Shopify Spring '26 Edition: Every New Feature That Actually Matters for Your Store

On 17 June 2026, Shopify released its Spring '26 Edition: more than 150 product updates shipping at once, branded the "Everywhere Edition" by CEO Tobi Lütke. It is one of the most significant releases in years, and the theme is exactly what the name suggests. Your products should be discoverable and buyable wherever a shopper happens to be, whether that is your storefront, the Shop app, an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Copilot, a physical store, or a wholesale portal.

This is a long read, because there is a lot worth understanding. We have grouped the updates by what they actually do for your business, explained the practical impact, and flagged what is worth acting on now. If you would rather have someone handle the strategy and implementation for you, take a look at our Shopify services.

The big idea: agentic commerce

The headline of Spring '26 is agentic commerce. The short version: people are increasingly starting their shopping inside AI assistants rather than search engines or your homepage. They ask an AI to find them a product, compare options, and sometimes buy, all without ever landing on a traditional website. Shopify's bet is that it can be the commerce engine behind every one of those AI shopping experiences, and that being on Shopify should automatically put your products in front of those shoppers.

Two pieces of infrastructure make this work, and for Shopify merchants both are enabled by default.

Shopify Catalog: one source of truth for your product data

Shopify Catalog is a global, structured dataset of products that AI agents can search and understand, spanning billions of products from brands worldwide. If you sell on Shopify and your products are eligible, you are in Catalog automatically. It syndicates your product details to channels like ChatGPT, Copilot, and the Shop app with no extra apps, manual feeds, or data wrangling on your part.

Why this matters: AI searches powered by Shopify Catalog convert at twice the rate of those using scraped data. Clean, structured product information is far easier for an AI to read and recommend accurately, so your products surface complete and current right when someone is ready to buy, rather than with the wrong price or missing details pulled from a scrape. The practical takeaway is that your product data quality is now a discovery channel in its own right. Thin titles, vague descriptions, and missing attributes like size and colour will cost you visibility in AI channels.

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

UCP, co-developed with Google, is the open standard for agentic commerce that covers the full journey from discovery to checkout. In plain terms, it gives AI agents one shared language for understanding commerce, so any AI surface built on it automatically respects your specific checkout rules, discounts, and customisations. Shopify merchants are UCP-enabled by default. As more developers build on UCP and Catalog, the number of places your products can appear keeps growing without any extra effort from you.

Agentic Storefronts in the admin

This is the piece most merchants will interact with day to day. You can now manage all your AI channels from a single place in the Shopify admin. Specifically, you can:

• Manage your AI channels: see which channels are active and control whether to enable product discovery and direct checkout for each one.
• See how you are performing: orders, sales, and conversions from ChatGPT, Copilot, AI Mode in Google Search, the Gemini app, and Shop, all in one view.
• Find the searches you do not rank for: search intelligence shows the top AI queries in your category, which ones you appear for, and where you are missing.
• Fix what is not converting: when your products surface in AI conversations but do not sell, Sidekick tells you what to change, such as adding specifications to titles or filling in missing product details.

The early numbers are worth noting. Red light therapy brand Omnilux saw AI channels drive 3.2% of total revenue in March, and luxury bedding brand Cozy Earth reported revenue from AI channels up 20x year on year. These are still early days, but the direction is clear, and the merchants who optimise for it first will have the advantage.

Sidekick: AI assistance across your whole business

Sidekick, Shopify's built-in AI assistant, became dramatically more capable in this Edition. It can now access more of your data, take more actions, and work across more devices.

• It connects to your other tools. Sidekick App Extensions plug third-party apps directly into Sidekick, so you can get answers and take action across your whole stack in conversation. It is live for 15+ partners at launch, including Klaviyo, Loop, and Smile. You can, for example, ask Sidekick real questions about your Klaviyo campaigns, flows, and revenue performance without leaving the Shopify admin.
• It is proactive. Sidekick Pulse turns your own sales, traffic, and inventory data into suggested next actions, and it now greets you on a redesigned admin home with Sidekick at its centre, so you get recommendations without having to ask.
• It is everywhere you work. Sidekick is on every screen in the Shopify mobile app, via typing or voice, with no full-screen takeover. You can make changes to your store from your phone on the go, and even ask for business insights from an Apple Watch.

For small teams this is genuinely significant. The promise is that the operational overhead of running a store, marketing, accounting, inventory questions, gets handled in conversation, freeing you to focus on product and brand.

Marketing that works harder for you

Marketing is consistently merchants' top challenge, and Spring '26 leaned heavily into AI-assisted tools that use Shopify's commerce intelligence to get you in front of customers and convert them.

An AI sales associate in Shopify Inbox

A new AI sales associate now lives on your storefront. It answers buyer questions, suggests products, and handles order inquiries using the data already in your admin, such as catalogue, inventory, and policies. If a buyer signs in with Shop, it can personalise recommendations in the chat. Crucially, you keep control over its tone and decide when a human should be looped in. For stores fielding repetitive pre-sale questions, this is a 24/7 first responder that actually knows your catalogue.

Campaign Autopilot

Campaign Autopilot runs AI-powered marketing campaigns automatically across Facebook, Instagram, Shop, and email, and optimises them over time using commerce intelligence, within guardrails you set for spend and messaging. More channels are coming, including Microsoft Advertising, ChatGPT Ads, and Snapchat. It is currently in early access. The important detail here is the guardrails: you set the budget, target return on ad spend, and rules, and the AI works within them, so you are not handing over a blank cheque.

Shop Campaigns on more channels

Shop Campaigns, which lets you target customers at a set price across Shop, other merchants' stores, and external channels like Meta, Google, X, Bing, and Snap, now also includes ChatGPT, Pinterest, and advertising on the open web via Microsoft Monetize. You only pay when a customer converts, which keeps the risk low.

Smoother shopping, online and in store

A cluster of updates focused on the buying experience itself, across the Shop app and physical retail.

The Shop app and Shop Pay

• Shop Pay anywhere: brands of all sizes, even those not on Shopify, can now offer Shop Pay at checkout, gaining access to 250M+ shoppers and one-click purchasing. For Shopify merchants, it reinforces Shop Pay as one of the highest-converting checkouts available.
• AI-powered Shop Search: buyers can now search conversationally ("I need a waterproof jacket for a weekend hiking trip") and get results tailored to their shopping history.
• Sign in with Shop: a buyer's profile, history, and saved details follow them across surfaces, which speeds up sign-in and checkout and improves conversion.

In-store returns and pickup

This is a genuinely new capability for omnichannel merchants. Your retail locations now surface in the Shop app, product pages show local inventory for in-store pickup, and returns started in the Shop app can be completed at your counter with a QR code. A customer initiates a return or pickup in the app, you scan their QR code in store, and the commerce is handled in Shop. There is also a ship-and-pick-up-in-one-checkout option that solves a long-standing problem: previously a customer who wanted one item shipped and another collected in store had to place two separate orders. For merchants with both an online store and physical locations, this turns digital browsing into foot traffic and turns a return into a reason to come back in.

POS v11 and new hardware

POS v11 is materially faster. Retail staff now save over a minute on complex cart builds, and the cart stays on screen through the entire transaction, with discounts, edits, and customer lookups opening in a side panel so staff never lose their place. There is also new hardware: the Verifone Victa mobile for Shopify POS scans barcodes, takes card payments, and doubles as a countertop terminal when connected to a tablet.

Native B2B on every plan

This one flew slightly under the radar in the main Edition announcement but is a major change for a lot of merchants. As of this release, Shopify has extended its foundational B2B features to merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans at no extra cost. You no longer need Shopify Plus to sell wholesale natively.

For the first time, merchants on non-Plus plans can access:

• Company profiles for wholesale buyers
• Up to three custom catalogues with tailored pricing
• Volume discounts and quantity rules
• Vaulted credit cards and payment terms

Because B2B is built into the core of the platform rather than bolted on, features you already rely on for DTC, like Shopify Flow, Markets, and Shopify Payments, now work for B2B too, from one unified admin. The results from merchants already using Shopify B2B make the case: up to a 33% increase in self-serve orders within six months and up to a 20% increase in reorder frequency. Shopify Plus still offers the full feature set for complex operations, including unlimited catalogues and partial payments, and the path between plans is seamless. If you have ever fielded a wholesale or bulk-buying request and managed it through spreadsheets or a separate system, this is worth setting up.

Rollouts: native A/B testing finally arrives

Rollouts is a new native capability to publish a new theme, checkout configuration, or customer accounts setup at a scheduled time, or to run it as a true A/B test before committing. It supports scheduled rollout and rollback dates, and themes can be translated across markets and then scheduled or tested. Native A/B testing for themes and checkout has historically been a gap on the platform, usually requiring add-on apps or API-level experiments, so bringing it into the admin gives most stores a genuine new merchandising lever. If you have been making theme and checkout changes on gut feel, you can now validate them with real conversion data before going all in. This pairs naturally with a structured conversion rate optimisation programme.

For the developers: Hydrogen, rebuilt

On the technical side, Shopify rebuilt Hydrogen from the ground up in collaboration with Vercel. It is now "agent-first" and works with any JavaScript framework, including Next.js, rather than being tied to React Router. The Catalog API also gained new capabilities like image search and product lookup, plus richer product attributes, and now supports sign in with Shop for personalised results. If you run a headless or custom build, this materially widens your options and is worth a conversation with your development team or agency.

One thing not to miss: Scripts is being retired

Amid all the new features, there is a deadline you cannot ignore. Legacy Shopify Scripts is being fully retired, and any discount, shipping, or payment customisation still running on Scripts will stop working. If you have custom logic built on Scripts, you need to migrate it to Shopify Functions before the cut-off. This is the kind of thing that quietly breaks checkout if left unaddressed, so audit your store now if you are not certain whether you rely on Scripts. We can help you audit and migrate if needed.

What merchants should actually do now

It is a lot to absorb, so here is a sensible order of priority for most stores.

• Audit your product data. With Catalog now feeding AI channels, the quality of your titles, descriptions, and attributes directly affects how often you get discovered and recommended. This is the highest-leverage thing you can do.
• Check your Agentic Storefronts dashboard. See which AI channels are driving sales, find the queries you are not ranking for, and act on Sidekick's recommendations.
• Confirm your Scripts migration status. If you use Scripts for discounts, shipping, or payments, plan the move to Functions before the deadline.
• Set up native B2B if it is relevant. If wholesale is even a small part of your business, the tools are now included on your plan.
• Use Rollouts to test, not guess. Before your next big theme or checkout change, run it as an A/B test.
• Trial the AI marketing tools carefully. Campaign Autopilot and the AI sales associate are powerful, but set clear guardrails and monitor results before scaling.

Final thoughts

Spring '26 is less a set of features and more a statement about where commerce is heading. The throughline is that selling is no longer confined to your website. It happens across AI assistants, the Shop app, physical stores, and wholesale channels, and Shopify wants all of it to run from a single admin with your data structured once and syncing everywhere. The merchants who treat this as a prompt to clean up their product data, embrace the AI channels, and test their way to a better store will be the ones who benefit most.

If you want help turning any of this into a concrete plan for your store, from product data optimisation to B2B setup, Scripts migration, or a structured CRO and growth programme, get in touch with Futur Media and we will walk through it with you.