SPECIAL EPISODE: Shopify Editions Spring 2026. What You Need To Know.

Right now, while you're listening to this, someone out there is asking ChatGPT for the best running shoe for a flat fee, or the best running shoe that doesn't hurt arches when you jog. And they're not on Google, they're not on your website, they're having a conversation, and at the end of it, they're gonna buy something.

The only question that matters for me, and for- should be for you, is whether the thing they're buying is yours. And that is the whole story of the Shopify Spring 2026 Edition, which just dropped this week, and it's why I wanted to do this episode as fast as possible. Now, if you're new to this, every few months, Shopify drops what they call an edition.

It's a big, giant pile of everything they've shipped. This one had over 150 updates, which is about par for the course. They're usually around 150, some are upwards of 200. Nobody has time to go through 150 feature updates, and honestly, most of it won't touch your store, [00:01:00] specifically this quarter anyway.

So I went through them all and I did the boring thing for you. I read them all and I clicked into the help docs behind all the shiny marketing copy and speak and videos. I went deep and I pulled out, I pulled out 10, but then I added one more. So I pulled out 11 that I'd actually turn on if this were my business.

So- Here's how I want you to think about this the whole way through this episode. For most of you, selling started as one thing, your website, and then it probably became two. You started selling in person through a card reader or at a market or a pop-up or shop. Then three, you probably started selling through social, through TikTok Shop or Instagram, the whole social circus, all the different channels.

This Shopify edition is Shopify betting hard that there's now a fourth place your customers buy, and [00:02:00] that's inside of AI agents, ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and Shop's own app, Shop App, which is itself an AI assistant, or they are at least trying to position it that way. It definitely is an AI assistant.

You, you ask it for products and it, it gives recommendations. So almost everything I'm about to walk you through only clicks once you see it through that lens, that knowing that this is now the fourth major channel for brands where they will be shopping. So we're gonna go a little bit longer than normal today, 'cause normally I like to keep these tight, 25, 30 minutes.

It might go a little bit over. I'd rather actually cover all of these properly than rush through them. So grab a coffee, make your walk a few extra steps today because we're gonna cover 11 features and what each one is and what it means for your store and who should care about it, and the exact next step you should take if you want to actually implement it.

So let's get into it. Number one is, and this is a big one, it's Shopify [00:03:00] Catalog and a thing in your admin called Agentic Home, and here's what it does. Shopify takes your product data, your titles, your descriptions, your variant images, all of it, cleans it into a standard format, and then pipes it all out to all those AI shopping channels I just mentioned.

So when someone asks an AI assistant for a product, yours is actually in the running to show up. Doesn't mean it's going to show up, but it's at least in the running with the right info, the right price, the right specifications. It has images, everything. All of the attributes are on it in a way that it could be bought right there in the AI agent.

So why does this matter? Shopify's own number is that the product data The, sorry, that the pr- that they syndicate this way drives twice the conversion in AI agents compared to when that data isn't set up for it. So AI agents need to understand your products. Now, Shopify says [00:04:00] it increases it, the conversion's twice as good when the data's better.

Now, that's a Shopify stat. That's not an independent study, so take it with a grain of salt. But the direction is actually, is 100% accurate. Clean, structured product data wins with AI. Messy data gets skipped. And then here's the part that most people really haven't even considered. There's a setting that says something like, "Let Shopify manage this for me."

And for most stores, that's already the default, which means you might be selling in AI channels right now, and you might not actually even know. It's just happening. It just shows up in your Shopify store, and if you don't look closely at the channel it came through, you wouldn't even know. Now, that's not just- that's not criticism or anything.

That's just the reality. Shopify opted you in. So who should care? Well, honestly, everybody. Everybody selling any physical products to consumers, this is the single most important tab in your admin right now, and you might not even be looking at it yet. It should become your most important. [00:05:00] Let me make this very concrete.

Say you sell supplements, and a customer asks an AI assistant "What's a clean protein powder with no artifir- artificial sweeteners under fifty bucks?" Think about the way you talk to an AI agent. If your product page actually says it's naturally sweetened, lists the price and names the flavor, y- you're a candidate to show up.

Maybe s- it talks about the clean ingredients. Now, if your description is kind of, you know, vibey sentences about your brand journey, a big hero photo, uh, y- you're talking about everything else except the ingredients, it might work for a human, but you're invisible to that question and to the AI agent.

The robot can't read your, your vibe and words that don't make sense. It reads your data. So it's not only about showing up in the answer. Shopify built the plumbing so that the actual purchase can happen inside the chat as well. And in some of these channels, the customer can check out right there [00:06:00] and pay you with Shop Pay and actually never even land on your site, which is a little bit wild when you think about it because it means your product data, your reviews, your price, your availability, that is now your storefront in these moments and this buyer journey.

Not your theme, not your brand colors, not your big hero video, not everything else that's on your store, the data. So when I say clean it up, here's what I actually mean in practice. Titles that say what the thing is, descriptions that answer the obvious questions a buyer would ask. What's it made of? Who's it for?

What problem does it solve? I, I use this example sometimes if you're selling fishing lures, what fish do you catch with it? What event is this shirt good for? Great for certain events. Variants filled in properly matter. Actually fill in all the details, like, of each single variant, not just your main pl- the main placeholder of the product, but all individual variants.

[00:07:00] Inventory actually matters. It's all that boring, unglamorous stuff, and the boring stuff is now, it's a moat, because most of your competitors aren't doing it yet. They will, uh, everyone will eventually, because if it becomes the main way that your channels get... Sorry, your products get recognized in these channels, they will.

But right now, it can be a massive com- competitive advantage. I'm gonna give you one next step for this one, and then I'm gonna go to number two from additions, is tonight or this, this weekend or whenever you're listening to this, go into your admin, find your sales channels, then click on Egentic and look what's already turned on, then open your three best sellers, products, and then read the descriptions.

And read it like a machine would. Don't look at it and worry about how good it looks. Are the materials listed, the fabric, what it's made of, the actual chemistry of it, um, the ingredients, the dimensions, the use cases? Like, do you have use cases listed? Do you have FAQs, common questions? And the, what's the one reason someone actually chooses it, [00:08:00] why people choose it?

Is that written down? So fix the vaguest ones first, and on, you know, pick your top three to five products. And just one kind of bit of a caveat here is not every product or market qualifies yet for this. So Shopify does have eligibility rules, so don't panic if something isn't showing. But fix the data.

It will eventually be rolled out across all the stores, and that work will 100% pay off. Okay, number two, Campaign Autopilot. This one is super cool and it's one that actually kind of made me Perk up a little bit I wanna say. Mostly because of, uh, the price. It's free on all paid plans. You only pay for the actual ad spend.

So here's what it is. You set a budget and a goal, and Shopify's AI builds and runs ad campaigns across meta shop app, email, and just they d- does it straight out of your Shopify admin. It picks your audiences, it places the ads, [00:09:00] and adjusts and learns to what's working. And the thing I like about this is the detail that makes it safe, even for someone who is already running ads with a real team, is that it spins up its own separate campaign, so it doesn't touch anything you're already running and clutter everything up.

So you can, you can let it loose on a small test budget and actually see how it does next to your existing meta setup and just compare. There's, there's zero risk to anything that's already making money, and it doesn't have any type of an extra fee to try it. So the two honest things that Shopify says in their own announcement, and I respect that they wrote them down.

One is it uses your existing product photos. It's not generating AI creative. So if your images are weak, this won't be as effective. You have to have great product imagery. And number two, they flat out say that they can't guarantee results and it needs time to learn. Fair enough. I respect that. I love, I appreciate the honesty.

So when a tool admits its own limits like that, I-- generally, that's a tool I trust. But I... One thing I know is this will for [00:10:00] sure get smarter over time, and now when you imagine millions of Shopify stores using it, they understand which customers are buying, which customers are converting, how much money customers have.

Uh, they know customers very well, arguably maybe better than than Meta and Google because they see the conversions, so they can show ads to customers who are more likely to buy. Who should care about this one? I think really any size brand, but especially if you're a smaller team without a dedicated media buyer or a media agency, this is the closest thing to hiring one for free.

You know, if you're bigger it's a cheap experiment to benchmark against to at least keep your agency honest, so I would maybe think about it in that kind of strategy. So picture it like this. If you hand a new hire a budget, a goal, and your product photos, and they go and run ads while you sleep- And they get a little bit sharper every day at it.

That's basically what this is. So the difference is the higher cost, is it's nothing on top of the ad [00:11:00] spend. And it isn't gonna quit on you in four months or it... Will it beat a great human media media buyer? Who knows? Probably not. But most small stores who don't have a great human media buyer, this is a great tool for that.

So, they've got you. It's, you know, 11:00 PM and they're boosting your... Or sorry, y- y- your, it's 11:00 PM and you're boosting a post and hoping and crossing your fingers, but this is at least a lot better than that. Um, just a couple quick catches before I give you the next step. It is in early access, so it might not be in your admin yet.

And the channels depend on where you are. So shop campaigns are in the US and Canada right now. And then just looking through my notes here, ChatGPT, Microsoft, and Snapchat are still rolling out. Also, Shopify renamed the marketing tab in your admin to growth, so that's where you'll find it. So as far as the next step, I would just actually go and check out the growth tab there and see if you have it, see if it's available.

If it is, give a small budget towards it. Take 10% of your ad budget or 20% of your ad budget and give it two weeks [00:12:00] and let's see what it can do. And don't judge it on day three 'cause it does need a runway to learn. It will get smarter. But test it out. I think things like this are always worth testing when they're new.

You can get a little bit ahead of competition. Okay, number three Sidekick. Some major updates to Sidekick. It now works with your apps. Um, Shopify's Sidekick, which probably a lot of you are familiar with now. It's funny, about a year ago, if I asked people, "Do you Sidekick?" "Oh, yeah, it's that little chat thing."

Most people didn't. Now people would say, "Oh, yeah, I rely on it. Oh, I can't live without it. I use it every single day." So Sidekick has just made huge strides in the last 12 months, so kudos to Shopify for that. But if you haven't used it, it's Shopify's built-in AI assistant that it's like an AI assistant, but it can actually run and execute things within your Shopify admin.

It's... If you, if you can't find it, it's that little guy with the purple glasses icon in your admin. It's actually been around for a while, but it's gone through some major updates lat- lately. So, th- this additions, there [00:13:00] was some real news related to because Sidekick now works with your apps, not just Shopify itself.

So it launched with 15-plus partners. S- a lot of the major ones that you would know, uh, Loop, Smile, Judge.me. So you can ask right inside Shopify, say, uh, "What's, what's my best performing subject line in my email tool?" And it'll actually get those answers without leaving the page. Uh, so it can execute, go into the apps, run things.

It can actually even set up campaigns. I saw one with ABRA Promotions. It said, um, "Can you set up a buy one get one campaign for me?" It actually created the campaign. It got all ready to go and you just had to push a button to activate it. So before, Sidekick was really blind to anything outside of Shopify's own walls, and so this is a meaningful change.

And the second big thing with Sidekick is it's everywhere now. So every single [00:14:00] screen in the sh- in whether it's Shopify desktop admin, Shopify mobile app, everywhere just by tapping or even by voice, you can be standing in line for a coffee and tell it to change the price of a product and it does it.

You can tell it to update product des- descriptions, run sales it's like a voice assistant as well too. So really, really neat things happening with Sidekick. So actually, there was another one. There's what's called Sidekick Pulse, which it's kinda neat. It greets you when you log in with things it's noticed on its own, so since the last time you w- logged in.

So, uh, sales dipped a little bit here, or this product is running low something that you might wanna look at this. So you don't have to ask it. It just flags it and surfaces it in the Sidekick Pulse section, which is really neat. And then- There's a small upgrade that's a little bit actually bigger than it sounds.

Sidekipp's... Sidekick w- works in the background now, which it didn't before. So even when you start a new task or close the window, it will still keep running. So you can point it at something, say start [00:15:00] building a report, or do an analysis of my last year's sales of all customers who are repeat customers who bought this product.

Run an analysis on how often they come back and buy something else, and you can go off and do something else, and it continues to work. It didn't used to do that. So it's a small thing, but as far as quality of life of running a Shopify store, that'll... and sitting there and having to babysit Sidekick while it ran a job, this is actually pretty big.

Okay, now always with every additions, is this real or is it hype? I need a little jingle. Is it real or is it hype? My son watches, um, Pokemon. There's this YouTube channel with Pat Flynn, uh, what's it called? Po- sh- p- short, Short Pocket Monster. They open up a pack of Pokemon cards, and it's like, "Should I have opened it or keep it sealed?"

So with additions, is it real or is it hype? Anyways, I'll go on. So Shopify said, uh, in their Q1 earnings call actually, that weekly active shops using Sidekick were up [00:16:00] 385% year, over year and that merchants have built over 12,000 little custom apps with it in one quarter. So no, it's not hype.

People are genuinely using it. So who should care? Honestly, I think everyone. It's free on every single plan, and it's not something that's just for small stores. I see the biggest Shopify Plus stores I know, they use Sidekick heavily, and the smaller Shopify stores where merchants need help, it- they're using it heavily too.

It's one of those things that really spans across all Shopify plans. But I will say there is one light caveat, and that's that some of the fancier stuff, like having the ability to build your own little custom apps within it, that's gated to the Grow plan and up. So while it's available on every plan, there's some functionality that's on higher plans.

And it is English first for now, so if you run your store in another language other than English, it's a little bit rough, but that's changing very soon. Um, but you can get around that pretty easy with AI and translation. So, next step on this one is just go and [00:17:00] open Sidekick this week and give it one job you would normally kinda dread doing.

Like, think of something that you wouldn't normally ask it. Something like "Tag every customer who's spent over $200 in the last 90 days and has bought a specific product." And, you know, give it something like that and watch how it does it, and then if you're using Omnisend or any other email platform, like ask it a question about that app directly through Sidekick and see it really answer the question.

Just start playing with it. That's the best way to learn what these AI tools are capable of is just start actually testing it and seeing what it can do.

Okay, let's roll on to number four here, and this is a quick one, but I- a super important one, and if you actually look at your numbers, this one will matter to you, because number four is a batch of analytics upgrades that really will make your life better if you are into your [00:18:00] analytics, which you should be.

So, um, the headline is Insights. Uh, it's a plain language summary that sits at, at the top of your analytics and tells you what changed, and more useful, like takes a real swing at why it changed. So revenue's up, here's what drove it, a thing. And then the second piece of this announcement is annotations.

So you can now drop a note right onto the chart and say something like, "Started the influencer campaign with Siral here," or, "Installed Sati," which is an amazing affiliate tool, "And r- at this point, we saw our sales started going up." So you can actually like annotate that right on your charts.

So three months later, when you're looking back and you're like, "What? Why did my sales spike here?" You can know why, and/or if you turn something off, uh, maybe sales will go down. So it's pretty useful, and there's more under the hood on this one. You can filter reports by your own metafields now and metaobjects.

So if you tag products by, let's say, a supplier or a season or whatever weird [00:19:00] system lives within your tags, you can actually now slice the data that way as well too in your reports, not just by the built-in fields and variants. So you can set targets on metrics and track against them, which I think is super helpful to actually put your goals and targets in there, and you can pull analytics data now into Shopify Flow to trigger automations off of it, which is I think huge.

There's a few really cool use cases I can think of doing that for especially for, like, notifications and briefs to go to management and, uh, you know, different people at your org that would care about certain data points. But, um, I think there's gonna be a lot of really interesting use cases that come out of that one.

So, I just wanna say why I think these annotations matter more than they sound, and, you know, we've all done this. Sales drop for a week, and you look at, and you panic, and you start changing prices, and you start second-guessing your whole catalog and your... whatever marketing you're doing. [00:20:00] But then three days later you realize, well, it was a holiday weekend or something.

Like, weather can affect people's buying. Or maybe just some... one of your big affiliates paused their campaigns for a little bit. Who knows? And then you spent three days solving a problem that was never actually real. So annotat- annotations are how you stop doing that to yourself. You write down what happened, when it happened and then the chart stops lying to you three months later 'cause you can go back and you can see, 'cause you forget about those kind of things.

So, just kinda commit to annotating everything and anything that you know related to your reports over the next month. It'll become a habit, and your future self will thank you. And then just one thing I wanna be straight about on this one, because I haven't fully nailed it down, the really fancy chart types, the scatter plots and all the rest, they live inside custom reports, and custom reports have historically been a higher plan feature Advanced and up.

So the daily insights [00:21:00] and the annotations everyone should get those, but the deep custom visual stuff probably skews to bigger plans. But don't take that as gospel. I don't know for sure on that one, but check it out anyway. So, uh, who should care about this? Honestly, everyone. Anyone making decisions.

Everyone should care about reports and analytics, but which is so critical, but we don't open it enough. So everyone should care about this, and I think just as a next step is go add some annotations to your sales charts today. Go in and start noting things like you sent an email today, you started your spring promotion, you ran a spring sale, your July 4th coming up.

Just build it out, out of habit. Every time you start doing something, annotate it. Like I said, your future you will thank you. So okay, number five rollouts is what they're calling it, and, um- If you've ever been scared to touch your live theme, this one's for you. A rollout lets you schedule changes to your theme or your [00:22:00] checkout or both, and push them live at a set time.

So instead of you frantically hitting publish at midnight before a sale you can use this feature to schedule it and let it roll it out, which to me, that alone makes this one worth making this list because I see so many people have their employees standing by at midnight flipping a theme live it-- which they shouldn't have to be doing that.

So you can schedule your Black Fri- Friday look in advance, sorry, change themes, um, really change anything. You can let it f- flip on automatically, and then automatically flip back when it's over. But the better part is of rollouts is experiments. You can now actually run real A/B tests on your themes or your checkout.

So you can show half of your visitors version A and half version B, and then see which one actually makes more money before you commit the whole store to it. So, you know, no more redesigning everything on a hunch and then launching it, praying and waiting for three months to s- [00:23:00] see results. Meanwhile, you are maybe losing money.

Who knows? So Um, here's a concrete one is, you've always believed your product pages convert better with the long description up top, for example. Let's your designer swears it's the reviews that should lead, but, instead of arguing about it in Slack for a month, just run an experiment.

Half for half one way for two weeks, half the other way and just let the money settle it. Then you stop guessing on that question, and, and that's really the whole appeal of this feature is you kind of trade opinions for evidence, and you do it without betting the whole entire store and actually betting your real revenue that one of you is right.

Just run the test. One caveat with this one, with all of them, there's one, always one little caveat and it's a real one. It's that the scheduling works on basically every plan, basic and up, but the AB testing, the experiments, needs the Grow plan or higher. So if you're on the basic plan and you got excited about the testing part, I'm sorry.

But if you're on Grow or [00:24:00] higher, you should have access to that. And then who should care about this one? I mean, anyone running promotions should care about this because generally when you run a promotion, you change your homepage, you change your collection pages, you put banners up on all your pages, you put timers on sites, you put maybe a bar across the top of your theme.

I hope you do. I hope you dress up your store to, for success. Or just anyone who's been making design changes based on what I call vibes instead of data, which no judgment, I've done it bef-before, and I've watched a redesign I loved tank conversion. So I think we've all been there. So this...

I think everyone should care about this. As far as the next step next time you plan a sale or any type of a theme tw-tweak, build it as a scheduled rollout instead of publishing it live just to play with it. I... people are changing themes a lot now 'cause summer's here, and people are changing the, their look.

So just use the feature to get familiar with it so you, Black Friday isn't the first time you're using it. [00:25:00] And of course, if you're on the Grow plan or higher, pick something to test. Pick something you are debating about internally with yourself or with someone on your team. Go ahead and test something simple like the button color or the words on the button or the checkout call to action or the checkout layout or anything, and just settle it with an experiment.

It's fun. It's super fun. Pick something the way your product images are laid out. Pick anything. And you can start having bets and with other people on your team, and loser buys dinner, whatever. Uh, have fun with it. But t- but start testing things so you get used to it because it will affect your bottom line, too.

It's not just fun Okay, number six. This is a pretty big one. You can now run your store from Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, which this is one of kind of... It feels a little bit sci-fi. You, you connect your store, and then you ask the AI that you already use to add products, pull a sales report, [00:26:00] check on an order, and it actually does it in Shopify.

I saw someone post on, I think it was Twitter if you've seen the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise is standing and he can see the screens around, and he's telling it, moving stuff with his hand, and telling his, telling it what to do. I saw someone set up a similar thing using Claude. I think they built some visuals on three different monitors, and they are saying, telling it to, "Check my annual sales.

Let's run this sale. Send the marketing campaign." And it connects into Shopify, and it does it all. It seems crazy, but that might be how we're all managing our stores in a few years. Who knows? So, but honestly, the first time I saw this, I wasn't sure how much I'd use it, of course, versus just doing it all in the admin.

But- L- like always, like, there is, there is a real case here, and once you start using software this way and getting comfortable with it and s- and speaking to an AI and having it do stuff, it actually feels a little bit archaic [00:27:00] to go back to an admin and click around in settings and find something and Google where that setting is.

So I do think this is gonna take off and be a way that we all manage our stores, 'cause once you do it, y- going back feels archaic, and to me, that's always a sign that "Okay, this is the future. I've tasted it. Now everything else is gonna catch up." So, if you're already living w- inside one of these AI tools all day, which I basically do, being able to say, "Add this, uh, new product with these three variants, create this image, change out this image," whatever, while you're right in mid-thought without having to switch tab, it's, it's genuinely faster, and it meets you kind of like where you already are in your...

w- with the way you work. So, for the more technical folks listening, there's also now a, uh... it's called a Shopify AI toolkit, which just went generally available, and it plugs into your code editor, so Cursor, Cloud Code, VS Code, and it gives your AI assistant direct access to Shopify's docs and [00:28:00] your live store data.

So it stops kind of inventing fake API calls that break and waste your afternoon trying to fix. It just works, 'cause it has access to it all. And if you build on Shopify, this is a real time-saver. So there's also a rebuilt version of Hydrogen, their headless framework, m- which is meant to run on any stack.

Uh, just know that this one is still in developer preview. It's not finished yet, so it's a kinda keep-an-eye-on announcement, not a go build your store on this tomorrow. Definitely not. And most stores are not running on, on Hydrogen at this point, so but s- a lot are, but, um- The reason I'd start read-only, and I mean this is the same reason you, you don't hand a brand-new employee the keys to your bank account day one, is I would start slowly with this one.

Let it start pulling reports for a week. Um, w- watch whether it gets your numbers right. To be- like AI can hallucinate and make up stuff, and depending on your environment in [00:29:00] Claude will affect how, like your instructions and projects and how that all works can affect it too. So start slowly testing things.

Don't just dive all, all in, fully managing everything in your store. Once it's earned your trust and things are working good, then you let it actually start making changes. Like the tech is impressive, I'll be honest, but it's still software and AI, and software does exactly what you tell it, including sometimes the dumb things you didn't mean to ask for because it is very literal.

And if you accidentally say something change all the prices on my coffee, and it thinks something else is coffee 'cause you have something in the collection coffee that shouldn't be in there, and it changes the price on that. So just ease into it. Who should care about this one?

I put really everyone, like especially solo operators and, and smaller teams though who are using AI. This can potentially make a huge impact to you if you are a smaller team, I think. So, next step I would say for this one is just if, if [00:30:00] you've got Claude, ChatGPT, or a Perplexity account, look up Shopify's connector for it and link your store.

Um, you can just ask those AI tools how to do it and it'll walk you through it so you don't... I don't need to give instructions on that here. That's one of the beautiful things about AI is literally ask, "How do I connect to Shopify's connector for my store?" And let it guide you. And just start by only pulling information.

Ask it for last week's revenue, poke around, ask for some reports, get comfortable with it, how it behaves, and then slowly start increasing what you do. So okay, number seven. Number seven actually is a pretty big one if you sell wholesale. This is B2B being available on more plans, and it's bigger because of who can now use it.

So Shopify took its B2B features, which used to be locked behind Plus at around 2,300, I believe. Yeah, still 2,300, yes, whatever the fees are a month, and now it brought that all the way down to Basic, Grow, and Advanced at no extra cost. So now, on a regular plan, you [00:31:00] get company profiles for your wholesale buyers, up to three B2B catalogs within their own prices.

You get volume and quantity discounts. You get payment terms like net 30 vaulted credit cards. It's a pretty decent wholesale setup that used to cost, uh, quite a bit to access that now everyone has access to. There is still more features reserved for Plus, but it's a pretty darn good solution for the basic plan.

So, why should you care about this? Well, here's a number that actually kinda stopped me when I was reading it. Shopify says that merchants using B2B see 4.1 times higher reorder frequen- frequency compared to regular direct-to-consumer orders. Four times. Wholesale buyers come back, and obviously this makes sense because wholesale buyers, they sign up, they get an account, they keep coming back.

But that's the entire point of wholesale, and now you can serve them natively instead of duct-taping on, um, you know, running multiple [00:32:00] stores and however you're doing it. And it's something you might wanna consider doing if you're not doing wholesale now. Think about how that can be a new channel for you.

I talk to brands who sell pet food and pet supplies, and they sell wholesale to coffee stores, which makes no sense, but when you think about it, it kinda does. They... trendy boutique coffee stores, they have little kiosks with your trendy, uh, dog food, um, because people who go to boutique coffee stores often have little boutique dogs, I guess.

I don't know. But, um, it can become a significant channel if you plan it out properly. So, I'll put the one thing though the net terms in plain language for anyone who's only done direct-to-consumer because this is the probably the biggest unlock here, is a wholesale buyer who doesn't want to pay the second they place the order, this is where they get the net term.

So if they wanna receive the goods, sell them in their shop, and pay you in 30 days, that's what you call net [00:33:00] 30. So that used to mean invoices that you would manage somewhere else and spreadsheets and chasing people for money, but now your store can offer those terms, keep the card on file, and then handle it all natively.

So that one feature is often the whole difference between a buyer saying yes and a buyer saying think about it," because Who you're selling to, they no longer have to tie up their cash. So if you're selling wholesale, they can have access to your inventory, put it in their store, sell it, make the margin, and then pay for it.

And as a retailer, that's exactly what you want. You- it's all about cash flow. So you're protecting their cash flow, and you'll, you'll be able to close more deals because of being able to offer net 30. So now, though, there are a couple catches on this one that three catalog, the, so you can have three different price catalogs.

It's, it's a real cap, so if you [00:34:00] have, wanna have more than three different price levels, uh, that's reserved for plus. And if you price differently for lots of different accounts, like which a lot of people do, they kind of give custom prices for one store, or another store gets a different custom price, you'll hit that limit fast.

But three will still allow you to have like a wholesale price for everyone. You can't say to someone, "I'm gonna give you 17.1% discount, another person 22.9", depending on how much they buy, which is how wh- wholesalers really actually operate. They have many different price levels. But this will at least get you in the game.

And then two things people miss is it's not on automatically, okay? So this is a big one. You have to go and activate it, and on the lower plans, those B2B catalogs they won't work in your POS yet, so just a note on that. So, you know, and I just, I know, who, who should care about this one? I, I just wrote, you know, any brand that keeps getting, "Hey, can I buy a case of [00:35:00] this?"

If people are asking that, then this is for you. And, or if you've ever thought about doing wholesale, n- now's the time to give it a try, because it's available on your plan. So, uh, next step is if you've ever turned down or manually like tried to wrangle a bulk order in some other way or used some other tool for, uh, managing those invoices, go into your admin, activate B2B, and set up one catalog for your most common wholesale ask.

And then just stop quoting stuff over email like it's 2015. Okay, uh, next one. Three more to go. We're on number eight. Uh, this one's pretty big if it's the Shopify markets upgrades. If you sell internationally there's a whole set of Shopify markets upgrades, so the useful ones are you can now control which product variants publish to which sales channels and which market without a whole bunch of ugly workarounds, which is pretty big, because you wanna sell different- just think about shoes, for example.

[00:36:00] You have, might have different sizes or the way the sizes are labeled, because in the UK they're different than in America. They have different numbering systems, or liters versus gallons. So you can have different variants showing in different markets. You can also run discounts targeted by market as well, and managed markets where Shopify handles all the duties, taxes, and compliance, all those cross-border headaches has now expanded to the UK and Canada.

It was primarily US anchored before, but now in the UK and Canada you have access to all that as well too. So it also does adaptive pricing by adjusting your prices for local markets automatically, so a shopper in an- another country isn't seeing numbers that make no sense for them. Why care about this?

Well, like honestly, cross-border is where most stores are leaking money. They just kind of say, "Well, [00:37:00] yeah I'm not capturing, or my shipping isn't right, or I'm not charging right in that, in that country. I'll just eat the cost." All the surprise duties you might have to pay that's, that can go away now.

Product... these updates, they close a lot of those gaps. So just, uh, one quick example of that trust piece. A local customer in Germany buys from your US store. If they see one price at checkout and then get ambushed by a surprise duty bill from the courier when they're picking it up, they may never buy from you again.

So they sh- the price they see when they're checking out should be the price that they pay all in. And, even worse, they're not buying from you, they're probably leaving a negative review, too. So managed markets and duty-inclusive pricing exists to kill that exact moment. The shopper sees the real all-in price up front, and there's no nasty surprise waiting for them at their door.

So, uh, who should care about this one? I wrote, you know, for sure anyone already selling internationally, [00:38:00] or if you're seriously thinking about it, you absolutely should care about this one. And I think for probably 80% of the stores I talk to, international expansion is their biggest opportunity. We it used to be that people just avoided it because it was hard and it wasn't worth the effort.

That's not the case anymore. It is... Shopify has closed a lot of those effort gaps, and there's a massive world out there other than your own country. And of course, since I'm Canadian and up here in Canada, letting all my fellow Canadians know, Shopify Tax also went live in Canada this edition. So if you're up here with me, definitely have a look at it. I know there will be a lot of Canadians excited about that. As far as the next step, if you sell abroad go check whether Managed Markets is available in your region right now, especially the UK and Canada crowd, go check.

Uh, it just opened up. I believe it's live as of today for everybody. And just do a full audit of your markets so you're not advertising products to countries that you can't ship to, only show the [00:39:00] products that you're shipping there, and it's a really small fix that saves real refunds and angry emails.

Okay, number nine. Two more to go here. Number nine, this is a Plus-only one, so if you're not on Plus, you can fast-forward 60 seconds. Um, but maybe you wanna know this anyway 'cause maybe you plan on moving to Plus one day. But it's worth knowing it exists because if you're growing fast, you'll end up on Plus.

Okay. This is called Multi-Entity, and it lets you run multiple legal businesses out of a single Shopify store. So different companies, even in the same country under one roof with payments, card readers, and payouts that respect the different entities. So before this, that meant running completely separate stores and a whole bunch of different accounting pain to reconcile it all.

So if you're a bit of a bigger operation that's required, you know, a, a, or a couple [00:40:00] brands, or if you've got separate legal entities for your different brands you manage for tax reasons, this is genuinely annoying, and this has been... is a problem that is now being solved. So, for example, say you built a skincare brand, and then you acquire a little soap company.

I saw this recently happening. I'm using this example. Now, it's its own legal entity. Now, before this, you either... You're, or y- you're either jamming it into your existing store where it doesn't quite belong 'cause it's its own brand, or you're running a whole second store and reconciling two sets of books at the same time.

But this lets both live under one roof, roof with the legal and payment separation intact. So it's a quiet feature, but for the people that it's built for, it's, it will remove a lot of headache. If this applies to you, it's a little bit niche, but it, if it applies to you, definitely check this out, and I wanted to make you aware of it.

And just one kind of [00:41:00] limit to know about, the multi-currency payout piece only covers a few countries right now, the US, Hong Kong, and Singapore, uh, and they said France is coming soon. So depending on where you are ent- sorry, where your, depending where your entities sit, not where you are, um- The money side might not all be there yet, but, and obviously who should care about this? I just wrote Plus merchants with more than one legal entity. I know that's a very specific group, but if it's you, your shoulders should kind of drop a little bit, 'cause you just heard this. And then next step you know, if you, if this is your setup and you do have multiple entities I would start a conversation with your Shopify rep on this one.

It's not a do it yourself toggle you flip. Bring it to them and have them walk you through how it maps to your entities. So this one is one you would wanna reach out to your rep. Okay, number 10. This one is for anyone selling in person or selling through POS. It is POS [00:42:00] version 11 and all the retail updates around it, and I would say the main headline with this is speed. That is the theme word for this one. Uh, Shopify says the new checkout saves over one minute per transaction, which seems very high, but that's what they're saying.

I guess across average, right? Across all the stores. I don't know, but it's their number. But I... But it... even if it only saves 20 seconds, that's still huge. So if you've ever watched a line build at a busy market while you're waiting, and you see the people's faces who are waiting while someone's fumbling, waiting for the POS to load or spin, you know that a minute is huge.

Even 10 seconds per customer, it adds up. Um, and it can be the difference between kind of an angry customer, like that bad checkout experience, or someone walking away happy. So checkout speed is... It's real money when it comes to retail. So the change I actually love is that [00:43:00] returns and exchanges and a new sale can all happen in one cart now.

You don't have to s- go, ch- close the cart and open a new one, so it can all happen at the same time. So if someone returns a shirt, grabs a different size, and let's say buys a hat on the way out, that used to be three different transactions, but now it's all one. Okay, and you know what? Now that I think about it, I see that that could for sure save over a minute, 'cause having to do the return, do the, the swap the ex- exchange, and then running the sale for the new one, yes.

Okay, Shopify, you're right on this minute estimate. I s- I hear you. I was thinking of just, like, a simple transaction. But yes, so I mean, 'cause this is huge. You can do this all now in one transaction, and your staff will love this feature, so make sure they know it, right? A l- a lot of this is education.

They need to know it's now available. So, bottom line is every [00:44:00] second, a customer stand at your counter is a second that three people behind them are deciding whether the wait is worth it or they should just leave, and I've actually done that. I've been in lines, and I, I have to get somewhere to pick up my kid from school, and I don't want him waiting outside alone, so I've just abandoned my line.

It happens. It's ab- abandoned. We got, you gotta abandon checkout on the web. You gotta abandon lines in real life. Speed at the till isn't just, like, a nice-to-have. It's conversion, really, the same way page load is conversion when you're shopping online. So we don't just... We just don't talk about it the same way, but it really, it is.

So a few of the, uh, operator-grade pieces like cash management with a full audit trail in-person pickup orders- receiving transfers are all on POS Pro, which is the paid tier. So just know that going in. But there is some serious improvements added and some serious functionality on POS Pro. But the core speed and the unified cart, [00:45:00] that's an everyday win for everyone on every plan.

And I just wrote, uh, here, who should care? Anyone with a physical location, pop-up, market, anyone selling through POS. Just as far as next step on this one, if you run retail, just make sure you update your POS app, um, because you do have to update it, and have your st- staff actually practice the new returns, new sale, exchange, all in one flow before your next busy day, 'cause it's kind of like muscle memory.

Like, they're not... Don't make them figure it out. Have everyone practice it one time. Okay, last one. We were gonna end at number 10, but I added 11 because it's, I think, a good one. Call it our honorable mention. Um Well, sorry, I do have a couple honor- quick honorable mentions after this one, number two. But number 11 is the Shop app getting smarter about discovery, and I think this is worth everyone knowing.

The Shop app now has conversational search, and if you don't... You should buy with the Shop app on a regular basis so you [00:46:00] see the experience your customers are having. But shoppers can now describe what they want in plain English instead of guessing at keywords. You can actually say, "I am looking for dinnerware for an Italian-themed dinner party I'm hosting with my kids," anything like that.

It'll- You don't have to say Italian dinnerware. There's also Posts, which is a content feed that you can show up in to browsers. And there's also demand indicators that hint at what's selling. It's all aimed at getting your store found by these millions of people who are already browsing and shopping inside Shop app.

So y- why care? I- This is free distribution to an audience that's already in buying mode. They downloaded a shopping app. They're not there by accident. They are buying. So it's a very good audience, and if you're not paying attention to it, you're missing out. And conversational search is quietly [00:47:00] the same story as feature one, which we talked about.

People are starting to search by describing what they want instead of typing keywords, going back to what we talked about at the beginning of this episode. And Shop app is an AI assistant in that sense. Something like "I want a gift for my mom who likes gardening and hates clutter." That's how people are searching.

So the stores that win that search are the ones whose products... sorry, whose product data actually describes the product the way a human would, which is why I think it was number one, Shopify Catalog, was so important. Like, do that first so this works down here on number 10. I know you're gonna hear me hammer this and hammer this probably on future episodes too, because it's like the theme of the next year.

Clean product data is the thread that is running through this entire Shopify edition, [00:48:00] but it's the theme that every store should be thinking about for the next 12 months: clean product data. Uh, who should care? I wrote here, this one's mostly for direct-to-consumer brands, not necessarily the B2B stores that we were just talking to a few points ago.

This is, uh, if you're on... If you're primarily B2B, this one's maybe not for you, but dr- direct-to-consumer brands, this is huge. Okay. Now, I just wanted to say three kind of quick honorable mentions here before I wrap up though super quick. One, for the bigger teams listening, Shopify added better governance.

You can now see a log of what your installed apps are actually doing and set more granular staff permissions, including who's allowed to touch payments and many more. So go in and look at your staff permissions. There's a whole bunch more in there. And just a note is when Shopify adds staff permissions, they're always off by default.

So you might have some staff messaging you if you're the owner of your store saying, "Hey, I can't access this. [00:49:00] Hey, I can't access this." Because if that... If an area just became a new permission, it's off by default, which makes sense. That is the proper way to do it, but it can be a little bit annoying if a new area becomes a permission, and now you have to make sure it's enabled for everyone.

So, if you've got a team and you care about security go check that out. You might wanna tighten it up or make sure that other people have access to these new, new permissions that they need to now get to on your store. You know, it's, it's that unsexy stuff, but it might save you on a bad day if one disgruntled employee goes rogue.

So, uh, that was honorable mention number one. Two, you can finally stack multiple discounts on the same product in one order. This kind of rolled out a little while ago, but they announced it in this edition. So, uh, if you wanna do a percentage off and a fixed amount together, you can do that, and merchants have been asking for this forever.

So I, I have one discount that gives 10 per... $10 off, but there's a store-wide discount of 20% off, and now that can be stacked. Honorable mention [00:50:00] number three, like I said, Shopify Tax in Canada. That one is big for us Canadians. Okay. Just, uh, regarding the store app one here, I just wanna give one next step I wrote down.

If... Go make sure your store is set up and that your product and brands and content are actually filled in. There is some settings you have to configure for this. Most people think it's just in there, but there's, like, hero images, logo, description. You kind of have... Your store has a little profile in Shop App.

Go look at it, make sure it's set up, take 15 minutes and make sure it looks good. And then try posting to the feed. It will show up to potential shoppers. Treat it like a channel you've been ignoring because most of the merchants, they are ignoring it, which is why there's big opportunity.

So spend some time on that one today for sure. Okay. So I... I mean, there was 150 updates. These are the ones that I would spend my attention on. I'm by no means saying they're the most important, but these are the ones that I think are worth [00:51:00] looking at and probably turning on, or at least, like, investigating for your store.

If you read through the additions, announcements, and that feeling of overwhelm, that great more stuff I'm supposed to do feeling, I'll just make this easy for you.

Forget 10 of them, and here's your one job that you have to do. Here, let's call it the 1%. Tonight's job, open your Shopify admin, go to sales channels, then Agentic, and look what's already turned on. Then open your three best-selling products, read the descriptions out loud, slowly, like you're a machine that has never read them before.

You could even copy and paste them and ask an AI agent to tell you everything they know about your product. This-- I lo- I love doing this. Take your product URL, paste it in Claude, ChatGPT, and just ask it. Say, "Based off of this product description, tell me everything you know about this product. Tell me what you think it's about, what it [00:52:00] does."

And then fix those questions that are missing. Fix the most vague ones. Add some FAQs. That's it. If there's one thing you do out of all of these, that should be the one you do because everything in this edition points at the same thing. Your customers are starting to shop by having a conversation with AI, and that AI reads your product data, not your beautiful homepages or your images.

And the brands that clean up their product data now are the ones that show up in those answers later. It takes time, but the ones that do it now will win. The ones that wait are gonna wonder where their traffic went in a few months. So I've been selling online since 1998. I've watched the thing that drives traffic change a dozen times, search engines, social, Facebook, Twitter, paid, TikTok, influencers.

And, every single time, the merchants who move early, while it still felt a little bit weird and small and maybe unproven, they always got [00:53:00] rewarded for it. The ones who waited until it was obvious, they just end up paying a lot more to catch up. And I'll tell you, this feels like one of those moments to me 100%.

Now, I'm not totally certain how fast all of this lands. Some of these features are early, and some of them will change over the shape a little bit. Some of them are rolling out in the next few weeks. But the direction isn't the question, and the work of having clean, clear, honest product data will pay off no matter which way the AI stuff all rolls out, I promise you That's it.

If this was useful, can you do me a favor? Can you hit follow on the show? Hit subscribe. Uh, if there's anything in here that you got that was useful, become a follower so you get notified every time a new episode goes out. And if you could leave a five-star review, I would be eternally grateful. That would mean so much.

Wherever you're listening, Spotify, if you're in Apple, leave a comment and just say, "Hey, I loved your edition about Shopify editions," so I [00:54:00] know you listened to it. I read every single comment and all the reviews. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey and for listening to our show. I'll see you on the next episode.

Now go fix one product right now if that's all you do. I'll talk to you on the next episode.