Shopify Editions – Spring ’26 – What You Need to Know

We’re here to decode the latest Shopify Editions – Spring 2026 with everything you need to know to stay up-to-date.

Agentic

• Agentic storefronts are now active – Now available for most merchants, not just those selling the US. This lets customers discover and purchase your products in AI channels, such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Agentic storefronts are active by default for eligible Shopify stores.
• Agentic commerce now available on more surfaces – This includes Copilot and soon Meta Ads. 
• Agentic plan – Businesses who are not on Shopify can now sync their products to Shopify Catalog and sell across AI channels/in the Shop app. 

We’ve already seen agentic storefronts generating revenue for our clients. Your products are automatically synced but you can optimise agentic storefronts even further by updating policies, answering FAQs and reviewing performance regularly. 

You should be treating AI assistants as a channel that needs optimising, measuring and reporting on, just as you would for SEO, PPC, and any other digital marketing channels you use. 

According to a recent survey, 64% of customers want to shop using agentic storefronts, so the potential is huge. By optimising your products for AI, you could be tapping into a new pool of customers who are ready to meet you there.

Sidekick

• Sidekick can now work directly with apps – Shopify’s AI-enabled commerce assistant can now connect with apps like Klaviyo and Loop, and answer questions/take action e.g. prompting Sidekick to ‘Reply to my recent 5-star reviews’

Another win for efficiency, this development could help ease the load on your internal teams and improve operations. It moves Sidekick from being a simple ‘answer engine’ to an ‘action engine’. We imagine this could be especially useful for brands who have smaller teams that need to keep the plates spinning. It means you can direct your precious time into overarching strategy, or even those projects you just keep putting off. 

This said, it is still vital to bear in mind that the human touch is still important, making sure that data privacy, brand tone of voice and other aspects are being carefully looked after. Getting the balance right here will undoubtedly unlock some serious speed wins for your business.

Online

• Launched AI sales associate – This is an AI assistant/chatbot with Shopify Inbox messaging tool. For customers signed into Shop, it can recommend customers products based on history. 
• Improvements to storefront search – Customers will now get relevant results even if they search using typos or unusual phrasing. Much like the development of traditional search in years gone by, storefront search is becoming intent-based rather than keyword-based – helping your customers to find the right product, quicker.
• A/B tests on online store and checkout – Brands can publish a new theme, checkout configuration, or customer accounts setup at a scheduled time or as an A/B test using Rollouts.

It’s clear from these updates that Shopify are consistently striving to improve the customer experience for users. Helping brands ensure that each step of the journey is more personalised and optimised. 

Excitingly, AI Sales Associate is bridging the gap between customer services and sales by solving customer problems and driving revenue.

Marketing

• Campaign Autopilot – You can now run campaigns across multiple channels with AI-powered marketing that learns, optimises and drives performance from the Growth page in Shopify admin. With Autopilot, you can:
  • Receive recommended marketing actions, such as email automations, ad campaigns, or customer acquisition offers that are matched to your store.
  • Approve actions that you want to run or reject the ones that you don’t want to run. You decide what goes live.
  • Connect marketing channels and set guardrails during setup.
  • Review performance and pause or stop activity at any time, including managing individual tactics and campaigns.
• Shopify Messaging – Create and manage WhatsApp marketing campaigns, SMS automations now possible and smart email delivery feature introduced. 
• Marketing data in analytics – View marketing reports in analytics with spend, ROAS, impressions and sessions alongside sales.

This update from Shopify looks again to take a lot of the manual load needed to run successful campaigns for your store. Especially useful for brands with smaller marketing teams or limited resources, Shopify’s Campaign Autopilot will give you personalised recommendations based on your store, performance and key metrics. You are given control in terms of what you can set live, however as this is AI-led, we’d be a little hesitant to jump headfirst into complete automation. 

We’ll be trailing Campaign Autopilot to see what the results are like, but making sure that we’re keeping a close eye on results. While AI can help identify opportunities and automate execution, brands should continue to oversee strategy, creative direction and, importantly, budget decisions. 

Shopify Messaging will be a great opportunity to utilise WhatsApp marketing campaigns as well as SMS automation for those who aren’t alreadying using platforms like Mailchimp or Klaviyo. Perhaps if you’re working with a smaller budget or don’t need a more robust ESP.

SMS automations are a great addition, targeting users more directly with a different form of communication – SMS typically achieves higher engagement rates than email. Smart email delivery feature is also useful in ensuring brands aren’t causing customer frustration by sending SMS at inconvenient times – this is especially useful if selling internationally with different time zones.

More marketing data being available in Shopify analytics is also good especially with cookie consent and attribution challenges impacting data. Google Analytics is more intelligent and allows for more data interpretation, but this is good for merchants using Shopify as their source of truth.

Payments

• Shop Pay available to any brand on any platform – Businesses of all sizes can offer Shop Pay at checkout even if they aren’t using Shopify’s online store. Get access to 250M+ shoppers and one-click purchasing. 

This is a huge opportunity for businesses who are not already on Shopify, tapping into an audience of 250M+ shoppers and offering speeder checkouts. 

This is an interesting development for clients not on Shopify and definitely would be interesting to see if there’s much uplift in sales after implementing this.

Conclusion

As expected, the further development of Shopify into Agentics and automation isn’t slowing down anytime soon with Shopify leading the way for ecommerce platforms. These updates give some smaller brands the power of teams 5x the size. 

If you need help implementing any of these features in your Shopify store, or are interested in the potential you could unlock for your ecommerce brand – get in touch with our Shopify certified experts today.