INSIGHTS
Shopify Editions Fall '26 is here
Shopify’s Editions Fall '26, “Exponential”, has landed with more than 150 updates across design, payments, AI and automation. That’s a lot to work through, so we asked our team which updates stood out to them and which ones their clients have been asking for. Here’s what they picked.
Shop Pay Installments arrives in Australia
Australian businesses can now offer Shop Pay Installments, letting customers pay over time with flexible terms. It’s in early access, so not every store will see it straight away.
This was the number one pick for our Head of Strategic Accounts, Alex Healey, and it’s easy to see why. Australians are among the world’s most enthusiastic users of buy now, pay later, and until now Shopify merchants here have relied on third-party providers to offer it. A native option built into Shop Pay means fewer integrations to manage and a checkout experience that’s familiar to the 400 million-plus shoppers with Shop Pay accounts.
It also pairs with another change in this Edition: you can now add Shop Pay and local payment methods through Shopify Payments alongside an existing payment provider in the same store.
To consider: If BNPL already drives a meaningful share of your orders, register your interest for early access and plan a side-by-side test against your current provider. Watch conversion, average order value and fees before you switch anything off.
Scheduled price and product rollouts across markets
You can now schedule changes to prices and product publishing as catalogs, roll them out across markets, and have them roll back automatically when the promotion ends. This was the most-mentioned update across our team.
Anyone who has run a Black Friday sale knows the pain: prices updated by hand at midnight, a scramble to publish new products on time, then the clean-up afterwards, all multiplied by every market you sell in. Rollouts now bundle these moving parts into one scheduled event. A single rollout can include your theme, checkout configuration, catalogs and discounts, and it can extend to headless builds, Shopify POS, Google Shopping and the Shop app.
Sidekick takes on technical, multi-step work
Sidekick has moved from answering questions to doing real work. It can now handle complex workflows, stage multiple changes at once, compute, write code and search the internet, and it remembers what you’ve asked. Shopify reports daily Sidekick sessions have grown 4.2x year over year.
In practice, that means you can make a plan, approve it once, and watch Sidekick apply the changes, such as rewriting descriptions across every product in a collection. It now also understands the apps in your stack, draws on web research about your industry when making recommendations, and can test proposed store improvements with SimGym before suggesting them.
To consider: Start with repetitive, low-risk jobs like bulk content edits and reporting questions. Always review the staged changes before approving.
''Exponential is the right name for this Edition. It’s all about the network – the buyers, payments and agents that already know each other – and how it compounds to benefit Shopify merchants. POS can now recognise more shoppers at the counter, turning a card the network already knows into a customer. Shopify Payments already blocks more than 12,000 high-risk payments every minute, and Shopify Protect builds on that to stop fraud before it becomes an order. Universal checkout on Shop will let shoppers buy from multiple brands in one cart. And with one MCP and the Catalog API, any agent or app can tap into more than a billion products. The bigger the network gets, the more every merchant on it gains.''
Josh Newport, Partnerships ANZ, Shopify
Canvas: your whole store in one view
Canvas is a new design workspace where every page of your store is laid out together, so you can pan across the whole store and zoom in on any detail. You can click any element to edit it directly, or tell Sidekick what you want and see its changes land in real time. Canvas is currently in early access.
Shopify says stores go from no theme to a launched store 20% faster with Canvas. However, Canvas is still early, and according to Shopify’s changelog it doesn’t yet support:
• third-party themes from the Shopify Theme Store (it works with Shopify themes and custom themes)
• Markets, rollouts or translations
• app blocks and app embeds
Themes edited in Canvas also don’t receive theme updates. You start from Online Store > Themes, either creating a new theme in Canvas or duplicating a Shopify theme or custom theme into it. Your original theme stays in the current theme editor.
To consider: With BFCM around the corner, now isn’t the time to be making big changes to your live store. If you’re curious, explore Canvas on a duplicate theme, but we’d recommend waiting until the new year before making any changes you plan to publish.
Shopify Flow reaches deeper into product data
Flow automations can now run whenever a product’s price, tag, metafield or another field changes.
“Very excited to see expanded product field changes for Flow. It opens the door to a lot of new automations, reduces existing complexity, and can remove the need for additional automation apps.” – Zachary Green (Development Team Lead, Convert Digital).
That last point matters for running costs. Plenty of stores pay for third-party apps just to react to product changes, such as alerting the team when a price drops below a margin threshold or retagging products when a metafield updates. Many of those workflows can now live natively in Flow. Flow also gains version history (preview, compare and restore earlier workflows), staff permissions based on existing admin roles, and the ability to build automations with your preferred AI agent.
To consider: It's worth auditing your automation apps. If an app’s main job is watching product fields, it may now be redundant.
“The new editing interface, Canvas, stands out for me as a designer. It lets you see the whole site in one view, a lot like Figma.”
Rachel Wyatt, Senior UX/UI Designer, Convert Digital
Also worth knowing
A few smaller updates our team flagged:
• A filterable activity log (coming soon). Review changes across your store in one log, with each action attributed to the staff member, app or service behind it.
• Multi-source collections. Collections can now combine products, apps or variants, be created with Sidekick, and be reused to power operations.
• Variants managed from the product page. Product and variant details now sit on the same page, with bulk controls for variants and a clearer layout.
• Shopify Tax for US expansion. For Australian brands growing into the US, Shopify can now calculate, collect and remit sales tax in each state for businesses new to the platform, and US tax is calculated from the location each order ships from.
• Multi-currency payouts in Australia. Shopify Payments now pays out in more currencies for Australian businesses on Advanced and Plus plans.
• Shop Campaigns in Australia. Shop Campaigns now covers over 35 new markets, including Australia, and you only pay when an ad drives a sale.
The bigger picture: standardisation is back
The thread running through this Edition is AI and agentic commerce. Shopify continues to build out the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which lets AI agents create carts and checkout links and answer questions about a store, grounded in facts the business has published. Stores can now also sell in Google Search’s AI Mode and the Gemini app, and review the business details shared with AI shopping agents.
Looking at it from a data perspective, our Development Team Lead, Zachary Green, sees a shift every merchant should take note of:
“The pull towards data standardisation is stronger than ever – more and more we will need to look to “how do we built the custom feature aligned with what the AI expects”. The more we rely on AI, the more that the work that we’re all doing needs to be aware of the broader context.”
For years, competitive advantage on Shopify often came from heavy customisation. Now, the more your store follows Shopify’s standard structures (clean product data, native features, supported themes), the more easily it plugs into Sidekick, Canvas, Flow and AI shopping channels. Every new feature adds to the incentive to tidy things up.
To consider: Treat product data quality and platform alignment as growth work, not housekeeping. A store that’s easy for AI to understand is a store that’s easy for AI to sell.
If you’re looking to make sense of these changes, that's exactly where we help. Get in touch at hello@convertdigital.com.au with any questions.
