Shopify’s Winter '26 Edition, titled RenAIssance, launched on December 10th, 2025. With over 150 updates, this release represents a strategic shift, focusing intensely on AI to amplify and provide the competitive edge for merchants. In this blog, we take a look at the most noteworthy new features from the release.
Sidekick: The Centre of This Release
Launched in June 2024 and having seen significant upgrades in the Summer Edition earlier this year, it was no surprise that Sidekick was going to take centre stage in this release.
Experiencing its own renaissance, Sidekick has evolved from a handy AI assistant to a proactive partner capable of anticipating your business needs and suggesting immediate actions. Crucially, it can now build code and make direct platform changes, always with your ultimate approval.
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Sidekick Pulse: This delivers a personalised growth strategy, providing high-impact, data-driven suggestions tailored to your store's performance and market trends. It’s like having an always-on e-commerce consultant.
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Custom App Generation & Flow Automation: You can now prompt Sidekick to build custom apps for your specific needs or create automated workflows in Shopify Flow. This achieves bespoke functionality without intensive development, dramatically cutting down development time and cost.
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Generate Theme Edits: Now you can talk to your theme. Tell Sidekick the design updates you want and watch it instantly modify the appropriate settings across your store. This allows for instant site iteration and faster A/B testing.
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Studio-Quality Photos & Mobile Editor: Sidekick now enables pro-level AI editing such as changing backgrounds, adding elements, directly within your file editor, even on the Shopify mobile app.
The Next Frontier: Agentic Commerce
The way customers interact and purchase is changing. Shopify is ensuring your brand is prepared for the shift toward shopping within AI conversations.
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Agentic Storefronts: This feature is a new sales channel and visibility booster. Your products are now automatically discoverable and shoppable in AI platforms like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity. This is a critical new marketing channel that requires a clear strategy for attribution and presence.
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SimGym App: This app uses AI Agents and data from billions of real transactions to simulate shopper behaviour. This facilitates risk-free experimentation, mitigating pre-launch risks and providing actionable conversion insights before they impact live sales.
Optimising Conversions & Operations
These updates provide us with powerful tools to improve data accuracy, test scenarios, and ensure a seamless buying experience.
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Rollouts: With native A/B testing, we can now schedule and run tests for storefront changes directly within the Shopify Admin. This is essential for a data-driven approach, replacing guesswork with measurable results and providing confidence in launches.
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Bot Filtering in Analytics: Excluding bot traffic from your analytics gives us a truer picture of your conversion rates and marketing channel performance. This means clean data and real conversions, leading to more accurate spending decisions.
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Unlisted Product Status: This simple but effective update makes hiding products from search results and search engines much easier, allowing for controlled promotions and VIP access.
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Nested Cart Lines: This improves the customer experience for bundles, warranties, or add-ons by grouping them visually in the cart. This helps drive up Average Order Value (AOV) and offers clearer bundles.
Retail & Mobile Innovation
The physical store and mobile experience receive key updates focused on reliability and utility.
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POS Hub: This new hardware ensures essential checkout peripherals (scanners, printers) have stable, wired connections and dedicated processing power, eliminating dropped connections. This means unwavering reliability for retail and smooth in-store operations.
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Shop App Quick Sale: Empowering store staff to instantly process sales and accept payments from anywhere in the store (or at events), this has the potential to be the endless aisle solution that captures every sale opportunity.
What This Means for You
This blog only scratches the surface of the abundance of new features Shopify has rolled out. However, it’s plain to see that Shopify has truly entered its AI-first period. The Winter '26 Edition marks a pivotal shift to an AI-first e-commerce platform.
It's plain to say that Agentic readiness will be more prominent in 2026. Stores will need to quickly adapt and define their brand's presence and strategy for the new Storefronts to capture early sales in this emerging channel.
Our team is already busy reviewing these new tools to ensure our clients stay ahead. If you are curious about how these updates could specifically benefit your store, feel free to reach out to us.
To find out more, you can explore Shopify's official Winter Editions '26 landing page.
