Shopify Sprint ’26 Edition is an event organized as part of the cyclical Shopify Editions, where news, changes, and optimizations around Shopify and Shopify Plus are announced. In this article, we discuss the key elements that were announced during the spring edition.
Shopify Spring 2026 Edition
During the Shopify Spring '26 Edition, over 150 updates were announced in the following areas:
-
Agentic
-
Sidekick
-
Online
-
Retail
-
Marketing
-
Operations
-
Shop app
-
Payments
-
Finance
-
Developer
We will discuss each of these sections, highlighting the Shopify 2026 news, changes, and updates.
Shopify 2026 News
Regarding Shopify 2026 news announced as part of the Shopify Spring '26 Edition, we can highlight:
Agentic: Shopify will automatically introduce products from a given Shopify / Shopify Plus store into AI channels, allowing for performance analysis, sales tracking, and also providing guidance on what elements should be changed, refined, or optimized to increase conversion rates.
Sidekick: Sidekick connects with Judge.me, Klaviyo, Loop, Smile, among others, allowing the system to answer related questions and perform specific actions within the applications.
Online: includes an AI assistant that uses Shopify Inbox to communicate with customers; a more advanced search engine; AI-powered analytics; A/B testing within the online store and checkout; dedicated discounts for specific markets within Shopify Markets; product publication in specific channels with variant segmentation.
Retail: includes scanning QR codes with discounts on Shopify POS; faster search for products, customers, and specific orders using built-in search suggestions; Smart Grid, which allows processing returns, exchanges, and new transactions in one cart; creating pickup orders at any retail point of sale in Shopify POS; keyboard shortcuts for Shopify POS to improve navigation; creating offline-only promotions and codes to separate in-store sales from online sales.
New Shopify 2026 Features
The new Shopify 2026 features presented around the Shopify Spring '26 Edition also covered marketing, operations, the Shop app, payments, finance, and developers. Below are the Shopify 2026 changes in these areas.
Marketing: includes the introduction of Campaign Autopilot, which learns and optimizes campaigns based on AI; WhatsApp marketing campaigns via Shopify Messaging; Shopify Messaging expands with SMS and marketing automations; enhanced analytics related to marketing data; Shopify Messaging prioritizes messages to send and pause, optimizing them for conversion.
Operations: in the area of operations, we can highlight changes in Shopify 2026 within:
-
plugins: including managing the store with Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity for adding products, creating collections, and managing orders directly from the chat; the Shopify AI toolkit, which allows managing the store from AI platforms like Claude Code, Codex, Cursos, VS Code;
-
admin: including new visualizations of the analytics panel; code editor in Shopify Flow; filtering and grouping reports by custom structured data; a larger number of metafields (up to 50), which can be pinned in product, customer, and order sections; discounts on the returns page; visibility of app activity (ability to track what given apps do, where they operate, and what elements they have access to);
-
inventory: including quick stock synchronization; order cancellation requests; fulfillment of local pickup orders from multiple sources;
-
shipping: including grouping orders into batches; manual marking of ‘delivered’ status for unsupported carriers/couriers; emails within local pickup;
-
global: including gift cards in local currencies in one store; Managed Markets and managing international pricing strategy; detailed duty calculation statements in the context of international sales.
Shop app: including demand indicators and stock alerts; product categories for browsing convenience; the ability to create posts in the Shop app.
Payments: many changes in this area concern checkout, which we will discuss later in the article.
Finance: including repaying Shopify Capital funds from the Shopify Payments balance, not from a bank account; Shopify Tax available in Canada.
Developer: including parallel reads for bulk queries; creation of app automation tokens; automatic updates and semantic versioning in Shopify CLI; metafields in ShopifyQL; improved Polaris documentation; extended APP Events API; new Collections API.
Shopify - checkout changes
Regarding changes in Shopify checkout, the key ones are changes in payments, including:
-
customers can choose shipping and in-store pickup for different products within a single payment;
-
address format validation for all payments, using rules in Checkout Blocks;
-
VAT number verification at the checkout stage using Shopify Tax in the UK and the European Union;
-
personalized branding in checkout, customer accounts, and the login panel (set once, then consistent across all other locations);
-
faster and more accurate address suggestions through auto-completion at checkout for customers in the USA, Canada, Australia, France, and the Netherlands.
Shopify 2026 Update
Shopify Spring '26 Edition brings not only new features and changes but also updates. The Shopify 2026 update includes:
-
online: improved online store editing in the mobile version;
-
online: more B2B capabilities on Basic, Grow, Advanced plans;
-
operation: information on who and how changed individual flows in Shopify Flow; notes within Shopify Flow; advanced delivery options to adjust order value and weight conditions within a single delivery option, with descriptions and transit times visible to the customer;
-
payments: more local payment methods within Shopify Payments;
-
developer: improved webhook monitoring with multi-select filter support; updated Shopify AI Toolkit for Polaris web components; Inventory API update.
Many store owners, including those in Shopify Poland, will certainly find new opportunities within Shopify, and the online store enhancements presented during the Shopify Spring 2026 Edition will undoubtedly also set the direction for the entire Shopify ecosystem's development in the near future.
