TL;DR – What You Need to Know
Sidekick Turns Pro: Let’s be clear, I have become a huge fan of Sidekick. Yes, you could do this in ChatGPT directly yourself through syncs, etc., but Shopify has done an excellent job of integrating an LLM UI that seems to “just get” what the user is asking for. The Sidekick App Marketplace is here.
Agentic Storefront: this is kind of what Shopify announced previously: ChatGPT Instant Checkout. Map once, checkout on the GPTs, collect sales in your Shopify admin.
Shopify Product Network is Sponsored Products Masquerading as Dropship: Put “sponsored” products on your storefront, easily and get paid commissions when checkout happens. Wait, commissions?!? BounceXchange meet universal checkout.
Shopify without a CMO is better at marketing its releases than companies with a CMO. Mostly because they release so much information and many times they are even releasing Youtube videos of their Product people using the release live.
Winter Editions is no different.
How to View Any Shopify Update
Let’s start by saying it’s impossible for one human to recap Editions. This is not a 3 bullet update, and Shopify never makes it super-easy to see it all in one place.
But with that, let’s dive in anyway. Tobi has always made it clear that there are 3 tiers of Shopify.
Newbies who just want to start out of the box, and perhaps configure a few things as they go.
Growth who need plugins and apps to optimize their business, but do not need ultimate flexibility — it’s too expensive and costly. Historically, this has been the domain of Shopify Plus.
Enterprises, Experts and Developers who need ultimate flexibility; like an expert car mechanic they need to open the hood and tinker or re-wire the system when needed.
On top of this, you have what I call the Tobi factor. This is when Shopify delivers things no one in particular asked for, but that he views are necessary to set the system architecture up for the next phase of evolution. Most developers would call this refactoring, and Shopify tends to do a lot of it.
It’s always been an ambitious vision, and one that few companies ever attempt. Most successful founders will tell you that a Software as a Service (SaaS) business can only ever hope to serve one Ideal Customer Profile. Shopify takes this common wisdom and chucks it out the window, saying “yes please, may I have another!” — for good and bad. Either way, this lens is how I view things.
Now, let’s dive into Winter Editions, which Shopify has cleverly turned RenAIssance.
Sidekick has Grown Powerful As We Have Foreseen
Your “AI-powered co-founder” gets a glow up.
Sidekick: Indeed you are powerful as the emperor has foreseen…
Updates
Sidekick Pulse borrows from ChatGPT pulse to give you a personalized digest, which lead to instructions.
Sidekick can create e-mail campaigns, segment your customers.
Sidekick can generate custom apps for you, and make them available in your Shopify admin.
Shopify is inviting developers to build into Sidekick, likely with MCP.
Sidekick can now make theme edits for you. Shopify calls this “talk to your theme.”
Sidekick can now create interactive todo-lists which can help you complete some of the tasks it gives you. Wait a minute, I thought I was supposed to be in control here? Now the AI is giving me tasks? 🙂
SimGym is an AI Research Preview (whah?) way to simulate what a storefront update will do even if you don’t have a lot of traffic on your stoer. Basically a way to A/B test without a statistically significant large volume of traffic because it’s simulated.
Rick’s Thoughts
Pulse is essentially someone working on your behalf and giving you AI suggestions, and then a plan to do it. The devil is in the details here - if the recommendations are good, great. If they’re not, well…. where do you feed it your business plan? Oh wait, you do have a business plan right!? Therein lies the problem with potentially random suggested tweaks, even well-intentioned: they can become a Brownian motion road to nowhere.
Is there a percentage of SMB Klaviyo customers that will think about defecting for Shopify Sidekick-powered e-mail and customer campaigns? Asking for a friend.
This worry for Klaviyo should not be limited to Klaviyo: Sidekick will be used as a powerful wedge into adjacent categories in my view.
The AI-generated blocks in the previous release now seem quaint now that Sidekick has … err... kicked the door down.
Sidekick can generate custom apps for you? Holy fucking shitballs.
If your app is not Sidekick-enabled, then users will think it is broken, like REAL SOON. Forget ChatGPT, Sidekick is where the puck has moved to in the Shopify ecosystem. If AI killed the storefront, then long live our new overload, the Commerce AI ecosystem.
Sidekick is one of those features that everyone can benefit from, not just newbies, even though it is billed as an AI-powered co-founder. Enterprises often don’t have powerful support teams either to get things done, and time in the day is always limited.
SimGym reminds me of what the crew at Cimulate is up to a bit. AI-powered simulation of updates before they happen.
SimGym says F U to normal staging environments and says, hey we have an AI simulator for your changes that are run through AI personas.
Updates
Shopify is providing a place map your Shopify standard product information to the schema provided by the LLMs.
You can preview how your products will show up.
There is one place to setup your products for all LLMs, no LLM-specific mapping.
Order information comes into Shopify and is represented by a channel like “ChatGPT Instant Checkout.”
Rick’s Take
LLM-specific mapping is likely something that large merchants will want to do because … there is always more optimization. My take is that merchants who need to go to this level of optimization will use a third-party. We saw this all the time in my past history at ChannelAdvisor back in the day.
Shopify “Online”
This is the normal Shopify eCommerce store updates, not POS or agentic stuff.
Updates
Selling subscriptions is now available on POS.
One caveat I saw was it doesn’t support gift cards. Why should tender matter?
More customization options are available to brand your customer and employee-facing Shopify POS screens for a better brand experience.
Some options, like customizable receipts, are only in the POS Pro plan.
Rollouts are the ability to coordinate store changes and schedule them at a particular time. A/B Testing is somewhat a part of this, and SimGym is meant for this. Testing what will work before you roll it out.
Tinker is an app which pulls all of Shopify’s AI tools into one place.
Almost like a browsable app store for Shopify’s generative AI tools.
Rick’s Thoughts
In some ways, what Tinker could be reminds me of “Canva for Shopify.” I don’t think it’s there yet, but it will be interesting to see if this is where it’s headed. Basically, Shopify is giving you a place to play with content production ideas easily. It doesn’t appear to be built into Shopify admin directly, it is a more exploratory type mobile app which seems to be standalone. As I mentioned, a mobile generative Canva is probably my best comparable.
Can you imagine a more confusing name than SimGym? I cannot.
Point of Sale
Updates
Selling subscriptions is now available on POS.
One caveat I saw was it doesn’t support gift cards. Why should tender matter?
More customization options are available to brand your customer and employee-facing Shopify POS screens for a better brand experience.
Some options, like customizable receipts, are only in the POS Pro plan.
POS Hub allows you to connect your devices and ensure that your mobile peripherals will never drop while interacting with customers.
Rick’s Thoughts
Shopify POS is one of Shopify’s fastest growing product lines; the company is wise to continue to knock down barriers to growth and some top objections.
Shopify POS is never going to be as powerful as an Enterprise POS, but “the POS for most people” is all they likely aim to be.
B2B
Updates
Horizons now supports B2B features.
Shopify Collective now available for B2B.
ACH freaking finally.
Rick’s Thoughts
B2B - hello? We need moar.
How long did it take us to get some recognition for EDI apps? Quite a while.
Marketing
Purchase and clicks and commissions, oh my!
Updates
Shopify Marketing now does SMS.
Shopify Product Network allows dynamic product sourcing and seems to reimagine Shopify Collective and Sponsored Products simultaneously.
Rick’s Thoughts
Shopify Product Network does a few unique things all at once:
Allows a merchant to source products without sourcing vendors. Think in categories and brands instead of suppliers and SKU setup.
Gives the buyer a seamless (almost hidden) multi-store buying experience without realizing it. I think this is all of Shopify’s agentic + Shop App work + Checkout 2.0 work coming to fruition.
Shopify pays you a “commission” on these sales, rather than being able to book the entire revenue. HOLD THE GODDAMN PHONE.
Who collects the purchase price minus the commission that was just taken from the buyer?
I actually think the video is a little sneaky here. The PM says “you make revenue, we pay you a commission.” Excuse me?! Revenue is the sale price. Commission is a referral fee, not revenue. Take a look at the photo above. $1,200 paid in commissions on 460 purchases! That is $2.60 per purchase. You will have to pile up a lot of clams to make this meaningful. I understand the revenue needs to flow to the real supplier, but this is not dropshipping. This is an sponsored product ad network.
A hidden but unified multi-store checkout within your storefront? Sounds like a marketplace to me.
Returns seems hard here. Won’t the buyer mix this up?
If merchants think this is a dropship network, they will be sorely disappointed. This is an advertising product. Because you are paid a commission as if users are clicking on an ad on your website (think AdSense) to go somewhere else, but where are they going?
Into your checkout, which then dropships an item to the customer.
Is Shopify offering a “kicker” for choosing Shop Cash dollars as your payout instead of your Shopify payout? If not, why the hell not?
This could be almost a “feeder program” into dropship. If you add a bunch of products here, and they work out, you could source the product which would enable you to book more revenue (or maybe your robot sidekick could). The PM kind of hints at this in the video when she says something like “take the next step based on this data.”
Reviews are mixed so far, so … some work to do? Lot of limitations too. US, Shop Pay only, no Buy With Prime (sorry Amazon). Not sure how they will knock all these down.
Developers, Developers, Developers
dev mcp server
Shopify’s dev mcp server can be connected to your favorite code generation tool like cursor. It will help agencies implement storefronts faster and developers build custom Shopify apps more easily too — likely with fewer development resources. I can do the same thing for POS extensions too, which is pretty wicked tbh.
Some Sources for Further Reading:
Wrap-Up
As I read through Editions, I am confronted by one thing. Shopify is leveraing AI into stickiness. Stickiness so its app ecosystem stays relevant. Stickiness to merchants so it doesn’t get disrupted by LLMs.
Sidekick itself has become one of the most powerful features in Shopify. And ultimately, that is what I think this release represents more than anything else.
Across the industry, there is no one (yet) at the expansive vision that Shopify has here.
