Shopify unveils Winter ’26 Edition with major upgrades to Sidekick and new AI commerce tools

Shopify released its Winter ’26 Edition featuring more than 150 updates, with a major focus on expanding Sidekick into a proactive, AI-driven commerce assistant that can generate admin apps, build workflows, customize themes, and edit product photos from natural-language prompts. The Edition also introduced Agentic Storefronts, allowing merchants to surface their products inside AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, plus new capabilities in retail hardware with POS Hub and native experimentation tools through Rollouts. Shopify is also previewing SimGym, an AI simulation app that models shopper behavior before changes launch, and expanding its AI-native developer platform to help teams build apps and storefronts faster.