Shopify dropped its Spring '26 Edition on 17 June 2026 – 150+ updates, as usual, but this time with a clear through-line: your products should show up wherever people are buying, which increasingly means inside AI conversations rather than on your own storefront.
I went through the whole thing so you don't have to. Here are my 10 top picks — the features I think genuinely deserve a merchant's attention. Some are the obvious headline acts; others are quieter updates that won't top anyone's highlight reel but matter more than you'd expect once you're actually running a store. For each, a note on why it matters and what, if anything, you should do about it.
1. The agentic online channel
Agentic Storefronts is the headline of this Edition, and the one I'd act on first. It's a sales channel in your admin that pushes your products into ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, AI Mode in Google Search, Gemini, Perplexity and Shop automatically – through Shopify Catalog, with no apps to install and no fees beyond standard processing.
The traffic/sales you will see in your dashboard will be probably low and some of the channels may not be enabled yet (for example ChatGPT and Copilot channels work only in the US). You still may see attributed sales to disabled channels because the attribution can be done also via URL parameters (like utm_source=chatgpt.com).
2. The AI Toolkit for (non-)developers
The Shopify AI Toolkit is now generally available: a single, open-source plugin that wires Shopify's docs, API schemas, live store data, and CLI straight into AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and VS Code, so an assistant builds against Shopify correctly instead of guessing. For an agency like ours it cuts the time to ship apps and integrations, which fits how we already use AI day to day.
For merchants, the main benefit is the Shopify connector to Claude. You can connect your store and manage from Claude client. What's the difference vs. Sidekick? I would say the better model – the coding quality is better and it will also seamlessly handles complex task. For example, you just upload docs (images, supplier sheet, etc.) and ask Claude to list the products to your store. It's also great for coding custom theme changes and new theme blocks.
3. Native checkout A/B testing
Until now you could A/B test a theme but not your checkout, which always struck me as the odder gap, since checkout is where the money actually changes hands. Rollouts now closes it: you can schedule, gradually publish, or run a real A/B test between two checkout configurations and let the data pick the winner. I walk through how it works in this short video. No surprise my first launched A/B test is finally the one-step vs. multi-step checkout.
Besides the checkout, you can test other pages, themes, or account pages.
Note below: If you are looking for the Rollouts app on the App Store – don't, it doesn't exist. Just go to your store admin > Markets > Rollouts.
4. Sidekick integration with third-party apps
Sidekick App Extensions let your other tools answer to Sidekick directly. Starting with Judge.me, Klaviyo, Loop, Smile, and 15+ partners, you can ask Sidekick about a Klaviyo campaign or your loyalty stats and get one answer that combines the app's data with your store context.
Action extensions go a step further, staging changes inside an app for you to confirm without leaving the conversation. It's part of Shopify's push to run everything from one place, and we can't wait to join with Candy Rack. If you haven't leaned on Sidekick yet, it's worth a try.
5. Campaign Autopilot
Campaign Autopilot is Shopify's attempt to run your paid marketing for you, straight from the admin (now renamed Growth). You set a monthly budget and guardrails, approve what goes live, and it plans, launches, and rebalances campaigns across Meta, Shop, and email, with ChatGPT Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Snapchat on the way. It uses your real product images rather than AI creative, and it leaves your existing campaigns untouched. It is free beyond the ad spend itself.
The catch: it is early access only, and it wasn't available on my store yet, so I joined the waitlist and hopefully will be able to test it soon.
6. Improved checkout
Shopify's checkout is already its best-converting surface, and this Edition adds a handful of smaller improvements that add up, especially if you are based in Europe:
- Payment methods are ordered automatically based on the customer's location and preference. So you no longer need to create a messy checkout customizations for hiding and reordering payment methods based on the market.
- Sharper address autocomplete gives more precise suggestions and validation for shoppers in the US, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands.
- More local payment methods: MobilePay (Nordics), TWINT (Switzerland), BLIK, and Przelewy24 (both Poland) are now available in more countries through Shopify Payments.
- VAT ID validation lets you collect and verify buyer VAT IDs at checkout with Shopify Tax across the EU and UK. Check the demo in my YouTube video.
- Customizable checkout/acocunts allows you to finally change a logo for different markets. This was a huge blocker for us.
7. New customer accounts
Three major updates land here, and together they make the customer account worth taking seriously.
- The pages got a design refresh: a cleaner single-column, mobile-first layout, a brandable sign-in page, and curated recommendations for shoppers who haven't ordered yet.
- Sign-in sessions now last up to 365 days, so customers stay logged in for a year and can pick up where they left off.
- And you can now capture email marketing consent right on the sign-in page, turning a login into an opt-in.
My own reason to care: the account is about to get far more traffic, because it's where EU shoppers will exercise the new right of withdrawal that applies from 19 June 2026. A clearer, stickier account page is suddenly doing compliance work too.
8 Variant-level product visibility
This is the kind of quiet fix I get disproportionately happy about. You can now publish or unpublish individual variants per sales channel, not just at the product level. The obvious use for most stores is hiding out-of-stock variants, but it also covers country-specific or B2B-only options, without duplicating products or resorting to storefront code.
Two caveats: for now it's only available through the API, not yet in the store admin. That last point is exactly why we're bringing it to Nada soon, so you can hide sold-out variants without writing a line of code.
9. Stackable product-level discounts
Combining discounts across types was already fine: an order discount could sit with a shipping discount, and either could stack on top of a product discount. The one combination Shopify still blocked was two product discounts on the same item, so a percentage off and a fixed amount off couldn't both hit the same product without Scripts or a third-party app. That last gap is now closed: with your discount combinations set to combine, you can stack multiple product discounts on the same item in one order.
Don't forget to enable discount combinations in the discount settings.
10. B2B on every plan
If you've ever turned down a wholesale or bulk request because B2B lived behind Shopify Plus, this one is for you. The core B2B toolkit is now native on Basic, Grow, and Advanced at no extra cost: company profiles for wholesale buyers, up to three custom catalogs with their own pricing, volume discounts and quantity rules, payment terms, and vaulted cards.
It runs in the same admin as your DTC store and works with Flow, Markets, and Payments, so wholesale stops being a bolt-on. Plus still wins for complex setups, with unlimited catalogs, deposits, and partial payments, but most merchants fielding the occasional wholesale order no longer need to upgrade to handle it properly.
The takeaway: where to start?
If there's a thread running through all ten, it's that Shopify is doing two things at once: pushing your products into AI-driven channels you don't fully control yet, and quietly stripping friction out of the parts you do. You don't need to act on everything today, but here's where I recommend starting:
- Get hands-on with Claude and the Shopify connector. Learning to delegate real store tasks to an AI agent is the habit that will compound fastest from here. Before opening the Shopfiy store admin try asking the Claude to perform exactly what you are going to do. This small habit will help you to understand the benefits and capabilities and also differentiate between tasks that you need to handle manually and tasks that you can "outsource".
- Always keep at least one A/B test running, on the storefront or in checkout now that Rollouts makes both testable. A test that never stops beats the occasional big redesign.
- Open the agentic channel and read the numbers. See where you're showing up, where you're not, and start fixing the product data behind it.
If you'd like a hand putting any of this in place, that's exactly what our agency services are for, so get in touch.
