Shopify’s Winter ’26 Edition has introduced 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 and introduces Shopify Agentic Storefronts. This tool puts merchants' products directly into AI conversations on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot and features many more key updates across POS and development tools.
“Kiwi retailers are operating in one of the most competitive and dynamic markets in the world. Consumer expectations are rising quickly, and merchants need tools that help them act on signals in real time while removing as much operational friction as possible,” said Shaun Broughton, Managing Director, APAC & Japan, Shopify.
“In this Edition, we’re giving New Zealand businesses AI capabilities that streamline the work behind the scenes – refining storefronts, simplifying merchandising, and making day-to-day operations more efficient. This allows retailers to focus on creativity, innovation and serving customers, whether they’re just starting or scaling across markets.”
Sidekick, already a powerful AI tool built for commerce, sits at the centre of this Edition.
- 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 that merchants can build custom tools with no code required.
- Customised themes: Theme settings can be customised via 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.
Additionally, Shopify Agentic Storefronts puts products directly into AI conversations on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot.
For Kiwi retailers prioritising the in-store experience, 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. The first-of-its-kind professional POS Hub provides a strong, dependable plug-and-play setup so users can sell without distraction.
Shopify has also introduced a new Cross-Border Profitability Insights Report globally, helping merchants understand how duties, taxes, and shipping adjustments are impacting margins so that they can make more informed international pricing and fulfilment decisions.
At the same time, 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 within their core workflow.
SimGym is another app being released as a research preview that uses a novel AI application 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, compare themes, surface issues, and recommend changes before launch.
At the same time, larger brands can gather early signals before testing with real shoppers.
Shopify’s AI-native developer platform is a standout example of how AI boosts efficiency and productivity.
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