What's New in Shopify Editions Summer 2025? Our Highlights
If you’re not sure what Shopify Editions is, every 6 months Shopify releases an Edition which is an announcement of newly released features and features being worked on to look forward to in the future.
This season's Edition was absolute FIRE, with amazing news for Shopify web designers.
The previous edition was mostly for developers, so we predicted that this Edition would be for designers, specifically with lots of updates to the theme editor, and with AI advancements. And we were right, but we would have never predicted that themes were going to have such a massive update, going in a whole new direction.
Let's get into what the major updates were for designers.
1. All New Themes: Horizon Themes
Shopify released a whole new collection of 10 free themes. But these themes work completely differently than anything we've seen before from Shopify. The themes include a TON of new features that maximize design flexibility, and have AI built in to make editing easy.
Horizon theme features:
- 10 whole new free themes created to give ultimate design flexibility.
- Generate custom theme blocks with AI
- Generate custom theme sections with AI. This will create a custom section with settings for you which are mobile responsive. We loved seeing how it predicted the settings and additional features we'd want to include but didn't specify!
- Create custom layouts by inserting theme-wide block types into sections. Each block type has its own settings to adjust the layout, size, appearance, padding, margin and more.
- Groups & Nested blocks: Groups of nested blocks allow you to add more content to every section, and the flexibility to adjust the layout of it.
- Customize product cards: Easily add blocks like color swatches, reviews, low stock warnings and plenty of other blocks to product cards (which previously had very minimal customization options)
- More theme styling options, such as styles for different heading types
What's unclear is if "Horizon" is the name for this new type of theme (like when Online Store 2.0 was released and themes had to rebuild in an OS 2.0 version), or if it's just the name for this collection. Shopify calls Horizon their "new design foundation".
Limitations to Horizon Themes
We've only had a few hours to play around with Horizon themes, and since this is just the first version of them, we're sure they'll improve. However, we'll still point out the initial limitations we noticed with the new themes and features:
- AI prompts limited to text: When prompting the AI to create a custom section or block, you are currently limited to only text prompts. It would be amazing to be able to upload an image here in the future so that the outcome would better match your vision.
- Limited AI iterations: When you've generated a custom section, you can only tweak the prompt a few times before it stops letting you edit the section. It's unclear at what point you're stopped from iterating on the section.
- Lost AI history: If you tweak the prompt on a section generated using AI, it regenerates everything and you lose the previous version of it. Copy and pasting the same prompt as before doesn't mean it will come out the same.
- Lost Setting history: If you set up your new AI generated section with content and then tweak the prompt, you'll lose all the section content and settings you've added and need to start over.
- It’s buggy: Everything is just a bit buggy right now. The AI generation doesn’t always produce exactly what you’ve described, especially when it comes to functionality.
- Custom fonts still need code: You still need to customize themes with code in order to add custom fonts. This is a bummer as it’s something every store who has invested in their branding needs to do.
- Lacking premium theme features: The current (first) version of these themes lack some features we like to include in every store like a free shipping progress bar, and upsells in the cart.
Your Questions, Our Answers
Our Instagram DMs were rammed today with your questions about all these new updates to themes. So we’ll answer some of the common questions here.
Are all the new themes the same just styled differently?
From what we've seen so far, yes. We looked at the sections available across various new themes and the sections are the same. This is just like Shopify’s previous collection of free themes which were all based off of the Dawn theme, just styled differently. I believe Shopify would make them all the same because it would otherwise be too much work to provide documentation and support on all of them separately.
What is the default theme now when you start a store?
As of today, the default theme is still Dawn when you start a new store. We are expecting this to change very soon (like within the next few days even!)
Will the AI generation feature be coming to premium themes?
It looks like yes. Theme developers will need to restructure their themes to make this upgrade, much like they did 3 years ago when Online Store 2.0 came out. Last time it took 6-12 months for themes to all make the transition over to the new theme system.
Is there a need for premium themes now?
It’s too early to say. Possibly not if you have the time to customize the free ones. However, I personally do think there is a reason for premium themes to exist because they do offer more premium options. Even with greater flexibility coming with the new free themes, premium themes look “premium” out of the box, and generally have more features than a free theme. IMO theme teams are going to need to tighten their laces and see what will make them stand out. We have more coming on this topic soon…
Does the 25 section limit still exist on pages?
Yes it does, however with new section blocks and nested blocks, it’s much easier to keep things within the limit.
Can the new features replace some apps?
We think there’s definitely the potential that some apps will become redundant. But other apps will definitely still need to exist. The whole point of apps is to fill the gaps where Shopify or themes don’t natively support, so those gaps will still need to be filled but the gaps may be different now.
What types of custom sections can you make?
Our Shopify course Discord has been super chatty today as we explore what can be done with the new features in just minutes or even seconds.
- Charis experimented with building a bundle product section
- Chloe created a social proof video section that she was previously using an app for
- Fabio created a video slideshow block
2. Better Shopify Theme Editor
The theme editor has gotten a big upgrade as well, with improvements that make it faster to build pages, and organize your editing experience. We saw a few of these updates roll out over the past month and were thrilled as the tiny changes are things that make building stores so much easier. Here are the new features:
- Rename sections and blocks (This helps reduce confusion about which section is which in the sidebar)
- Sections collapsed by default (Meaning that you won’t see all the blocks and nested blocks by default — you’ll need to expand the section to see them. Finally something to keep things looking organized!)
- Copy and paste blocks and sections across pages (An awesome time saver, and helps keeps things consistent)
- Right click for shortcuts (we love the option to open the code file for a particular section right from the theme editor)
- Categories for sections and blocks (Meaning that sections are organized into Image, Text, Video, etc. categories)
- One-click text editing
- Hover to preview in block picker
- Simplified sidebar with conditional settings
3. Other Updates
These next updates are exciting as well but can be summarized much quicker:
- A new free Store Migration app to import product and customer data from WooCommerce, Etsy, Square and more
- One discount for multiple savings. Now certain apps can allow stores to use ONE discount code which can apply to BOTH products and shipping (for example, 20% off plus free shipping with one code)
- Sidekick (Shopify’s AI powered ecommerce assistant in the Admin) is now supported in 20 languages and can now generate images
- Sidekick also now allows you to screenshare to talk it through tasks in the admin
- Flat shipping rates now possible when orders are being fulfilled from multiple locations
- Shopify integration with Roblox means that players can purchase from brands directly inside of Roblox
- Shop Pay Installments is now available in Canada
- Thank you and Order status pages got an upgrade a few months ago, but there’s now a guide for this
- Shopify Payments is available in 16 more countries. The reason this is important is because using Shopify Payments unlocks some other platform features.
- Sell from multiple business entities through a single store
- Get payouts in multiple currencies (up to 8 currencies in Europe and Australia)
- Collect duties, taxes and tariffs at checkout OR embed duties and taxes into product prices, and use Tariffguide.ai to help you determine the duty rate for any product
- The option to refund orders to store credit
Our Final Thoughts
Flex sections were announced two years ago in the Summer 2023 Edition, and we did see tiny baby step updates on this, but nothing significant, so while we were expecting an update on “nested blocks” in this Edition, we were completely blown away by the enormous change in direction to themes that was announced today. They were really working behind the scenes on this one.
Overall, we love the new AI code generating features but still believe that knowing how to code is the best way to be able to leverage these tools to create the designs you want. We're excited about how this will speed up our workflow and allow us to create better stores!
We have a lot more to say about two things:
- The future of premium Shopify themes
- The role that web designers play in this new trajectory of store building
Look out for our thoughts on these topics coming soon!
Hana Drdla
