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 named The Renaissance Edition, with an emphasis on “AI”. It's full of updates that help support Shopify merchants to get better insights into how to grow their stores, and AI tools that assist them in doing so quickly.

While the past Edition had a ton of updates for designers, and the one before that for developers, we feel that this Edition is focused on Merchant tools.

Let's get into what updates designers need to know about.

Shopify Rollouts

[Coming soon] Rollouts is about to make sales campaigns and site optimizations a whole lot easier. Rollouts lets you: 

• Prepare theme design changes in advance, and schedule them to go live at a specific time (great for campaigns)
• Create A/B test theme changes, set traffic percentages for testing, and view analytics to compare which one performed better 
• Validate untested store changes with an AI tool that simulates shopping behavior

While Rollouts covers theme changes only, if you need to schedule price changes, you can use Shopify Flow to do so. You an access Rollouts on the admin under "Markets". 

This past year we've been working a lot on implementing conversion strategies, so we're so excited to try out this new A/B testing feature.

Shopping with AI

Shopify merchants will soon be able to have their products discoverable in AI chats such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity. They'll be able to manage which products are available and how the brand appears.

I know many of my clients have been asking how they can make sure that their products are being recommended by AI tools. This is a great opportunity for designers to reach out to past clients and help them get set up to appear in AI chats.

Additionally, Instant Checkout is available most ChatGPT users in the United States. When Instant Checkout is enabled, it allows the checkout to happen in the chat. Otherwise, ChatGPT would provide a link out to a merchant’s site to finish checkout. Instant Checkout recently launched with Glossier, SKIMS and Spanx products. 

Sidekick Updates

Sidekick can now help with even more complex, multi-step tasks. It can now: 

• Write to-do lists for a plan of action & complete many of these tasks
• Build highly personalized custom apps designed for a store's specific business needs 
• Remember your chats and preferences
  
• Create collections, create coupon codes, , create customer segments, and edit Shopify emails
• Generate custom reports and data visualizations. We're checking out the new heatmap visualizations in our Analytics to spot patterns and trends
• Adjust your theme based on design updates requested
• Developers can create Sidekick app extensions which allows Sidekick to access app data and perform actions inside the app

Additionally, Sidekick Pulse is a new feature that proactively creates 5 tailored store recommendations based on the store’s data, market trends, and performance to identify opportunities, insights, and actions to take. Pulse then tells the information to Sidekick to help store owners put the recommendations into action.

A new feature we've been using in stores lately is reusable Skills. You can save Sidekick prompts as "Skills" to reuse later on, share your skills with the community, and use others' shared Skills in your own store. 

Shopify Product Network

Shopify Product Network allows stores to offer products from other stores on collection pages, search results and more, while earning a commission on every sale. The tool gives merchants insights into what customers are looking for, and recommendations on how to fill those gaps by instantly adding products from other Shopify brands (US only). 

For designers, providing recommendations like this based on store insights will help your clients succeed and keep iterating on their product offering. 

What's the difference between Shopify Product Network and Shopify Collective? 

While the new Shopify Product Network sounds very similar to Shopify Collective which was released a few Editions ago, the difference is in how you work with other stores' products. 

With Shopify Collective, a store can import a different store's product listing directly into their own store's catalog. When an order is placed, it's sent to the supplier who fulfills and ships the order to the customer. This is better suited for direct partnerships with selected suppliers. 

With Shopify Product Network, merchants "host" products from other stores, which are clearly labeled as "Sold by [other store name]" at checkout. Products can be displayed in store placements like collection pages, search results, and post-purchase pages. The purpose is to offer complementary products, using Shopify's data insights to help fill gaps in customer demand. It's a more dynamic way of offering other brands' products. 

Both allow store owners to earn a percentage or commission on the sale without managing inventory or shipping for those products. 

Other Notable Updates: 

• Shopify SimGym is a new free app that lets you simulate storefront changes, and see how AI shoppers respond. Designers can you this to see how design changes are predicated to impact the user experience and sales.
• New updates to the Shop app that provide a more personalized shopping experience, such as: shoppable videos, customizable product pages, and order tracking in more countries
• Displaying unit prices for products is now possible (e.g. $3.75/100g). This is a legal requirement in some countries
• Collections can now be duplicated, and conditions now allow you to say "tag does not equal X"
• Shop Pay Installments is now available in the UK 
• Auto-translation for Shopify forms from English into 19 other languages 
• Newish "Unlisted" product status now available. This is a live product that's not discoverable in the store - great for free gift upsells!
• Create products with up to 2048 variants. You are still restricted to 3 product options.
• Customers can now log into stores using Google or Facebook
• Shopify Collective is now available in 35 additional countries 
• Tinker is a cool new AI app to help merchants ideate and create content 

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Any business owner is always up to their neck in tasks that they could be doing to improve their online store. We love that these Shopify updates are helping merchants identify what the most impactful changes are, and helps them quickly implement them. And as designers, there is plenty of opportunity for us to use the new AI tools to help make optimized design decisions and ensure that our clients are set up for success.

You can read the full Edition here.

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