Shopify's Q2 2026 earnings call confirmed AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores each tripled year-over-year, with 75% of AI-attributed purchases coming from outside the platform's top 100 product categories. WOW!
Shopify Editions can feel like a long list of features you will never have time to explore. Some updates change how customers find your products, how your team runs your Shopify store and how easy it now is (thanks to AI) to spot opportunities for maximising profit and where there are opportunity to optimise.
This is my practical roundup of the new Shopify features I would pay attention to:
Your product catalogue is now a growth channel
Your website is no longer the only place customers will discover your products. End of story. half of all AI-referred sessions land directly on a product detail page, 2.5 times the rate of traditional search. This is a great line for you because it makes concrete why product data quality matters, customers AND agents skip the homepage and land directly on the product page.
AI is rapidly becoming a product discovery channel. Shopify reported that AI-driven traffic and orders to its merchants tripled year on year.. As shopping moves into AI tools, your product catalogue is now THE foundation for visibility across search, AI conversations, social channels, the Shop app and more. Shopify Catalog is designed to standardise and enrich product data. Your eligible products will now surface across AI-powered shopping experiences. Shopify says that data syndicated through Catalog drives twice the conversion in AI chats compared with scraped product data.
But hold your horses, for businesses, this is less about rushing to “do AI” and more about getting the essentials right. A product called The Alba Chair might work beautifully as part of your collection. But someone (or an AI agent) seeing it outside of your website needs more context. “Handmade walnut bedside table, natural finish, 60cm wide” is easier to find, understand and recommend. Your customer still gets the story and visual world of The Alba on the product page. But the underlying product information needs to do some practical work too.
Catalogue-powered searches now convert at roughly twice the rate of searches using scraped data. AI search conversion was nearly 80% higher than traditional organic search.
WHAT TO REVIEW
- Your PDP, please make sure it contains all the correct and useful information. Use this how to guide.
- Are product titles clear enough without the context of your website?
- Are all materials, dimensions, colours, finishes and care details complete?
- Are product variants named consistently?
- Are product variant images set?
- Do product descriptions answer customers questions before buying?
- Is the information on your product page accurate, structured and easy to scan? For both humans and agent...
This sort of work does feel unglamorous, yet it has a direct impact on your product catalogue's visibility, confidence and conversion.
Sidekick is now worth opening and using
Sidekick has had a significant revamp. The trusty AI assistant now works with third-party apps, including Judge.me, Klaviyo, Loop and Smile. It can answer questions about data inside those apps and take action within the app, rather than making you bounce between dashboards.
This could be particularly useful for running better campaigns. Ask Sidekick to analyse your Klaviyo and Shopify data, create a promotion, investigate a store issue or troubleshoot an operational task. It is also becoming more proactive: forgotten to add SEO metadata to a product? Sidekick can flag it directly on your Shopify homepage. Get to it.
Sidekick handled nearly 34 million merchant conversations in Q2 2026. Daily active merchant usage up 3.6 times.
It is a much more practical version of Shopify’s AI assistant. It is never a replacement for strategy, it's a helpful way to identify problems and get routine work shipped faster.
The new Apple Watch functionality is too obsessive for me. I do not need my wrist updating me on orders, sales targets reached etc. Protect your peace peeps.
Sidekick's new capabilities can remove some of the friction involved in getting data and answers using your analytics.
USE IT TO:
- Answer your customers’ questions and take action INSIDE the app!
- Help you run more effective campaigns by analysing Klaviyo and store data and analytics, create promotions or troubleshoot store ops.
- Flag the products didn't finish adding SEO metadata to.
Growth replaces Marketing
Your Marketing tab is now called Growth. I personally do not rate the new name, which they can't seem to land on. Anyway, Campaign Autopilot does sound useful. It uses your store, customer and sales data to automatically create and manage marketing across channels. Even if you only use it for inspiration for future marketing efforts, it takes a load of data analytics off your plate. This feature is an early access tool for select merchants, join the waitlist from the Growth tab.
USE IT TO:
- Create Shopify messaging for email
- Run Shop campaigns and Meta ads
- Create branded emails and automations tailored to your store e.g. Abandoned checkout recovery email or welcome series etc.
GOOD TO KNOW:
- Nothing goes live till you approve it and you can set the parameters like spend limits.
- The pending action section is useful, after analysing your store it creates a list where you review the audience budget and schedule before you approve or dismiss.
- You can monitor performance, pause anything, or switch it all off.
The Shop app now deserves more attention
I think the Shop app is one of Shopify’s most useful, but often underused, customer-facing channels. I use it to track deliveries from Vinted to Evri to my Inessa subscription. It is gradually becoming a place where shoppers research, compare and purchase products through AI-assisted chat and personalised recommendations as well as track all their orders. Sign in with Shop is not new, but it is worth enabling on your store. It allows returning customers to use Shop Pay with their details pre-filled, reducing friction at checkout.
Shop Pay crossed $400 billion in lifetime accelerated GMV. It is not a nice to have toy, it's a powerful and integral feature.
FOR YOUR BUSINESS, USE IT TO:
- Create shoppable Posts in Shopify Admin. Tag products and appear in customers’ home feeds.
- Sync content from Instagram Reels and other connected sources, meaning your existing social content now works twice as hard.
- Use it as another place for customers to discover your products.
- Make it super simple for customers to check out. It gives them the same pre-filled checkout ease PayPal made famous, just faster, more seamless and doesn't charge you those unwanted PayPal fees.
WHAT TO DO:
- Check that your Shop channel is set or set up correctly
- Ensure your product imagery and product information are strong enough to work away from your website
- Create shoppable Posts around launches, seasonal edits and bestsellers
- Sync existing short-form social content where appropriate
- Enable Shop Pay to make returning checkout faster and easier
Use analytics to run the store better
I am fascinated by store analytics tools, lucky it is part of my job hey! They are not the flashiest part of Editions, they are commercially critical. Use them to look beyond total sales. Which products are viewed frequently but not purchased? Where is demand growing? Which collections underperform? What activity is happening before and after a promotion? These are the questions that should shape pre-Christmas website strategy re. merchandising and stock planning.
Use Shopify Flow to to connect operational actions to store data. For example, set up an automated notification that alerts you team when a best-selling lampshade reaches a specific sales target or inventory threshold. Now you can to make more product or reorder stock before it runs out.
START WITH THESE QUESTIONS:
- Which products get attention but fail to convert?
- Which product pages need clearer information, stronger imagery or more reassurance?
- Which products have started to gain momentum?
- Which collections are not earning their place in navigation or campaigns?
- What inventory or fulfilment tasks could be triggered automatically?
Good reporting tells you more than what happened, it is a crystal clear basis for deciding on next steps.
The practical takeaway
Ever the practical person, my takeaways are that Shopify’s Spring ’26 Editions are a reason to see where you can optimise your store. They are a reminder to keep the platform working for your business so you can work ON your business.
I would start optimising your product catalogue now. Then make sure your marketing, operations and customer journey are using the data that is sitting inside Shopify ready for you to use. The businesses that will reap the most reward from these updates are the ones that choose a few useful improvements, set them up properly and keep their eye on how their customers respond.
I incorporate these updates into Folklore's monthly Shopify retainers. We keep your website current, identify the platform changes that are relevant to your business and turning them into practical improvements that support discovery, conversion and growth.
NEXT STEPS:
We can design and build a new Shopify store for you, optimise your current store for higher conversions, and if you are not on Shopify we can migrate you and redesign your website to give you both the peace of mind and the ecommerce platform your business deserves.
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