Even though this wasn’t billed as an AI exclusive update, unsurprisingly it felt pretty AI heavy – or maybe it was just that the most significant changes were AI related. Either way, there are plenty of non-AI specific updates that were released too.
As always, there is no way I can cover every update on the list, I’m cherry picking the most exciting and need to know for the majority of people. Don’t forget to check out the full release at Shopify.com/editions and check the show notes for this episode that will include additional links.
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Shopify Agentic Storefronts
Let’s get started with the latest releases in the Agentic storefronts. As you might have noticed, Agentic is now listed as a Sales Channel with a quick access link inside your Shopify admin left-hand navigation menu. This gives you a high-level overview of how much money you’re generating from your agentic store front, tells you what queries you’re appearing for, and gives you quick access to update your Shopify catalog and your knowledge base.
To make sure we’ve got a handle on the basics, let’s chat about the knowledge base and the catalog real quick.
Knowledge Base is a free app provided by Shopify that lets you add frequently asked questions that are directly accessed by AI tools. This is not a customer facing tool and is would still require you to have say an FAQ page on your website. You would just duplicate your content in both places.
Shopify Catalog is essentially just a global catalog of all products that are sold by stores on Shopify. It’s just like the product feed you sync to Google Merchant Center so you can show up in Google Shopping Results. But in this case, the feed is what gets connected to the AI platforms.
As a Shopify seller, you don’t have to do anything special to have your products in Shopify catalog. As long as your products are eligible, they will be automatically included. Shopify even created a special plan for non-Shopify stores called the Agentic plan. This lets you submit your product feed to Shopify Catalog, so your products will be eligible to appear in these Agentic storefronts.
Like any product feed, you do need to make sure you have the right fields mapped between the two systems. Currently, there are three fields in Shopify Catalog that you can map. Product Title, Description, and Category. Category is the product taxonomy that’s used to determine sales tax and the one that randomly creates all those category metafields you don’t ask for.
We’re going to come back to optimizing your feed in a minute, but now that we’ve got the basics down, let’s talk about the updates.
Shopify Agentic Storefronts Product Catalog
Shopify will be automatically standardizing and enriching your product data to drive more conversion in AI shopping. The example they show includes features and specs, variant availability, and delivery estimates.
What isn’t clear from this or any of the documentation, is where this data is coming from. Specifically the structured data it’s referencing like top features and tech specs. Maybe that’s coming from those category metafields but it doesn’t explicitly state that.
Even if that is where the data is coming from, it doesn’t say anything about it being able to read the data you store in metafields. And I confirmed it’s not possible to map more than 1 shopify field to each catalog field.
So for example, if you’re one of the many Shopify merchants that broke out your product description information into separate fields to make it easier to read on the front end, for example moving your product ingredients out of the description field and into a separate metafield – well, you won’t be able to map both fields into the Shopify catalog description.
But, don’t worry. You don’t have to move all that content back into your description. You can create a new field that combines your regular product description and any metafield information into a new metafield that you use as the description field that is specifically mapped to the Shopify catalog. And you can automate it all with Shopify flow.
Yes, there will be a bit of work upfront to backpopulate the field for your existing items – this can still be done with Shopify Flow, but then you can set it up to make the update whenever you add a new product.
Shopify Secrets students and Lounge Members, I’ll be releasing a tutorial on how to do this by early next week if not sooner.
In the meantime, I would make sure your product category field is properly assigned. Really you want to be doing this anyway because that’s what determines the sales tax that’s charged at checkout.
And just check your mapping. Navigate to the Agentic sales channel, click the gray box that says “Review how your product data is sent to the Shopify catalog for Agentic Storefronts” and check your current mappings. It will tell you if any of your products are missing the field so you can make some quick updates.
Shopify Agentic Storefronts Direct Checkout
The next Agentic update is direct checkout. If you remember, when ChatGPT originally announced shopping would be available in their platform, they also stated customers would be able to check out through their platform. That idea was quickly scrapped with Open AI saying they would focus on being a product discovery platform. But, Shopify will now be providing the direct check out in these AI platforms. Right now it seems to be limited to Microsoft Copilot, but they did say Meta ads was coming soon and I expect additional platforms to be supported as well.
Of course, direct checkout comes with limitations. I’ll stick a link in the show notes that goes through all of them, but the most important to be aware of is obviously product customization. If you offer personalization where the customer needs to enter data on the product page before adding to cart, you’re going to want to turn off direct checkout, so the customer will be directed back to your store to place an order.
Navigate to the Agentic sales channel and you’ll see a list of all the platforms you’re connected to along with a toggle that is on by default which says, Allow Shopify to manage for me. Once you turn that off, you’ll be able to control each platform individually. You can either turn off your catalog for all AI channels, or click into Microsoft Copilot and just turn direct checkout.
The Shopify Catalog API
There are also a bunch of updates with the Shopify Catalog API. Even though this doesn’t impact you directly as a merchant, it does mean developers can build a shopping feature in their app using Shopify’s catalog.
Developers will be able to allow users to sign into Shop, eventually surfacing personalized search results, use image search so users can find products similar to what’s featured in an image they upload, and even offer sponsored products within the feed.
Shopify created a couple of demo projects to show what people might want to build. While there will likely be larger retailers who will build unique app experiences that access only their product catalog, who knows – maybe there will be more opportunities for you to get your products featured in other platforms like a comparison shopping app or something. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this.
Sidekick
Our good buddy Sidekick also got some updates. Some exciting, and some I’m a bit weary of or think are completely unnecessary.
For example, sidekick can now be used on your Apple Watch. Do you really need that kind of connectivity to your store? I don’t know about that.
Sidekick will also start giving you actionable guidance with tips to attract customers, improve conversion, and drive repeat sales. This is the one I’m a little weary about. While I’m open to see what sidekick has to say, Lounge members feel free to let me know what it’s recommending for you. I am a little concerned it could send you down some unnecessary rabbit holes or recommend things that won’t make a huge difference for smaller businesses or lower volume stores.
My recommendation here is to keep an eye on it as it might have some good suggestions, but don’t rely on it for your strategy.
My favorite update though is that sidekick can now take action in some of your favorite apps. The apps need to have specific sidekick extensions, so it is a bit limited at the moment, but the starting list is pretty good with Klaviyo, Judge.me, Smile, Aftership, Loop returns, and Yotpo as the first apps this is available with.
Of course, there is bound to be overlap, Klaviyo has a lot of their own AI tools built right into the platform, but it should still be a good help. One of the use cases they gave as an example was replying to all your 5 star reviews through Judge.me.
I’m definitely excited to see what else gets developed here.
Online Store Updates
Next up, let’s talk about the Online store updates. Starting with an update they released quietly a few weeks ago giving you variant level publishing for products.
Being able to unpublish specific variants vs. having to leave them sold out or delete them permanently was a long time coming. Excited to finally see that. Of course they waited until after they released combined listings on Shopify Plus, or themes and of course Shopify Secrets, built their own Shopify Siblings functionality. That still makes sense for stores with smaller assortments that want to look more full but damn, I feel like if that had released it sooner it would have saved a lot of merchants a lot of headaches. It’s okay Shopify, I still love you.
AI Sales Associate in Shopify Inbox
I think the most exciting announcement though is an AI sales associate is coming to Shopify Inbox. While there are plenty of AI assistant chat apps you can add to your store, I’m excited to see they’re updating their internal tools to have this functionality. This is currently marked as coming soon in my dev store with an option to toggle it on and be notified when it’s available. If you don’t have Shopify Inbox installed, I would install it and turn that on so you can test it out. You should be able to leave the regular chat off for now if you don’t want to use it at the moment.
B2B Available on All Plans
Another update they released quietly a couple of months ago, is B2B on all plans. The wholesale functionality on Shopify has been limited to Plus for many years, and non-plus stores needed an app to sell wholesale through their Shopify store.
While this is a very exciting update, it’s not without its limitations, and they’re not all obvious unless you do a little digging… which of course, I did.
For the purposes of today’s episode, we’re going to focus on the limitations because that is the easiest way to figure out if this is even a viable option for you. And it’s important to note, that while basic B2B functionality is available on all plans, there are some features that are still exclusive to Shopify Plus.
Limitations of Shopify’s Native B2B Functionality
The biggest limitation of the Shopify B2B platform is how product unit minimums work. Any unit minimums you set at the product level, are applied to each variant individually. So let’s say you sell apparel that comes in different sizes, and you want your retailer to buy a minimum of 5 units, but they can mix and match across the different sizes. This cannot be done with Shopify’s B2B functionality. Not even on Shopify Plus.
Pricing is also a bit limited. You can easily set a catalog wide price adjustment, say 50% off your retail prices, and you can adjust individual product pricing separate from the catalog wide 50% off, but there isn’t an easy way to assign different discounts to different groups of products. For example by product type.
You can create different product catalogs that would give you a bit more control, but you’re limited to 3 product catalogs on non-plus stores.
Catalogs on non-plus stores also can’t be assigned to specific companies, so if you wanted to offer different pricing or even different product availability to different retailers for say zip code protection, this isn’t possible without Shopify Plus.
You run into similar limitations at the order limit options as you can only set one order limit for all companies. There are no conditions for different companies or even opening vs. repeat orders. This seems to be a limitation on Plus as well. One quick note, order limits are set with the app Checkout Blocks. This order limit functionality used to be limited to Shopify Plus, but it is now open to all plans.
Who is Shopify’s Native B2B Functionality Good For?
Anyone who doesn’t need mix and match unit minimums across variants, those who have a smaller product assortment or is fine having the same percentage discount across their entire catalog for all wholesale customers.
The one merchant mix and match unit minimums could work for is if say you sell one product, and all your variants are listed as individual items. This way you can turn the unit minimum into an order minimum and it would achieve the same goal.
If you have different opening order minimums vs. repeat, a way you could work around that is to set your wholesale order minimum to your repeat order requirement. Then, when you have a new wholesale customer, you process their opening order manually through a draft before giving them wholesale shopping privileges on your website. This way you can enforce the opening order amount.
Ultimately, while I think it’s great they’ve released this feature for all plans, and for some merchants it will work perfectly, for those will wider product assortments, you’re probably still better off looking at an external app. A free one that I’ve used in the past which is super flexible is YMQ. The interface is super basic, but it does pretty much everything you need. And the developer has other paid apps, so I guess this one is simple enough they’re able to offer it for free.
Shopify POS Updates
For my brick and mortar retailers who use Shopify POS, you got a few fun updates too, most notably, a faster POS experience, faster search, in-store only discounts, returns and exchanges in one cart, and QR codes for scannable discounts.
There were a bunch of other little quality of life improvements you’ll want to check out, so make sure you read through everything on the editions page.
Shopify Marketing Updates
There were some solid marketing updates in this release, and honestly, this is the section I think most of you are gonna be most interested in. We’ve got a new AI-powered ad tool, some updates to Shop campaigns, and a new Shopify email feature that I have some thoughts on. Let’s get into it.
Shopify’s Campaign Autopilot
The biggest marketing announcement centered around Campaign autopilot. An AI powered marketing tool that plans and runs your ad strategy across meta, Shop and email with more channels on the way, including ChatGPT ads, Microsoft Advertising, and even SnapChat.
You essentially give the tool a budget, and it allocates everything for you. You set guardrails and approve everything before it goes live, then it continues to learn and adjust as it goes.
This is one of those tools that I say hey, if you want to give it a shot and see what happens, you should. But… keep a close eye on it and be realistic with your expectations.
If nothing else, I think it’s a great way to get access to ChatGPT ads since small retailers wouldn’t be able to go to them directly, so there’s that.
Campaign autopilot is free for all brands on a Shopify paid plan, and the only additional charge is for the actual ads. This is currently in early access.
Shop Campaign Updates
Shop campaigns have also gotten a few upgrades, including you can run one campaign across multiple channels, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Monetize, and Pinterest. You can also set up one campaign with custom bids for different customer segments, for example new vs. lapsed customers.
If you haven’t already given Shop Campaigns a shot, they’re definitely worth a test. LIke any new ad strategy they can take a while to start showing results, but you don’t pay unless you make a sale so there’s really no risk.
One of my Lounge members reported last week she’s starting to see an uptick in orders from Shop and so far she’s pleased with the results. Again, you don’t pay unless they convert so there’s really no risk.
Smart Email Delivery
For my Shopify email users, there’s a new feature called smart email delivery. If you have more than 1,000 subscribers on your list Shopify will “intelligently” prioritize which messages to send and which to hold back, optimizing for conversion.
According to their documentation, smart delivery automatically filters out customers who haven’t interacted with your recent marketing campaigns or SMS subscribers with inactive phone numbers. If those are the only 2 criteria, then cool. It saves you a little bit of extra time. Although I still recommend you actively manage and segment your engaged vs. non-engaged subscribers anyway.
What isn’t clear, and admittedly I didn’t dig too deep into it, they don’t say what recent means. My concern is they would over filter in an effort to make your engagement metrics look really good. And while list health and deliverability is important, there is an element to email marketing that is still a numbers game.
While smart delivery is on by default, you can turn it off. So I recommend you alternate for a few weeks and compare the numbers. So one week have smart delivery on and the next, segment your engaged list yourself and see how many people are being sent the emails, what’s the engagement rate, etc. Just be careful it’s not over optimizing and you’re not missing out on less engaged customers who are just waiting for the right email that will push them into action.
Shopify Inventory Management
There were some major updates to how Shopify handles inventory management too. We won’t get into the nitty gritty of everything, but let’s cover the most impactful.
Receiving inventory now creates transfers that are connected directly to the purchase order, giving you a full audit trail. You can also receive partial shipments, creating multiple transfers for each individual delivery. You can also receive inventory directly through Shopify POS, and can more easily route inventory to the right location at the receiving step.
Sidekick can also help you decide what to order. It can look at what’s been selling, what you have left, and forecast demand to recommend what to buy and how much. You can make adjustments as needed, and even have sidekick create the purchase order for you.
The one thing you have to watch out for, is there’s no way to really store required minimums from your suppliers so that sidekick knows what quantities or dollar amounts it needs to hit. And there still is no dedicated suppliers list. You could probably get creative with some workarounds, like creating a metaobject with all your suppliers and their order minimums or using a metafield to set minimum quantities at the product level. Sidekick can read that data if you direct it to.
Like most things AI, I would say use it as a jumping off point or to check your own logic, but don’t expect sidekick to be able to do it all.
Other Shopify Updates
Alright, before we go let’s do a couple of quick hit updates you’ll probably want to dive a bit deeper into.
There have been a ton of analytics updates such as new data visualizations, daily insights, metric targets to track your progress, using metafields to filter analytics, and you can even add annotations to your analytics charts.
Inventory adjustments are now track each change so you have a full audit trail.
You can organize your orders into batches for fulfillment, grouping by criteria such as product type, or shipping destination so you can pick, pack, and purchase labels and print documents in a way that matches your workflow.
There were a bunch of Shop App updates too including offering in-store pickup through the shop app, customizing your product detail pages in Shop with blocks, adding posts to Shop that get seen my active shoppers on the app in their home feed, and they even added demand indicators like if an item is trending or if inventory is low.
Shopify tax is available in Canada.
And the last thing I wanted to mention today, was a big announcement about earning cash back on ad spend for Meta and Google ads when you pay with ACH through Shopify Balance.
I am NOT a fan of any payment like this that takes your cash right away. I still recommend you use a credit card for ad payments in case your account gets hacked, or something with your billing goes wrong. Having the ability to dispute, cancel the card, all while still having access to your cash is important. And this isn’t a hypothetical, this is based on it actually happening to multiple merchants in the past.
Check out Chase’s Ink Business Credit card. They have one that gives you higher cash back on ads and shipping.
Your Next Steps
As I mentioned earlier, this is just a sampling of what was included in the Shopify Editions Summer 2026 release. I still recommend you go and check out the release page – I will say this one was much easier to navigate than I think it was the winter AI renaissance one that was overly designed and super annoying.
A good number of these are currently in early access or you need to get on a waitlist so you’ll want to keep your eye out over the next few weeks or couple months for when they’re fully released.
Time Stamps
00:00 Shopify Editions Overview
01:37 Agentic Channel Basics
03:45 Optimize Catalog Data
07:27 Direct Checkout Controls
09:46 Catalog API Future
11:28 Sidekick New Powers
14:04 Online Store Upgrades
16:00 B2B For All Plans
22:15 POS Updates
22:46 AI Marketing Tool
24:54 Smart Email Delivery
27:10 Inventory Operations Revamp
30:13 Analytics And Quick Hits
33:17 Wrap Up And Links
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