SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, 11th December 2025 – Shopify (NYSE: SHOP), a leading commerce technology company, has unveiled its Winter ‘26 Edition, RenAIssance, the eighth showcase of its latest products and innovations that redefine how merchants build commerce operations and how shoppers discover products.
Shopify’s Winter ’26 Edition introduces 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, introduces Shopify Agentic Storefronts a tool that 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. Together, these capabilities help businesses work smarter, adapt faster, and meet rising consumer expectations with greater ease.
“Australian retailers are operating in one of the most competitive and dynamic markets in the world,” said Shaun Broughton, Managing Director, APAC & Japan, Shopify. “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. This Edition, we’re giving Australian 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 out or scaling across markets.”
“We chose the Renaissance theme for this Edition because it symbolises progress, momentum, courage, new beginnings, and redefining what’s possible,” said Vanessa Lee, VP, Leading Product at Shopify. “It’s a compilation of 150+ product updates across our platform that help merchants and developers make the most of the latest technologies and advancements in AI and beyond. Many of these features weren’t possible a year ago and they redefine how we achieve our mission of making commerce better for everyone.”
Sidekick: The ultimate commerce AI assistant
Sidekick, already a powerful AI tool built for commerce, sits at the centre of this Edition. Supported by a complete AI ecosystem, Shopify is setting the standard for intelligent, merchant-first technology that’s shaping the future of commerce.
Sidekick now offers:
- 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 merchants can build custom tools, no code required.
- Customised themes: Theme settings are customisable through 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.
Sidekick has already proven its value, being used by Shopify merchants in 100 million conversations since its inception.
“We use Sidekick to quickly uncover actionable insights about shopper behaviour,” said Dan Small, Chief Customer Officer at Boody. “With a number of proven hero products that are day-in and day-out best sellers, sometimes we can overlook small changes in consumer behaviour. Sidekick helps us identify these subtle shifts by showing how different customer segments engage with bundles and promotions in real time. This enables us to optimise offers and marketing strategies responsively, sharpening human decision-making and allowing us to spend less time analysing data and more time acting on what truly matters to our customers — which is what modern retail is really about.”
Shopify Agentic Storefronts: Your products in agentic conversations
Shopify Agentic Storefronts puts your products directly into AI conversations on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. One setup in your admin and your products are immediately discoverable by many agents. No complex integrations, no separate apps for each platform—just your products showing up exactly when and where customers need them.
Customers buy without leaving their conversations, and you decide where and how your brand shows up. Your checkout experience, your customer relationships. Toggle which platforms display your products and watch attribution data flow directly into your admin. Commerce is happening in conversations—Shopify Agentic Storefronts ensures you’re part of them.
POS Hub: Reliable, connected in-store selling
For Australian 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. Designed for flexibility, POS Hub can be mounted discreetly under the counter or displayed on the counter-top, with a sleek look that is customisable to a variety of store aesthetics and layouts.
The first-of-its-kind professional POS Hub provides a strong, dependable plug and play setup so users can sell without distraction.
Designed for Shopify POS, the new hub:
- Is purpose-built specifically for retail
- Has the power of a computer with built-in software to keep data flowing between merchant hardware and Shopify Point of Sale all day
- Is Apple MFi-certified for multi-device wired connections and supports a wider range of hardware
- Resilient by design thanks to built-in monitoring and automatic updates for your POS hardware.
Cross-Border Profitability Insights Report
Shopify has also introduced a new Cross-Border Profitability Insights Report globally, helping merchants understand where duties, taxes and shipping adjustments are impacting margins so they can make more informed international pricing and fulfilment decisions.
Rollouts: Native experimentation capabilities built into the core workflow
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. By tapping into these capabilities, merchants can use real data to refine the buyer experience, improve conversion rates, and drive stronger revenue growth.
SimGym: Empowering merchants to test ideas without guesswork
SimGym is a new app being released as a research preview that uses a novel application of AI 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, compares themes, surfaces issues, and recommends changes before launch.
Drawing on insights from billions of purchases each year, SimGym can model shopper behaviour at both broad and store-specific levels – from casual browsers to high-intent buyers – allowing merchants to run storefront changes through simulated evaluations without needing high traffic, while larger brands can gather early signals before testing with real shoppers. In summary, it reduces guesswork so merchants can focus their energy on creativity, innovation and validating the ideas that set their business apart.
AI-native dev platform: Expanding developers creative potential
Shopify’s AI native developer platform is a standout example of how AI boosts efficiency and productivity . The shift to an AI-powered development environment enables teams to build more and faster, and operate in a frictionless environment. Instead of spending resources and time on setup and tasks, teams can now move directly into building.
The platform now offers:
- End-to-end AI support for development workflow:
- AI agents can create dev stores, scaffold apps, run GraphQL operations and generate validated code, allowing developers to focus on architecture while AI handles setup and other repetitive tasks.
- Dev platform allows developers to ask questions in natural language and receive working, validated code.
Shopify has also introduced:
- MCP UI Components: Delivers centralised, interactive commerce components, such as product details and variants from MCP servers to ensure consistent, rich UIs across AI agents.
- Shopify Catalog: Enables your agent to search across hundreds of millions of products.
- Developers can use the Shopify Catalog to enable AI agents to search product data from shops across Shopify.
- The Shopify Catalog server lets your agent search across billions of products on behalf of a buyer.
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