In the Winter ’26 Renaissance edition, Shopify redefines how merchants work, surfacing insights, enabling natural language queries to Sidekick, and bringing native testing and simulated shopper validation into the core platform.

Every Shopify Editions release brings new features. Some are incremental. Others signal a deeper shift in how merchants are expected to operate. Shopify Editions Winter ’26 falls firmly into the second category.

This release marks Shopify’s most decisive move yet towards becoming an AI-native commerce platform, one that doesn’t just present data, but actively helps merchants interpret it, test ideas faster, and make better decisions with less friction.

At Convert, we work with merchants every day who are trying to balance growth, experimentation, and operational complexity, often with lean teams and limited time. What stands out about Winter ’26 isn’t just the volume of updates, but the intent behind them: less time finding problems, more time solving them.

From Sidekick and natural language data access to native A/B testing, simulated shoppers, market-specific experiences and deeper retail integration, Shopify is reshaping how commerce teams work day to day.

Here’s what the Winter ’26 release really means for merchants and where experience and strategy still matter most.

1. Shopify’s Shift to an AI-Native Platform: What It Really Means for Merchants

Shopify’s latest updates aren’t just feature releases, they represent a fundamental shift in how the platform works and how merchants are expected to use it. Shopify is moving from being a place where you look for problems to a platform that actively helps you solve them.

In short: less time finding the problems, more time solving them.

From AI-driven recommendations to native A/B testing, simulated shoppers, and deeper retail integration, Shopify is reducing friction across the entire commerce lifecycle, particularly for smaller teams who need to move fast without heavy technical overhead.

2. From Dashboards to Direction: Shopify as an Advocate for Success

At the centre of this shift is Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick. Traditionally, ecommerce managers spend hours inside dashboards trying to interpret data:

- Why did conversion drop?

- Why is AOV down?

- What changed last week?

Sidekick flips that workflow entirely. Instead of merchants hunting for insights, insights are surfaced automatically.

Sidekick will:

- Continuously monitor store performance

- Identify issues before merchants realise they exist

- Surface opportunities and recommendations in real time

The result is a platform that doesn’t just report on performance, it actively advocates for success based on the specific store it’s running on.

A useful way to think about Sidekick is this: you talk to Shopify Sidekick like you’d talk to your parents, basic, simple, and direct.

You don’t need technical language or scripts. You can ask for custom data in plain English, and Sidekick handles the complexity behind the scenes.

3. Making Advanced Data Access Human

This approach is reinforced through ShopifyQL, which allows merchants to query their data using natural language. Instead of writing complex queries, you can ask things like “show me customers from the last 30 days who haven’t repurchased”, or “which products underperformed in Victoria compared to NSW?”.

This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for advanced analysis and means non-technical users can do fast, meaningful work without relying on developers or analysts.

4. Native A/B Testing + SimGym: Testing at Speed

One of the most significant announcements is native A/B testing, delivered via Shopify’s own first-party app (called A/B Testing Rollout, available through the Shopify App Store).

This is something merchants have wanted for years, and until now, it’s lived largely in the third-party ecosystem.

With native A/B testing, merchants can easily test:

- Templates

- Layouts

- Buttons

- Conversion-focused design changes

Alongside this, Shopify introduced SimGym, a tool that sends hundreds of AI shoppers through your store to stress-test customer journeys and conversion funnels.

The combined result of native A/B testing + SimGym allows users to validate ideas faster, test designs before committing significant development time and implement better-performing designs with more confidence.

This is especially good news for smaller teams: this removes the need for long testing cycles or heavy development just to see if an idea works.

5. AI Block generation: AI Code (With Caveats)

Shopify’s Sidekick brings AI-powered code generation directly into the platform. Merchants can now generate their own code without starting from scratch, a huge leap forward in speed and accessibility.

But caution to the wise, it’s not foolproof.

AI-generated code needs to be treated with care: Saving generated code directly to a live theme can cause breaking changes, and if not appropriately configured, may not flow back into version control. 

Horizon AI is powerful, but it reinforces an important point: AI accelerates execution - it doesn’t replace experience.

This is where experienced digital partners remain critical, helping merchants navigate what to automate and what still needs human oversight.

6. Market-Specific Experiences and the Next Frontier of Testing

Shopify has also expanded market-specific functionality, allowing merchants to tailor pricing, products, and experiences by region.

This started with storefronts, where different markets could see different prices and products - and has now extended into checkout, enabling region-specific checkout experiences.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Shopify followed a clear pattern:

- Market-specific storefronts launched

- Native A/B testing followed on storefronts

If that pattern continues, it’s reasonable to predict that native A/B testing for checkout could arrive next.

Given how valuable checkout optimisation is, this would be a significant step forward and one that aligns perfectly with Shopify’s broader push toward faster validation and iteration.

7. Retail POS: No Longer an Add-On

The scale of updates to Shopify’s Retail POS makes one thing clear: retail is no longer treated as a secondary feature.

POS is now a core pillar of Shopify’s product offering: not an accessory to online commerce.

The increasing synergy between storefront, checkout and POS signals a clear strategy: if you’re on Shopify, the platform expects you to run everything through Shopify.

For retailers, this creates a more unified, less fragmented operation and a stronger overall ecosystem.

Shopify Editions Winter ’26 makes one thing clear: the future of commerce is proactive, AI-assisted, and faster by default.

Merchants will spend less time buried in dashboards and more time acting on surfaced insights. Testing will move quickly. Ideas will be validated earlier. And smaller teams will gain access to capabilities that once required heavy technical investment.

But while these tools lower barriers, they don’t remove the need for experience.

AI can surface opportunities, generate code, and simulate outcomes, but it can’t always judge risk, context, or long-term impact. That’s where the right partner still plays a critical role: helping merchants decide what to test, when to automate, and how to implement changes without breaking what already works.

At Convert, we see Winter ’26 as an inflection point. Not just a feature release - but a shift in how successful Shopify stores will be built, tested, and scaled moving forward.

If you’re looking to make sense of these changes, apply them safely, and turn Shopify’s AI-native tools into real commercial advantage, that’s exactly where we help. Reach out to us at hello@convertdigital.com.au