Shopify Winter ’26 Explained: 7 Features that actually matter for merchants
There's two things Shopify keeps proving time and time again: they’re not slowing down, and they’re not playing it safe. The Winter ’26 Edition, dubbed the Renaissance, is more than just another feature release: it’s a clear statement of intent. What stands out most to us? Shopify isn’t just shipping more features. They’re expanding the surface area of commerce while using AI, hardware and developer tooling in a way that actually makes merchants more efficient. That combination is rare and powerful.
One of the clearest signals of that intent is how Shopify is evolving Sidekick. What started as a helpful AI assistant last Summer, is quickly becoming a co-pilot for merchants and teams. With the Winter ’26 Edition, Sidekick moves beyond answering questions to proactively surfacing insights, suggesting improvements, and even helping execute changes across the platform. It’s embedded deeper into daily workflows, closer to real business decisions, and increasingly aware of context.
And that’s only one of the many standout updates in this release. With over 150 new features that dropped, it's hard to pick favorites. But these are the updates we believe will matter most to our clients and leads.
1. SimGym & Native A/B Testing: launch with confidence
One of the most exciting announcements is SimGym, Shopify’s AI-powered simulation engine, paired with native A/B testing.
Instead of guessing how customers might respond to a new launch, layout or pricing change, SimGym uses AI agents trained on billions of real-world purchases to simulate shopper behaviour before you go live. This leads to actionable insights that tell you what’s likely to work, and what isn’t.
We see this is a paradigm shift. Testing is no longer limited to post-launch experiments, but becomes part of the decision-making process itself. For our customers, native A/B testing combined with SimGym will quickly become a standard workflow, especially for teams that care deeply about conversion, speed and informed launches.
2. Checkout & account customisation per Market (and per B2B Buyer)
International growth is exciting, but also incredibly complex. Different countries behave differently, expect different payment flows, and convert in different ways.
With this release, Shopify allows merchants to customise checkout and customer account pages per market, and even differentiate between B2C and B2B customers, directly from the editor.
This is huge. It means checkout and account experiences are no longer one-size-fits-all. They become context-aware, adapting to geography and customer type without breaking the experience elsewhere.
For international merchants, this unlocks serious conversion optimisation potential. You can change the experience for each market without compromising performance or maintainability.
3. The POS Hub: Shopify gets serious about retail hardware
The POS Hub isn’t an update - it's a product. Purpose-built hardware that connects card readers, printers and scanners without pairing issues or unstable networks.
For merchants running physical stores, this matters a lot. Hardware reliability is one of the biggest pain points we see: unstable WiFi, changing IPs, dropped connections. The POS Hub addresses these challenges head-on and reinforces Shopify’s ambition to be a true unified commerce platform.
4. Receiving transfers in-store: logistics finally catch up
Unified commerce only works if logistics keep up.
With the ability to accept or reject inventory transfers directly in-store via POS, Shopify removes a major friction point. Previously, these actions often required admin access, slowing down store teams and creating bottlenecks.
Now, store staff can manage transfers as part of their daily workflow. For merchants with multiple locations, ship-from-store or inter-store transfers, this is a long-awaited improvement that makes operations smoother and faster.
5. SMS marketing: back to '00s - or is it?
Shopify is expanding its native communication stack beyond chat and email by introducing SMS marketing inside Shopify Messaging.
That means you can now run SMS campaigns directly from Shopify, alongside existing messaging channels. This means promotions, updates, and engagement flows can be managed from one central platform, without relying on external SMS tools.
Even though SMS has been around for decades, it remains one of the most effective channels for time-sensitive communication and retention, especially for promotions, drops, and loyalty-driven brands. By making SMS a native capability, Shopify lowers the barrier to entry while keeping customer data and insights in one place.
6. Payment Requests per Fulfilment: built for real B2B
B2B orders are rarely simple. They’re larger, often split across multiple shipments, and payments typically follow fulfilment instead of the other way around.
With payment requests per fulfilment (Shopify Plus), merchants can now charge customers as shipments go out. This aligns far better with how B2B buyers expect to pay and significantly improves the customer experience.
For our B2B clients, this removes a common workaround and brings Shopify even closer to real-world wholesale expectations.
7. MCP: building faster, smarter, and safer
As Shopify becomes more powerful, it also becomes more flexible, which inevitably leads to more complexity as well.
That’s where Model Context Protocols (MCPs) come in. MCPs give development agents and tools access to always up-to-date Shopify documentation, allowing teams to build faster, reduce technical debt and avoid costly mistakes.
For merchants like you, this might be invisible, but the impact is real. It means custom solutions can be built more quickly, more reliably, and in a way that scales with your business. A win-win-win.
The Winter ’26 Edition makes one thing clear: Shopify is going all in on unified commerce. From AI-driven decision-making to serious retail hardware, from B2B-native flows to developer accelerations: this release reinforces why Shopify has become the platform of choice for ambitious merchants.
If you’re wondering what these updates mean for your setup or how to leverage them in practice: we’re happy to explore that with you.
