{"id":338785,"date":"2025-12-11T10:14:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T10:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/338785\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T10:14:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T10:14:19","slug":"this-edition-ai-brings-every-entrepreneur-their-renaissance-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/338785\/","title":{"rendered":"This Edition, AI brings every entrepreneur their Renaissance moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re living in a modern-day renaissance with AI at the center. Our Winter \u201926 Edition<\/a>\u2014The RenAIssance Edition\u2014is a compilation of 150+ product updates across our platform, all designed to help merchants<\/a> and developers<\/a> make the most of the latest AI and technology advancements. It\u2019s one of our most ambitious Editions to date, and is an excellent showcase of what\u2019s possible in today\u2019s commerce landscape.<\/p>\n

We chose the Renaissance theme because it symbolizes progress, momentum, courage, and new beginnings. It feels emblematic given the features we\u2019re shipping, many of which weren\u2019t possible a year ago. This Edition redefines how we achieve our mission of making commerce better for everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With so many launches, I wanted to highlight a few that I think are transformative to the platform and explain the ambition behind them.<\/p>\n

Sidekick enters a new chapter<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2023, we shared our vision for Sidekick<\/a>\u2014a super-charged cofounder for every merchant. Since then, we\u2019ve been heads-down, focused on getting Sidekick to a point where it\u2019s consistently great at tasks that are core to commerce. And earlier this year, we shipped a new architecture to improve Sidekick\u2019s performance. Sidekick has gone from a tool with only minor usage to an essential part of the platform. All of this has laid the groundwork for the features in this Edition, which raise the ceiling of what Sidekick can do.<\/p>\n

First, we are giving Sidekick the ability to think on your behalf and surface insightful next steps tailored specifically for your business using Sidekick Pulse<\/a>. When identifying opportunities to expand your business takes a backseat to the day-to-day, Sidekick is there to proactively identify new ways to grow.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s how it works: because Sidekick already knows so much about your store and your business, it\u2019s able to work behind the scenes to analyze and find opportunities for growth. Sidekick\u2019s research uses both store-specific and Shopify-wide signals, ensuring every recommendation is unique, contextual, and valuable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sidekick has your back, and will notify you when it sees something worthwhile. You won’t just get ideas\u2014you\u2019ll get a partner that assists in executing these recommended actions. Additionally, Sidekick can now take on more complex tasks<\/a>, generating to-do lists and working with you to complete them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We also gave Sidekick a host of new skills<\/a>: the ability to build automations, better theme editing capabilities, and the ability to edit emails. But I\u2019m particularly excited about one new Sidekick skill\u2014the ability to generate a custom app.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Leveraging all of the developer tools we\u2019ve built over the years including Polaris UI and the Admin GraphQL API, Sidekick can generate custom applications<\/a> right inside the admin. Merchants can visually iterate on the app, test to ensure it\u2019s making the right changes to their store and install the app when they\u2019re done. With millions of merchants on the platform, giving each merchant the ability to dictate exactly the user interface they want for their specific business is so powerful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve heard from both the app developer community and our merchants that they want Sidekick to work with the apps they use to run their business every day. So this Edition, we\u2019re releasing the developer preview of Sidekick App Extensions,<\/a> how apps will be able to expose data and functionality to Sidekick so it\u2019s available in merchant conversations. Using Sidekick extensions you can connect your app\u2019s data and workflows to Sidekick so that it can surface insights, answer questions about your app\u2019s context or even navigate merchants straight to the right screens to take action inside your app.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll continue making Sidekick more capable in 2026, prioritizing the features that give entrepreneurs leverage in their day.<\/p>\n

Strengthening the contract between merchants and their customers<\/p>\n

Our bread and butter at Shopify is our ability to facilitate transactions across millions of businesses and their customers at tremendous scale. Just a couple weeks ago during Black Friday Cyber Monday, we processed a total of $14.6 billion in global sales over four days and at its peak we enabled $5.1 million sales\/minute.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to appreciate just how much goes into each order. Pricing, tax calculation, inventory checking and reservation, shipping routing and cost calculation, discount validation. And these don\u2019t even include the more complicated bespoke requirements like age verification, delivery date collection, facilitating pick up in store\u2014the list goes on. I like to think of every order as a contract that is made between a merchant and their customer. Helping merchants execute these contracts at scale is our core promise.<\/p>\n

To help deliver on this promise, we are making improvements to inventory, the heart of physical commerce. That\u2019s why we are introducing Purchase Orders and inventory transfer<\/a>, making inventory management easier and more precise.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To model real world inventory more accurately, we need to make sure that you can easily adjust when changes happen. If inventory gets destroyed in transit or if you want to model new inventory, now you can edit a transfer after it\u2019s been created. And if you don’t know or care to record where items come from, you can create transfers without specifying an origin.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve also made improvements to the platform to help guarantee inventory accuracy and are shipping updates to our API to minimize unintentional inventory mistakes. Developers can now do a compare and swap to make sure inventory levels are more accurate and introduced idempotency keys for developers so there\u2019s less accidental over-writing of values.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although these updates might look minor compared to other launches, I wanted to spotlight this progress because it\u2019s the start of a much larger effort to help make inventory management on the platform accurate even with the most complex physical set ups.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The start of a new era for POS<\/p>\n

Shopify POS (Point of Sale) has been in brick and mortar stores since 2013 and it has grown so much in that time. POS started as something for casual sellers or single location brick and mortar merchants. It\u2019s now grown to a POS that can support many locations and out-of-the-box delivers unified online-offline experiences like pick up in store or centralized customer profiles.<\/p>\n

Over the past year or so, we’ve been listening to merchants and getting feedback on how to improve POS. To address this, we are now refocusing on the core of POS: enabling fast, reliable checkout experiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This starts with the new POS Hub<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

One of merchants\u2019 biggest pain points is needing a consistently reliable setup\u2014whether they are using wired or wireless devices. We\u2019re now making it possible to connect wired peripherals to your Shopify POS, for the strongest, most reliable countertop setup. For retailers using Apple devices, the POS Hub is MFi certified, which means that you can plug in multiple peripheral devices (like scanners, card readers and printers) to an iPad all at once\u2014something that isn\u2019t possible without the Hub. And unlike other standard hubs, our POS Hub contains a processor which will actively manage your peripherals and monitor their connections making setup really fast and ensuring your peripherals stay connected. It works with both Apple and Android devices and will enable you to use a wider set of peripherals that weren\u2019t possible before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We have learned a lot building the world\u2019s most efficient and scalable online checkout, it\u2019s time we bring that reliability and speed to our POS. This is a step in the right direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Launch with confidence using Rollouts and SimGym<\/p>\n

Your online store is your brand\u2019s home and feeling confident in your changes is extremely important. This Edition, we are opening up our new Rollouts<\/a> feature in early access. Rollouts gives you the ability to stage a set of changes to your online store and schedule it for a specific time. In the coming months this will extend to more surfaces in Shopify so you can coordinate rollouts across products, discounts and more.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Within Rollouts, we’ve snuck in a very handy feature: you can control the percentage of traffic you want the rollout to apply to and can simultaneously launch more than one set of features. This in effect turns a rollout to an A\/B test.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is one of those features that starts simple and elegantly grows with you. You can get started with scheduling changes like sales events with Rollouts and as you get more traffic, it naturally expands to support A\/B testing between different variations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For those who want to collect early signal on their online stores, we are announcing the SimGym app<\/a> in Research Preview. By learning from real commerce sessions across our platform, we have trained models to simulate real customer personas who can approximate what shoppers might do and feel as they land on your storefront. Before launching major updates to the online store, Simgym gives merchants a way to stress test their changes with AI shoppers and catch low hanging fruit optimizations that could help with conversion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

Leveraging our scale to help merchants grow<\/p>\n

With millions of merchants on the platform, we\u2019re always looking for ways to help every merchant benefit from being on Shopify together. One of the features that really embodies this is the Shopify Product Network.<\/p>\n

Shopify Product Network<\/a> helps merchants diversify their product catalog and improve customer conversion. Larger retailers have long recognized the importance of a diverse product catalog for years, building endless-aisle experiences on their online stores by adding third party marketplaces to their sites. We are now bringing that same ability to all Shopify merchants, allowing them to list their products on each other\u2019s sites to fill specific inventory gaps. Using our scale and knowledge across the platform, Shopify can dynamically display products on merchants\u2019 storefronts, tailoring the experience to their brand and each customer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Product Network works because it feels completely seamless for customers when they browse and buy. As a merchant, you control the placements of these product listings and manage any exclusions for products you do not want on your site.<\/p>\n

For merchants getting started this is a great way to figure out what their customers are craving. All of the order data gets preserved, making it easy to then start talking to those brands about wholesaling or dropshipping. This is even more seamless if both merchants are on Shopify Collective<\/a>, a feature we launched back in 2023 that helps merchants work together.<\/p>\n

I love this type of feature where Shopify merchants can achieve more together than they can apart. Another area that benefits from these network effects is Shopify Agent Storefronts.<\/p>\n

Shopify Agentic Storefronts\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI has reignited a boom in creativity and a new goldrush of consumer shopping experiences. As a platform, we have always made sure that our merchants show up where their customers are, from your own online store to marketplaces to social selling to the metaverse. We have always used our scale and our platform to ensure our merchants are there first and that their brands show up authentically. And this is still true with the rise in AI-powered channels and agentic commerce.<\/p>\n

This Edition we are introducing\u00a0Shopify Agentic Storefronts<\/a>, a set of tools to help you ensure your products are discoverable and your brand stays authentic in agentic conversations. These tools are available to every merchant, right within the admin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Set it up once and your products will be syndicated and surfaced to AI chats everywhere. You don\u2019t need to worry about integrating with every AI platform individually. In the coming weeks we\u2019ll start rolling out more merchandising controls so that you can ensure your product data is syndicated accurately. We\u2019re also evolving Knowledge Base to help you control your brand story and track conversations so you know what is happening on these surfaces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We know how much energy and effort you put into your brand and making sure your products speak to your customers. In this next era of commerce where AI is introducing new ways for consumers to shop, we want to make sure that your story stays front and center. This is why we will be continuing to invest in tooling to make sure you can craft your story in Shopify and easily make it available to all the places where consumers are shopping.<\/p>\n

Although a lot of the narrative around commerce this year was around shopping within conversations, we believe that AI unlocks all types of shopping experiences. From virtual try-on apps, to AR-VR, to voice, AI has unlocked a new set of consumer shopping experiences that were not possible before. Shopify Agentic Storefronts unlocks AI shopping for all of these and it\u2019s possible thanks to the Shopify Catalog.<\/p>\n

Arming developers with Shopify Catalog<\/p>\n

For the past two decades, we have built real, scaled consumer shopping flows from discovery to cart to checkout and we\u2019re now giving developers the ability to work with millions of retailers with a single integration.<\/p>\n

In August we announced a suite of tools <\/a>to enable any developer to incorporate commerce into their agent. We showcased the Catalog API for product discovery, a universal cart API that can hold items from multiple stores and our Checkout Kit so you can embed a merchant\u2019s checkout right in the agent. This Edition we are opening up access to the Catalog API through our developer dashboard.<\/p>\n

With millions of merchants, product discovery isn\u2019t simple. Product data can be messy and it\u2019s hard to produce accurate search results when product metadata is spread across various fields. The Shopify Catalog takes billions of products, infers their categories and attributes, and clusters products that are the same. We are uniquely set up to do this because we\u2019ve seen billions of product configurations over the years.<\/p>\n

When you search using the Catalog API, the results aren\u2019t just more accurate\u2014they\u2019re also more relevant. Many products are resold across retailers and without proper clustering, search results would contain duplicates and bury potentially relevant results. The Catalog API solves for this.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rolling out this week, developers will be able to generate tokens for the Catalog API and use the playground to get started. Catalog API is the best route for most developers but a Catalog Feed is available for specific partners with their own search infrastructure. And if you\u2019re building at scale, come talk to us so we can ensure you get the right limits.<\/p>\n

One other thing I want to call out is the ability to use the catalog token to create an embedded checkout. Checkout Kit<\/a> is available already if you want to build an accelerated checkout experience within your app. But soon, you will be able to attach a set of overrides so that the checkout looks and feels consistent to your agent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are also giving a preview of our new Checkout MCP tools for specific partners building native applications. Our goal is for it to work seamlessly with the Checkout Kit and branding overrides so that you can build a seamless commerce experience across millions of merchants with a single integration.<\/p>\n

This Edition is about moving AI from hype to everyday help\u2014reliable tools that make real work faster and smarter. From Sidekick\u2019s proactive guidance to more confident launches with Rollouts and SimGym, from more accurate inventory to a stronger POS, and new ways to discover and sell products with Product Network and the Catalog API, we\u2019re raising the bar on the fundamentals that matter.<\/p>\n

In 2026, we\u2019ll keep pushing on the essentials: a more capable Sidekick, faster and more dependable retail experiences, tighter inventory accuracy, smarter rollout controls, and a broader platform for agentic commerce. Clear, practical gains\u2014shipped quickly, improved constantly.<\/p>\n

Thank you to the merchants who trust us with your businesses and push us with honest feedback.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thank you to our partners, developers, agencies, and the entire ecosystem for building alongside us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019re grateful to be in this with you.<\/p>\n

Call it a new chapter, a fresh start, or yes\u2014even a little renaissance. Whatever the name, we\u2019re just getting started. 2026 will be a big year. Let\u2019s go.<\/p>\n

Vanessa Lee is a VP of Product at Shopify, where she leads the company\u2019s core product portfolio, from online stores to retail POS, the Admin, developer platform, Sidekick and Agentic Commerce.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re living in a modern-day renaissance with AI at the center. Our Winter \u201926 Edition\u2014The RenAIssance Edition\u2014is a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-338785","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}