Shopify Winter ‘26 – An AI Rebirth of the E-commerce Giant?

Shopify has officially announced its Winter '26 Edition, aptly dubbed "RenAIssance," a clear signal that artificial intelligence is taking the center stage in the 150+ newly introduced functions. Although Winter Editions are also called the “boring” ones, the novelties announced are definitely exciting. AI is now embedded in every critical aspect of a merchant’s workflow, from personalized advice to back-end development.

The new Winter Edition’s goal is to help merchants become more efficient and strategic than ever before. This is a huge step, especially for smaller e-commerce companies. Some of the new features, however, can also help larger players create better websites and processes for their clients. Here are the key novelties from this edition: 

• Shopify's Winter '26 Edition (RenAIssance) features over 150 new, mostly AI-driven functions.
• Sidekick now acts as a business strategist, building custom apps and giving personalized advice.
• Agentic Storefronts make products discoverable and purchasable directly within ChatGPT and other chat apps using its models.
• Testing is getting better with Rollouts for A/B testing and SimGym for AI shopper simulation.
• Updates for enterprise merchants include B2B management and the reliable POS Hub hardware.

Sidekick Pulse is here to help you make your business better 

The evolution of Sidekick is perhaps the most defining feature of the RenAIssance Edition. It has transformed from a simple Q&A tool into a proactive, AI-powered business partner dedicated to your store's growth.

Sidekick Pulse is where AI gets truly strategic. Pulse delivers personalized, actionable business recommendations and next steps for your store. To do this, Sidekick Pulse leverages market trends and your unique sales data. It’s like having a dedicated analyst who brings you new ideas for more sales.

Sidekick can now take on complex tasks, as well. Merchants can describe a workflow to automate, and Sidekick will build it in Shopify Flow. Furthermore, it can also be prompted to generate custom apps designed for specific business needs (e.g., an app to check returns eligibility or a bulk B2B company importer), all through simple conversation. We at Color and Code are really curious about how well this will work and how it will handle complex tasks that often pose enormous challenges for mid-sized and enterprise merchants. Smaller stores, however, might easily benefit from this function. 

Sidekick’s AI is now also able to do Theme and Design Refinement, and update themes based on natural language prompts. Embedded AI photo editing is also here. Again, this a function that might help smaller merchants to do visually much more than they could before, especially on the product photos front. 

Agentic Storefronts are coming

The second central pillar is the move toward Agentic Storefronts. We already wrote about direct checkouts when they were announced, but now they're really launching. There are plenty of questions about direct checkout, but it’s definitely a function that will shake up the e-commerce world. 

What we didn’t know is that Shopify is also introducing a feature called Shopify Agentic Storefronts. This will help you control how your products appear in AI environments, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity. By setting up your data once, Shopify ensures your products are syndicated to AI chats everywhere.

Test and predict what your users like

We’re also very curious about the new testing and rollout functions that Shopify is introducing. Two new features might make a massive difference in how we iterate on the websites we’re creating. 

First is Rollouts, which simplifies experimentation by allowing merchants to schedule theme changes and perform seamless A/B tests. This lets merchants validate design or content changes with a subset of their audience before a full launch.

The other exciting feature is the Shopify SimGym app, which will allow us to simulate customer behavior using AI agents. To do so, Shopify will use data from billions of real-world purchases to predict what works and what doesn’t. With SimGym, we can test new features or store changes against these simulations and get actionable recommendations and realistic conversion forecasts before going live.

Of course, professional agencies like Color and Code always use other methods of validation, such as user tests, but this is another valuable tool in our belt for creating better stores.

More than just customers and e-commerce

Shopify also continues to expand its platform to cater to both large-scale enterprises and hybrid merchants, addressing the complexities of B2B and the need for robust in-store operations.

The novelties include customization for companies with B2B customers, with a focus on checkout, among other things. This, especially when it comes to price handling, was always a complex and often painful topic with Shopify. Workarounds exist, but better native solutions are very welcome. 

Shopify also announced POS novelties, which is fantastic news for companies with brick-and-mortar stores. Here, Shopify is focused on hardware reliability and operational efficiency. They introduced their own POS Hub, which handles everything from accurate stock management across platforms to subscriptions and payments. The reach of in-person payments is also expanding, with Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android now supported in more European countries like Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic.

In short, the RenAIssance Edition introduced a lot of exciting new features. Some of them might benefit smaller e-commerce stores with a limited staff, but there are new functions that even agencies like us can be very excited about. We can’t wait to start playing around with agentic testing and benchmarking and to create our first Agentic Storefront, for example.

‍