We’re living in a modern-day renaissance with AI at the center. Shopify’s Winter ’26 Edition—The RenAIssance Edition—is a compilation of 150+ product updates across our platform, all designed to help merchants and developers make the most of the latest AI and technology advancements. It’s one of our most ambitious Editions to date, and is an excellent showcase of what’s possible in today’s commerce landscape.
We chose the Renaissance theme because it symbolizes progress, momentum, courage, and new beginnings. It feels emblematic given the features we’re shipping, many of which weren’t possible a year ago. This Edition redefines how we achieve our mission of making commerce better for everyone.
With so many launches, I wanted to highlight a few that I think are transformative to the platform and explain the ambition behind them.
Sidekick enters a new chapter
In the summer of 2023, we shared our vision for Sidekick—a super-charged cofounder for every merchant. Since then, we’ve been heads-down, focused on getting Sidekick to a point where it’s consistently great at tasks that are core to commerce. And earlier this year, we shipped a new architecture to improve Sidekick’s performance. Sidekick has gone from a tool with only minor usage to an essential part of the platform. All of this has laid the groundwork for the features in this Edition, which raise the ceiling of what Sidekick can do.
First, we are giving Sidekick the ability to think on your behalf and surface insightful next steps tailored specifically for your business using Sidekick Pulse. When identifying opportunities to expand your business takes a backseat to the day-to-day, Sidekick is there to proactively identify new ways to grow.
So here’s how it works: because Sidekick already knows so much about your store and your business, it’s able to work behind the scenes to analyze and find opportunities for growth. Sidekick’s research uses both store-specific and Shopify-wide signals, ensuring every recommendation is unique, contextual, and valuable.
Sidekick has your back, and will notify you when it sees something worthwhile. You won’t just get ideas—you’ll get a partner that assists in executing these recommended actions. Additionally, Sidekick can now take on more complex tasks, generating to-do lists and working with you to complete them.
We also gave Sidekick a host of new skills: the ability to build automations, better theme editing capabilities, and the ability to edit emails. But I’m particularly excited about one new Sidekick skill—the ability to generate a custom app.
Leveraging all of the developer tools we’ve built over the years including Polaris UI and the Admin GraphQL API, Sidekick can generate custom applications right inside the admin. Merchants can visually iterate on the app, test to ensure it’s making the right changes to their store and install the app when they’re done. With millions of merchants on the platform, giving each merchant the ability to dictate exactly the user interface they want for their specific business is so powerful.
We’ve heard from both the app developer community and our merchants that they want Sidekick to work with the apps they use to run their business every day. So this Edition, we’re releasing the developer preview of Sidekick App Extensions, how apps will be able to expose data and functionality to Sidekick so it’s available in merchant conversations. Using Sidekick extensions you can connect your app’s data and workflows to Sidekick so that it can surface insights, answer questions about your app’s context or even navigate merchants straight to the right screens to take action inside your app.
We’ll continue making Sidekick more capable in 2026, prioritizing the features that give entrepreneurs leverage in their day.
Shopify Agentic Storefronts
AI has reignited a boom in creativity and a new goldrush of consumer shopping experiences. As a platform, we have always made sure that our merchants show up where their customers are, from your own online store to marketplaces to social selling to the metaverse. We have always used our scale and our platform to ensure our merchants are there first and that their brands show up authentically. And this is still true with the rise in AI-powered channels and agentic commerce.
This Edition we are introducing Shopify Agentic Storefronts, a set of tools to help you ensure your products are discoverable and your brand stays authentic in agentic conversations. These tools are available to every merchant, right within the admin.
Set it up once and your products will be syndicated and surfaced to AI chats everywhere. You don’t need to worry about integrating with every AI platform individually. In the coming weeks we’ll start rolling out more merchandising controls so that you can ensure your product data is syndicated accurately. We’re also evolving Knowledge Base to help you control your brand story and track conversations so you know what is happening on these surfaces.
We know how much energy and effort you put into your brand and making sure your products speak to your customers. In this next era of commerce where AI is introducing new ways for consumers to shop, we want to make sure that your story stays front and center. This is why we will be continuing to invest in tooling to make sure you can craft your story in Shopify and easily make it available to all the places where consumers are shopping.
Although a lot of the narrative around commerce this year was around shopping within conversations, we believe that AI unlocks all types of shopping experiences. From virtual try-on apps, to AR-VR, to voice, AI has unlocked a new set of consumer shopping experiences that were not possible before. Shopify Agentic Storefronts unlocks AI shopping for all of these and it’s possible thanks to the Shopify Catalog.
Arming developers with Shopify Catalog
For the past two decades, we have built real, scaled consumer shopping flows from discovery to cart to checkout and we’re now giving developers the ability to work with millions of retailers with a single integration.
In August we announced a suite of tools to enable any developer to incorporate commerce into their agent. We showcased the Catalog API for product discovery, a universal cart API that can hold items from multiple stores and our Checkout Kit so you can embed a merchant’s checkout right in the agent. This Edition we are opening up access to the Catalog API through our developer dashboard.
With millions of merchants, product discovery isn’t simple. Product data can be messy and it’s hard to produce accurate search results when product metadata is spread across various fields. The Shopify Catalog takes billions of products, infers their categories and attributes, and clusters products that are the same. We are uniquely set up to do this because we’ve seen billions of product configurations over the years.
When you search using the Catalog API, the results aren’t just more accurate—they’re also more relevant. Many products are resold across retailers and without proper clustering, search results would contain duplicates and bury potentially relevant results. The Catalog API solves for this.
Rolling out this week, developers will be able to generate tokens for the Catalog API and use the playground to get started. Catalog API is the best route for most developers but a Catalog Feed is available for specific partners with their own search infrastructure. And if you’re building at scale, come talk to us so we can ensure you get the right limits.
One other thing I want to call out is the ability to use the catalog token to create an embedded checkout. Checkout Kit is available already if you want to build an accelerated checkout experience within your app. But soon, you will be able to attach a set of overrides so that the checkout looks and feels consistent to your agent.
We are also giving a preview of our new Checkout MCP tools for specific partners building native applications. Our goal is for it to work seamlessly with the Checkout Kit and branding overrides so that you can build a seamless commerce experience across millions of merchants with a single integration.
This Edition is about moving AI from hype to everyday help—reliable tools that make real work faster and smarter.
Read the rest of this post on the Shopify Newsroom.
