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    Shopify Spring ’26 Edition: what’s new and what it means for your store

    By Rupert• June 23, 2026

    Shopify drops its big product update twice a year — and the Spring ’26 Edition, which landed on 17 June 2026, is one of the most significant releases the platform has shipped in years. Over 150 new features, all built around one big idea: your products should be discoverable and buyable wherever your customers are — not just on your website.

    Shopify have even given it a name: the Everywhere Edition. And having gone through the key updates, it’s a fair description. Here’s what’s new, what actually matters for UK store owners, and what you might want to do about it.

    The big theme: agentic commerce

    If there’s one phrase that runs through this entire Edition, it’s ‘agentic commerce’. What that means in plain English: people are increasingly discovering and buying products through AI tools — ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity — rather than typing into Google or visiting a website directly. Shopify has built its Spring ’26 Edition to make sure your products show up in those places too.

    Think of it like a new kind of SEO. The stores that get their product data structured and distributed early will have a head start — much like the brands that took Google SEO seriously back in the early days.

    Shopify Catalog — the update most worth knowing about

    Shopify now automatically standardises and enriches your product data and syndicates it to AI shopping channels for you. According to Shopify, product data distributed through the new Catalog converts twice as well in AI chats as products that an AI simply scrapes from the open web.

    You also get a dashboard showing how your products are performing in AI channels — similar to how you track website sales today. This is switched on by default for all Shopify merchants, so there’s nothing to install. But it only works well if your product data is clean and complete — good titles, descriptions, images, and attributes all matter more now than ever.

    Sidekick gets a lot smarter

    Sidekick is Shopify’s built-in AI assistant, and it’s had a significant upgrade in this Edition. Previously it could answer questions and give you information. Now it can actually take action — including inside third-party apps like Klaviyo, Judge.me, Loop, and Smile, so you don’t have to keep switching between tabs.

    It also now asks follow-up questions when it needs more context, works in the background after you’ve moved on, and is available on mobile so you can manage your store by voice or text from your phone. For time-pressed store owners, that’s a genuinely useful upgrade.

    Campaign Autopilot — AI-powered marketing without the agency

    One of the most useful new features for smaller stores is Campaign Autopilot — an AI tool that runs cross-channel marketing campaigns for you, optimising spend and creative over time while you set the guardrails. It also brings a native WhatsApp marketing channel, which is a big deal for brands with international audiences or mobile-first customers.

    B2B on all plans

    This one’s been a long time coming. Shopify’s native B2B features — company profiles, B2B pricing catalogues, net payment terms — are now available on all paid Shopify plans, not just Shopify Plus. If you sell wholesale to other businesses alongside your direct-to-consumer store, this is worth exploring straight away.

    A/B testing with Rollouts

    Shopify has finally added native A/B testing — called Rollouts — for themes, checkout configurations, and customer account setups. You can now test changes against real traffic before fully committing, which is something merchants have been asking for for years.

    POS v11 — faster in-person selling

    If you sell in person as well as online, POS v11 is a meaningful improvement. Shopify says retail staff now save over a minute on complex cart builds, with discounts, edits, and customer lookups all opening in a side panel so the cart stays on screen throughout the transaction. Small time saving, big difference over a busy trading day.

    One urgent action if you’re using Shopify Scripts

    This isn’t a new Spring ’26 feature, but it’s important enough to flag here: Shopify Scripts — the old way of customising checkout — stopped running on 30 June 2026. If your store was using Scripts for any checkout customisation, those will have broken. The replacement is Shopify Functions, and if you haven’t migrated yet, it’s something to sort urgently. Give us a call if you need help.

    What should you actually do with all of this?

    You don’t need to act on all 150+ updates at once. Here’s what we’d suggest focusing on first:

    1. Clean up your product data. Complete titles, descriptions, images, and attributes mean better performance in AI channels. This is the single highest-value thing most stores can do right now.
    2. Check your Scripts. If you had any checkout customisations running on Shopify Scripts, verify they’ve been migrated to Shopify Functions or things may have broken at checkout.
    3. Explore B2B if it’s relevant. If you have wholesale customers, the native B2B features being available on all plans is a significant cost saving compared to third-party apps.
    4. Try Sidekick. It’s free, it’s built in, and it’s genuinely more capable now. Even if you’ve tried it before and weren’t impressed, it’s worth another look.

    As always, if you’d like help making sense of any of these updates for your specific store, we’re here. This is exactly the kind of thing we keep on top of so you don’t have to — give Rupert a call or drop us an email and we’ll help you figure out what’s worth acting on.