eCommerce · Shopify ·

Shopify’s Biggest Updates for 2025-2026 Every Small Business Should Know

Shopify announced a range of new features and updates in December 2025, with a strong focus on AI-powered tools alongside a handful of smaller but genuinely useful improvements. Below is a curated summary of the updates most relevant to New Zealand businesses and my clients, so you can quickly see what is worth paying attention to.

Some features are only available on certain Shopify plans. If you have questions about any of the updates or would like help applying them to your store, feel free to get in touch.

Sidekick

AI powered chatbot available in your Shopify admin:

  • Get answers or generate custom reports from analytics and insights using data from your store.
  • Generate images and content.
  • Describe what you want to build and Sidekick creates the flow automation in the Shopify Flow App.
  • Grow plans and above - custom app generation
  • Use Sidekick to help you with admin tasks, such as creating collections and discounts
  • Shopify Plus - use Sidekick to create B2B companies.

Online

Store A/B testing and scheduling, new product, discount features:

  • Schedule theme changes and try A/B testing with rollouts directly from the admin.
  • Simulate shopper behaviour with AI agents to get actionable recommendations before going live.
  • Let customers sign in with social accounts to your store (Google/Facebook)
  • Unlisted product status - hide products from search results, collections, sales channels etc, while keeping them accessible with a direct url.
  • 2048 variants per products (this one many people have been waiting for, for a long time!) - will reduce the need to use additional apps for product options in some cases.
  • For discounts that you only want to apply for specific customer groups, you can now create automatic discounts (previously always had to be code based discount)
  • Unit pricing - display prices by weight, volume, length or quantity!
  • Compare at price - you can now set this using price adjustment percentage etc, will also help eliminate the need for additional apps for this.

Checkout

Only for Advanced plan and Shopify Plus:

  • Customise your checkout and customer account pages for different countries and B2B buyers directly in the editor.

You can read through the full list of updates for Shopify Editions 2026 here.

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