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Christmas came early for brand owners, as Shopify have just released the latest installment of their biannual Editions showcase.
As a Shopify Premier Partner, we’re always finding new ways to push the boundaries of what’s possible on Shopify. Editions equips us and the broader ecommerce community with tools that accelerate innovation and open new directions.
Coming off their most recent Summer Editions, which was filled with AI-powered tools, this Edition has kept the focus on AI and was fittingly called the renAIssance edition. We’ve previously looked into the potency, or lack thereof, of Shopify’s AI tools for building ecommerce experiences, so does this Edition lead us to change our tune?
Let’s look into everything you missed from Shopify Editions winter 2026.
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.
Summer 25 felt a bit empty on the developer side of things, with some highlights being a re-engineered developer dashboard, updates to the AJAX and Functions APIs, and the ability for Bulk Data Management in Shopify CLI. Outside of that though, the focus was on AI, and a racing game (if you were wondering - brand marketing executive, Owen held the record for us with a time of 1:27)
So did Winter ‘26 bear sweeter fruit for us? Let’s find out.
Easily the biggest Edition, with the current product discovery landscape. Shopify is introducing the ability for ecommerce stores to sell directly within AI chats. Shopify’s recent partnership with OpenAI signalled that the dam was about to burst on this, and here we are.
An agentic storefront lets brands manage how their store appears to the millions of users shopping in AI chats. Products are discoverable right in ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity, with other channels coming soon. It comes at the exact right time, with Omnisend reporting that 65% of customers use AI tools to discover new products, this is going to be an essential part of any ecommerce brand’s ecommerce marketing strategy in 2026 - get on the waitlist for this now!
Shopify’s AI sidekick tool - a favourite amongst small business owners with minimal development resources, has been supercharged. In fact, Shopify deemed this the biggest update of the lot this time around
Sidekick can now
There’s also a dedicated mobile editor and the option for email styling.
A/B testing is an essential part of any brand’s ecommerce strategy, and Shopify’s made things much easier with the newly introduced “rollouts” functionality. Rollouts allows brands to schedule theme changes and A/B test minor differences, but crucially allows for the scheduling of the test. This lets you schedule it over key retail periods, and makes the process easier through automation.
A smaller addition in line with this, is the newly introduced SimGym App, which simulates shopper behaviour with Ai to give you actionable recommendations on your theme. This one we’re less sold on. It may be good to get a baseline idea of which option in your A/B test works best, but there’s no way of knowing for sure until real purchases are being made with your audience. So it might be worth trying, but don’t put too much stock in this
For those of you with brick and mortar locations, read closely. In addition to some new processing-power-boosting hardware and POS hub compatible scanners, Shopify POS can now sign customers up for subscriptions, accept more types of barcodes, and allow for different prices in store and online.
Arguably the most intriguing new feature, and one we’re annoyed is currently limited to the USA. The Shopify Product Network allows brands to fill gaps in their product libraries by choosing to list other brands in their store, email and post purchase pages. A brand can then receive a commission on every purchase made.
It’s one we’d be interested to try out, but also something we could see causing issues for both the primary retailer and the brands they’re stocking. Watch this one closely.
Shopify Markets is one of Shopify’s most powerful tools, letting brands make changes to their store depending on where a customer might be on the planet without the need to set up a separate store front. However, despite being able to make changes elsewhere, the checkout and accounts feed has historically been kept unified.
Until now! Winter Editions now lets you adapt your checkout and accounts pages on a market basis. This means you can.
Ah yes, our favourite chapter of any Shopify Edition; the Developer Updates.
We take back everything negative we said about AI powered development. All of shopify’s AI powered development tools released up until this point - Sidekick, Horizon themes, and more - have all been in service of replacing a developer, rather than empowering those already skilled at development. Shopify developers now have access to AI powered development tools with full dev MCP (Model Context Protocol) support, essentially a generative AI model trained off of Shopify’s Development Documents. This means that developers can actually speed up their workflow, rather than having to compete with sidekick.
You can now combine multiple bundles such as size and length into one selection - one to get creative with.
One update we’ve actually already used.
Shopify has introduced a fourth product status, letting brands mark a product as unlisted - alongside its existing "Active, Draft, and Archived" statuses.
Unlisted products work similarly to how unlisted YouTube videos work - they aren’t discoverable in Google, won’t show in collections, but can still be accessed with a direct link. It’s a great way to reward loyalty customers and email subscribers, or even b2b buyers. It could also be used for selling warranties or other product add-ons that don't need to show up elsewhere.
An update we’ve been begging for since it was first teased almost two years ago.
For those who missed it, Shopify first announced they would increase their variant limit from 100 to 2048 way back in January of 2024, and we’ve been awaiting the delivery ever since.
We’ve previously had to hard code around this when brands sell products with many variants - and likely still will to some extent - so this update is a huge quality of life improvement to ecommerce stores everywhere.
Want to learn how we’ve got round this issue before? Check out our case study for Lifting Equipment Store, who found Shopify’s Variant limit a challenge during their Shopify migration.
Pretty cut and dry, in addition to “on its way,” “delivered” etc, you can now mark an order as in progress when it’s being prepared for fulfilment. A small change but one that will keep impatient customers happy.
Built in heat mapping, bot filtering, precise date and time controls, and more - there’s a ton to get stuck into for those of you who love your Shopify Analytics.
Those of you who are fans of the Shop App, you can now tailor your storefront in the same way you can your online store and provide dynamic product recommendations on a per shopper basis.
Suppliers can now discover and connect with new retail partners using the Shopify Collective retailer directory. So, if you sell B2B, you may see an increase in requests coming soon.
Compared to the most recent Summer Edition, which we gave a B-, this edition is far and away an improvement. From new tools to empower developers to resources that empower brands to show up where customers will be shopping in 2026, we must say that Shopify hit on all of the pain points merchants are facing in today’s ecommerce age.
And bonus points for renaissance branding - We give this one an A Grade (if only Shopify product network was available in the UK)
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!
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