Shopify, a leading commerce technology company, has unveiled its Winter ‘26 Edition, Renaissance, the eighth showcase of its latest products and innovations that redefine how merchants build commerce operations and how shoppers discover products.
Shopify’s Winter ’26 Edition introduces a new wave of practical, business-ready AI innovations that supercharge human creativity and act as a true force multiplier for merchants, developers, and partners. Featuring more than 150+ updates, this Edition includes significant improvements to Sidekick, Shopify’s AI-enabled commerce assistant, along with key updates across POS and development tools. Together, these capabilities help businesses work smarter, adapt faster, and meet rising consumer expectations with greater ease.
“AI is now essential to modern commerce,” says Deann Evans, Managing Director, EMEA, at Shopify. “Our 2025 Holiday Retail Report shows the shift is already underway: 66% of consumers expect to use AI for at least one part of their holiday shopping. On the business side, 93% of UK merchants have already invested in, or plan to invest in, AI tools that help customers discover and buy products, and nearly half are prioritising AI-generated content to streamline operations. This Edition continues Shopify’s tireless work to help merchants find their place in this new AI landscape and cut through operational complexity with intelligent, merchant-first technology built to help businesses move faster.”
Sidekick: The ultimate commerce AI assistant
Sidekick, already a powerful AI tool built for commerce, sits at the centre of this Edition. Supported by a complete AI ecosystem, Shopify is setting the standard for intelligent, merchant-first technology that’s shaping the future of commerce.
Sidekick now offers:
Sidekick Pulse: personalised suggestions on Home: Sidekick is moving from reactive to proactive. It can now surface personalised, high‑impact tasks on Home to help merchants act on what matters most.
Admin app builds: Sidekick now generates admin apps from a prompt, so merchants can build custom tools, no code required.
Customised themes: Theme settings are customisable through natural language commands, allowing merchants to adjust theme configurations without navigating complex menus.
A repository of Sidekick prompts as “skills”: Merchants can save, reuse, and share their best Sidekick prompts as “skills” thanks to a user-scoped repository of quick actions and commands. Merchants can create shortcuts for repeat tasks, launch them from the skills tray or with a slash command, and open shared links that prefill the prompt safely, ensuring merchant data and dangerous prompts are not shareable, in chat.
Working Flow automations generated from natural language descriptions: Merchants no longer need deep Shopify knowledge and programming skills just to get started with Flow. Sidekick generates working Flow automations from natural language descriptions.
Edit product photos with Sidekick: Brings state‑of‑the‑art AI image edits to the file editor so merchants can produce better product photos, faster.
Sidekick has already proven its value, being used by Shopify merchants in 100 million conversations since its inception. Jamie Evans, Head of E-Commerce at Jaded London, said: “I get hit with probably around 10 to 15 requests a week for a deep dive which would have taken me hours. This could be anything from how swimwear is performing in Australia, to how many customers do we have in Korea that haven’t churned in the last 180 days, or can we make a segmentation for our New York City pop-up customers. Sidekick is just always there. I just ask him every question and I use it like a business intelligence tool. I also find Sidekick incredibly useful when building out landing pages or making small liquid changes where it gives me a steer on browser optimisation and can sometimes even give plug and play code that perfectly matches my prompts.”
While Sidekick takes center stage, AI functionality is thoughtfully integrated throughout the Shopify platform, showing up in some of our other exciting updates.
Shopify Agentic Storefronts: Products in agentic conversations
Shopify Agentic Storefronts puts merchants’ products directly into AI conversations on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. One setup in the admin and products are immediately discoverable by many agents. No complex integrations, no separate apps for each platform—just merchants’ products showing up exactly when and where customers need them.
Customers buy without leaving their conversations, and merchants decide where and how your brand shows up. Your checkout experience, your customer relationships. Toggle which platforms display products and watch attribution data flow directly into the admin. Commerce is happening in conversations—Shopify Agentic Storefronts ensures merchants are a part of them.
POS Hub: Reliable, connected in-store selling
Shopify’s new POS Hub strengthens in-person retail by connecting merchant checkout hardware – card readers, printers keyboards, scanners and more – to their POS tablet for fast, reliable wired connections on iOS and Android. Designed for flexibility, POS Hub can be mounted discreetly under the counter or displayed on the counter-top, with a sleek look that is customisable to a variety of store aesthetics and layouts.
The first-of-its-kind professional POS Hub provides a strong, dependable plug and play setup so users can sell without distraction.
Designed for Shopify POS, the new hub:
Is purpose-built specifically for retail
Has the power of a computer with built-in software to keep data flowing between merchant hardware and Shopify Point of Sale all day
Is Apple MFi-certified for multi-device wired connections and supports a wider range of hardware
Resilient by design thanks to built-in monitoring and automatic updates for your POS hardware.
Rollouts: Native experimentation capabilities built into the core workflow
Rollouts brings native experimentation capabilities directly into the platform, giving merchants the power to schedule changes, run experiments, understand buyer behaviour, and make data-informed decisions, all directly within the Shopify Admin. By tapping into these capabilities, merchants can use real data to refine the buyer experience, improve conversion rates, and drive stronger revenue growth.
SimGym: Empowering merchants to test ideas without guesswork
SimGym is a new app being released as a research preview that uses a novel application of AI to help merchants explore the potential of their ideas through realistic simulations. Designed to give small businesses the confidence and clarity typically available to larger brands, it uses AI shopper agents with human-like profiles to model how different customers might experience a storefront, compares themes, surfaces issues, and recommends changes before launch. Drawing on insights from billions of purchases each year, SimGym can model shopper behaviour at both broad and store-specific levels – from casual browsers to high-intent buyers – allowing merchants to run storefront changes through simulated evaluations without needing high traffic, while larger brands can gather early signals before testing with real shoppers. In summary, it reduces guesswork so merchants can focus their energy on creativity, innovation and validating the ideas that set their business apart.
AI-native dev platform: Expanding developers creative potential
Shopify’s AI native developer platform is a standout example of how AI boosts efficiency and productivity . The shift to an AI-powered development environment enables teams to build more and faster, and operate in a frictionless environment. Instead of spending resources and time on setup and tasks, teams can now move directly into building.
The platform now offers:
End-to-end AI support for development workflow:
AI agents can create dev stores, scaffold apps, run GraphQL operations and generate validated code, allowing developers to focus on architecture while AI handles setup and other repetitive tasks.
Dev platform allows developers to ask questions in natural language and receive working, validated code.
Shopify has also introduced:
MCP UI Components: Delivers centralised, interactive commerce components, such as product details and variants from MCP servers to ensure consistent, rich UIs across AI agents.
Shopify Catalog: Enables your agent to search across hundreds of millions of products.
Developers can use Shopify Catalog to build applications and AI agents that can search product data from shops across Shopify.
The Shopify Catalog server lets a merchant’s agent search across products on behalf of a buyer.
Shop Pay Installments: Flexible financing
Beyond the global announcements, Shopify is expanding flexible payments with Shop Pay Installments, launching first in the UK. Merchants can now offer customers up to 24-month payment plans through Shopify’s partnership with Affirm, opening the door to shoppers who prefer longer-term options and reducing checkout friction. Fully integrated into the Shopify checkout, Shop Pay Installments removes the need for third-party plugins or manual reconciliation. All payment activity is managed directly in Shopify Admin for a streamlined, unified view of performance.
Evans concludes: “Businesses today are under pressure to move faster, adapt quickly and do more with less. With this Edition, we’re giving builders a set of AI tools where they are most needed to remove the bottlenecks and simplify complex work. By bringing AI deeper into workflows, we’re facilitating the actions needed to unlock new paths of expansion.”
