Shopify has launched its Winter ‘26 Edition, titled Renaissance, unveiling a suite of over 150 updates designed to transition e-commerce from simple automation to “agentic” artificial intelligence.
The update, announced on 10 December, positions AI not just as a support tool, but as an active participant in how merchants build businesses and how consumers discover products across the web.
The rise of Agentic Storefronts
A headline feature of the release is Shopify Agentic Storefronts, a tool designed to insert merchant products directly into AI conversations on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot.
As search behaviour shifts from traditional engines to conversational AI agents, this feature ensures products are discoverable where the dialogue happens. Merchants can toggle which platforms display their products, allowing attribution data to flow back into the Shopify admin without complex integrations.
“AI is now essential to modern commerce,” said Deann Evans, managing director, EMEA at Shopify. “Our 2025 Holiday Retail Report shows the shift is already underway: 66 per cent of consumers expect to use AI for at least one part of their holiday shopping.”
Sidekick becomes proactive
Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick, has received a significant architectural overhaul. Moving from reactive to proactive, the new Sidekick Pulse feature surfaces personalised, high-impact tasks on the merchant’s home dashboard—such as suggesting product bundles based on cart data or flagging missing return policies.
Crucially, the assistant can now generate admin apps from natural language prompts, allowing merchants to build custom tools without writing code. It also gains the ability to edit themes via voice commands and allows merchants to save and share effective prompts as “skills” for their teams.
Vanessa Lee, vice president of leading product at Shopify, commented: “This Edition raises the ceiling of what Sidekick can do… It’s a compilation of 150+ product updates across our platform that help merchants and developers make the most of the latest technologies.”
Simulating success
In a move to reduce the guesswork for smaller merchants, Shopify introduced SimGym (currently in research preview). The tool uses AI “shopper agents” with human-like profiles to simulate how different customers might experience a storefront.
By modeling behaviour—from casual browsing to high-intent purchasing—SimGym allows merchants to A/B test changes and validate ideas without needing to risk live traffic or wait for real-world data accumulation.
Physical retail and payments
Beyond software, the Winter ‘26 Edition introduces POS Hub, a new hardware solution designed to streamline in-store connectivity. The hub connects card readers, printers, and scanners to POS tablets via a wired connection, aiming to improve reliability for brick-and-mortar retailers.
For the UK market specifically, Shopify is expanding flexible payment options with Shop Pay Installments. Powered by a partnership with Affirm, the feature allows merchants to offer payment plans of up to 24 months, fully integrated into the checkout process.
The release comes as UK merchants aggressively adopt AI technologies; Shopify’s data indicates that 93 per cent of UK merchants have already invested in, or plan to invest in, AI tools to aid product discovery.