.
We can’t speak for everyone on this, but it was a bit disheartening to see how front and centre AI was in this update. And this can even be seen in the presentation. Whilst previous editions have been presented by Shopify’s VP of product Glen Coates, this edition instead featured scripts clearly written in ChatGPT and voiced with AI too.
We’d like to see more ways for developers to solve problems in future… and Glen.
Having had enough time to break down the updates and how they will affect the stores we work with on a daily basis, our team gives this Edition a B-. Whilst there were a number of extremely useful updates, especially in relation to the checkout and order processing, we ultimately just wanted more variant support. So whilst we can't wait to get stuck in with the new features, the lack of follow through on previously teased updates is frustrating.
If you have any questions about this Shopify Editions, or would like to know how we can help you with any of the updates listed here, contact us to find out how we can help you!
