Shopify Editions Spring 2026: agentic commerce, Sidekick with apps and A/B tests

Episode recorded in Polish in June 2026, after the first round of World Cup group matches (released 24 June 2026), so it describes Shopify Editions Spring 2026 as it stood then: some features, such as buying directly from Meta ads and sponsored products in Shopify Catalog, had only been announced at the time. As of October 2026 the Shopify Agentic plan (no subscription, a fee only on sales in AI channels) is available in Poland; the teaser at the start of the video is not repeated here.

Priorities first: the World Cup

Tomek: Hi, this is Tomek Runowicz.

Maciek: And Maciek Czerniak.

Tomek: We run wecanfly, an agency that helps established brands with complex migrations to Shopify Plus.

Maciek: And this is Flying with Shopify, the channel where we talk to e-commerce experts and founders. Welcome to another episode. Listen, I think we can start. Yes, Shopify Editions, but first…

Tomek: Yes, priorities first.

Maciek: Priorities. I think all the first-round group matches have been played. What do you like so far?

Tomek: So far I like that Poland hasn't lost a match. As for the teams that are playing, what's nice is that there are no weak teams at this World Cup. On the one hand, some of our European favourites aren't delivering, Spain for example, but that probably comes partly from fatigue after a long season. I've also noticed that the players from the top clubs have arrived pretty worn out so far. On the other hand, when it comes to goalscorers, the pillars of football of the last 10 years aren't disappointing: Messi, Harry Kane, Haaland. Each of them scored two or three goals in the first match. It looks like a clash of titans at some stage.

Maciek: I also think France looked good so far, from the second half on.

Tomek: Yes, France were nice. Germany had too weak an opponent to judge how strong a team they are…

Maciek: Exactly, we can't tell.

Tomek: …at this point. But Argentina played brilliantly. It'll be interesting, but with this many teams I think it will only really start in the knockout stage, and not even in the round of 32, probably the round of 16.

Maciek: Poland are already waiting in the quarter-finals with a wild card.

Tomek: Poland, yes, Poland are waiting for sure.

Did Shopify Editions Spring 2026 bring anything new?

Tomek: On the one hand we're living the World Cup here, but on the other we're meeting today to talk about what's going on in our e-commerce world, because as usual that moment in the calendar has come when Shopify announced another batch of changes, modifications and new features. I often read their announcements by watching the direction they're heading in rather than picking apart individual items, because those are often a collection of things that had already been happening in the meantime. It's more an attempt to find that direction.

Maciek: I also think it's not about new things, because there was de facto nothing new here.

Tomek: Nothing groundbreaking, yes.

Maciek: All of it had already been announced in rollouts, in the changelog, so there's no big shocker.

Tomek: That's true. But privately and personally I'm happy with the name of this spring Editions, because it's named exactly what we allowed ourselves to say during one of our recent presentations: simply "sell everywhere". I think we called it right. For as long as we've known it, Shopify has been incredibly effective at this and keeps moving in that direction: letting merchants sell their products wherever there's potential for them at any given moment.

Maciek: Absolutely, although I think in the Polish context it should read "sell everywhere, but not on marketplaces". Because all those integrations are still missing, and you can't do without Ikarus here.

Agentic commerce in Poland: handbrake still on?

Tomek: To be honest, the first module of these changes, the one about agentic selling, selling through various agents, still has the handbrake on in the Polish market, and even in Europe. Let's not kid ourselves. Stores already have access to it, and you can see it even in the Shopify admin: there's a separate channel called Agentic where you can watch how your store is slowly performing, how it pulls traffic from different agents and how that traffic then turns into sales. But as I said, the handbrake is still a bit on, because we don't yet have sales in those channels as such, what's already happening in the US. For now, what we can and should take care of is making our store as ready as possible for those sales, and today making sure our products and stores are used there to recommend us: so the customer can get to know our offer, so the offer is properly compared with others and stands out, and so the customer then comes to us.

Maciek: I'm not sure we don't have sales. I think even on Polish accounts…

Tomek: But on Polish accounts it's attributed. It's treated as a marketing channel: the customer was there, found you there and then…

Maciek: But the selling functionality itself…

Tomek: That's what I'm saying, it's probably a preview of what's coming shortly anyway. That's where Shopify started, by opening up all the possibilities around this kind of selling. First of all, it encourages you to prepare a better description of your store and your products, and of how agents read you through Shopify…

Maciek: Catalog?

Tomek: Catalog and Shopify… Is it Product Base or Knowledge Base?

Maciek: Knowledge Base.

Tomek: Knowledge Base, where you can nicely define all the information about yourself.

Maciek: And even correct it. You can display…

Tomek: …see how the agents see you. Exactly. That's amazing.

Promoting products in the catalog and buying from Meta ads

Maciek: You can see there's a focus on it. Of the small things around this that I noticed in this Editions, two caught my attention. The first: there's now an option for product placement, that is, promoting your product in the catalog. It seems they're already looking for a way to monetise it, to get your products shown higher in the catalog. It surprised me a bit.

Tomek: I think we talked about this a bit, that they're actually creating the space where customers are now supposed to be.

Maciek: I just thought it would happen at a different level, meaning there'd be some system at the level of, say, ChatGPT. I suspect there will be one too, so I'm curious how they'll handle these two layers of promotion, because both sides will want to monetise it.

Tomek: Yes.

Maciek: So that's interesting. The second thing, also a small one, but it caught my eye: the Universal Commerce Protocol, the whole agentic commerce thing, will be usable on different surfaces, let's call it that. I noticed they're announcing the option to buy directly from Meta ads, meaning ads on Facebook and Instagram, where you'll simply finish your purchase. Even at the level of the feed or the stories you're watching. I'm curious how it will work, but I think it's super interesting and real competition. I read it a bit as an answer to TikTok Shop.

An AI assistant in the store and the apps Shopify absorbs

Tomek: Yes, you stay in that channel until the end. And what do you think, Maciek, about the AI assistant that supports conversational shopping?

Maciek: It doesn't surprise me that they built it. It was an obvious move. I think all the apps in the Shopify ecosystem that handle fairly obvious things are kind of waiting to be swallowed. We've talked about apps here: Gorgias has something like this, for example. We went through the same case with subscriptions: they weren't there, Shopify added them. So it seems to me that where the functionality is that obvious, Shopify keeps moving into the layer reserved for apps. Even the next feature, Sidekick integrated with apps, shows the direction. As for the feature itself, I think it…

Tomek: Natural.

Maciek: …makes sense and will work nicely from a sales point of view: you have an agent on the site that makes suggestions based on your purchase history and preferences and works with the products of that store. It doesn't send you somewhere outside, so I think it will definitely be used a lot, especially with large product catalogs. We'll see.

Tomek: A lot will depend on how effective it is, on whether you feel the suggestions really fit you.

Maciek: That there's real value in it.

Tomek: And that there's value in it. I think that will decide its success. But as you say, it's the natural direction shopping in general is moving in. Shopify has always watched closely how the well-performing apps in its ecosystem develop and what features are built there, and somehow it naturally moves into those areas and probably takes over part of that functionality.

Native A/B tests: Rollouts and SimGym

Maciek: Another such feature, again not new, because it had been announced before, is A/B testing, which you now have natively. You can do it…

Tomek: It's called Rollouts, right?

Maciek: Rollouts. You can do it through Rollouts, or through SimGym.

Sidekick talks to apps

Tomek: You also mentioned Sidekick, Maciek. I'd like to come back to that and expand on it, because Sidekick is one of the areas that got a big upgrade. A lot of these features improve what was already there: even deeper analysis, even more ability to edit and modify things on the site. But about what you said on integrating with apps: Sidekick can now query apps about what's happening in them, what data is collected, what interactions take place. And it can aggregate that information in one place, not just from the store itself but also, for example, from what you have in Klaviyo. I assume you can then compare that data and know how to react to it. What matters is that for now this communication is limited to a handful, a dozen or so of the most popular apps. From our local perspective, Klaviyo will be one of those where users really feel the value. Besides that there's Mailchimp, Judge.me for reviews, Yotpo, which we once had in our episode too. Matrixify is also nice, and it's not entirely obvious, because it's an app that often works in the background. We don't use it directly: whether it syncs data for us, integrates it or we manage it with it, we can now get to that data from a conversation with Sidekick.

Maciek: Totally agree. It's comfortable: you don't have to go out to those apps and click around, you can check or do certain things right where you work. They showed a nice example in the presentation: "reply to the last five five-star reviews".

Tomek: Brilliant.

Maciek: Simple, quick, nice. I suspect it will work the same with Klaviyo: you'll be able to set up and send a campaign, or send a text message with a simple command to a segment, with a discount created on the fly. That's where it's heading.

Vibe coders and Shopify apps

Maciek: The Matrixify example really is interesting. I think it's an example of an app that has found a bit of a formula for Shopify. It's something fairly narrow and niche, and I don't really see them having…

Tomek: …the intention to replace it?

Maciek: Yes, to replace it. You probably also get several invitations on LinkedIn every day, I've had them literally for a few months, from all the vibe coders of the world who've built a Shopify app and now just want to flog it. I think the days when you take something that's already on the market, copy it and make it better and cheaper are over, that's not the way. You really have to find something niche, so that…

Tomek: That's right.

Maciek: …you have domain knowledge, so that…

Tomek: …you solve a real problem or need.

Maciek: …you bring some real value.

Tomek: Yes, I agree. To sum up, Sidekick is heading towards being your real assistant, because it has access to more and more of the resources you use, and you can do more and more with it.

A hydration break and American football

Maciek: Shall we have a hydration break?

Tomek: Great idea, Maciek. I wonder what inspired you. The question is whether we'll use it like American TV and run a whole load of ads during it. Did you hear that in Europe that's banned and the hydration break is a normal pause? You see the fans, you see the players talking. Just a break in the match. In the US it's absolutely used for advertising, because that's when the TV ads come in.

Maciek: Well yes, the US, you know. A break during the Super Bowl.

Tomek: Listen, Maciek, I have to brag, changing the subject quickly. Last week I went to an American football game for the first time in my life, in Wrocław.

Maciek: I thought you were going to say the Super Bowl final.

Tomek: Not yet. It was the first time I'd seen a game like that live.

Maciek: Panthers Wrocław.

Tomek: The Panthers, yes. Incidentally, it turns out they're the second-best team in Europe, so it's really fun to watch. But you can clearly see it's a sport created by Americans with commerce in mind.

Maciek: There are more breaks than play.

Tomek: Yes. The rules say four quarters of 15 minutes. That's how long a game lasts on paper. In reality it takes at least three hours, if there aren't many disputed situations, because in practice a play lasts 10 seconds at most and is always followed by a 30-second break.

Maciek: Resuscitation.

Tomek: A 30-second break. And on American TV every one of those breaks is filled with an ad.

Maciek: Well, of course. What's the issue? What's the problem?

Tomek: What's the problem? Who's the activist here?

Campaign Autopilot: marketing run from the Shopify admin?

Tomek: All right, Maciek, moving on: we started with this and I absolutely agree that this is definitely not a revolutionary Editions. But for a while now we've felt there's a clearly set direction: AI commerce. We're moving towards increasingly agentic store management, selling and customer service, and you can see that's where most of the effort goes. Still, let's look at a few other areas that appeared at this Editions as new features, or at least as a kind of systematisation. We feel that especially in the developer part, which is always shown last and is surprisingly rich, because there are always plenty of changes. But from what we see and hear from our developers, it's simply publishing things that, from their perspective, had already been rolled out and modified. For them it's no big news. And in the operational part, Maciek, did anything specific catch your eye?

Maciek: You know, I'm not sure it's operational… Maybe it counts as operations too. The thing that caught my attention is Campaign Autopilot. An AI assistant for managing marketing, channels and campaigns that you can launch from Shopify. The theory is that it starts those processes itself, allocates budgets, analyses, learns and optimises. What will it look like in practice? Hard to say. My experience with campaigns in Shopify is that it doesn't quite read them and doesn't show ROAS. If you run campaigns from the ad platforms rather than through their system, it doesn't see them. In my opinion it doesn't add up.

Tomek: I'm not a fan either, for one more reason. In my view this whole marketing and campaign part can only work for a merchant who does it mostly on their own, not even with an agency, because I can't imagine any agency today wanting to work on the data it gets in the Shopify admin. It will work on its own data, and that rules out bringing in a copilot in one place, as you said. If you do it yourself, on your own, there's a chance the data will be more precise. But we've always looked at it with a bit of disbelief and, quite honestly, I'm not expecting a big revolution from it today. It's still the direction, but I think for those who…

Maciek: If it worked the way they…

Tomek: …announce it…

Maciek: …announce it, that would be great.

Reports: contextual insights and targets

Tomek: That would be great. Moving on to the operational part, though: I noticed Shopify's reports. Financial and sales reports, the data that is extremely important for running a store. After the last overhaul they're already very accessible. First, the dashboard is very rich. Second, creating reports is dead simple: there are loads of predefined ones, and any report you create you can then adjust with simple commands and tweaks. Great stuff. But what extends it further now: for a while, contextual reports have been appearing at the top of the dashboard. They don't necessarily tell you about store conversion, they give you information that matters here and now. Things like "we see sales from this area grew strongly in the last week or month" or "your product called such-and-such has stopped selling". These are report insights and highlights, but more contextual, giving you a specific signal that there's something you can do.

Maciek: That existed already. Isn't that Pulse? I think that's Pulse.

Tomek: Yes. It's just that now, as they said, they've expanded these reports even further. They're enriched, you get more information. And the second thing, which is nice for those who plan store activities strategically: you have an annual strategy, you do a quarterly one and set yourself goals. From now on these goals appear in the reports. You can define them: you set a target for a given metric, for delivering the plan, and you can track progress as you go. I wouldn't call it a gadget, but it definitely gives you an even better picture.

Discounts per market in Shopify Markets

Maciek: OK, among the small things I noted discounts created separately for each market.

Tomek: Yes.

Maciek: That's a nice thing. Very practical. Small, but practical.

Tomek: I think Markets didn't come through explicitly in these changes, because you'd have to collect all those small things you mentioned. But Markets has definitely been gaining a lot of functionality over the last few months. And what you mentioned was one of the fairly big, last pain points that distinguished markets from separate instances: you couldn't dedicate discounts to a given region. Now that's possible.

A closed platform versus open source with AI

Maciek: Yes. But it makes me reflect: what are we even talking about? On platforms that aren't closed but open source, developers have access to AI-assisted engineering and can write a feature like that on the fly. Here you still have to wait for it a bit.

Tomek: Wait for it. But that's obvious. Shopify doesn't change one rule: it's still a closed platform, in the sense that it's provided by someone else. At the scale they're at now, with the number of things happening on different fronts, being global and so on, even a very simple thing, and I assume this wasn't hard from a development point of view, takes time, because there's already a certain inertia.

Sidekick, AI Toolkit, connectors and the Agentic plan

Maciek: At the same time I think they're aware of it. They must be aware of the potential threat, the disruption from open platforms. And you can see they're working on it, on the one hand finding some workaround: inside Shopify there's Sidekick, which takes on the role of an agent, can not only do various things for us but also moves into the app layer, because you can write apps in Sidekick. And at the same time they're now reaching their tentacles outwards so that different LLMs and tools can talk to Shopify.

Tomek: On the developer side it actually started with headless, with Hydrogen, meaning the whole storefront can already be decoupled.

Maciek: But I also mean the AI Toolkit and the connectors they finally built for Claude and ChatGPT. Recently they even built connectors for… Lovable was already there, but for Replit, where you can design a storefront in Replit, connect it to Shopify, publish and manage it: build the storefront agentically, with AI, and just tie it to the admin underneath. Interesting moves in this area.

Tomek: Absolutely. I think the change happening before our eyes in the software world, and in technology more broadly, is so big that you can be number one for many years, like Shopify, and that still doesn't make you bulletproof against what's going on. First, you have to react, and second, I think there are really serious conversations there about how to develop this further: in which direction, what to allow, where to open up and where to keep ownership. In my view one of the interesting ideas, which we haven't mentioned yet, is their Agentic plan in the agentic part. What is it really? I think it's a brilliant marketing and sales move: you don't make your whole infrastructure available, you don't make anyone switch to your technology, you reach out to all the other technologies instead. You're fully open to them, so even if someone doesn't use your core product, the store, you as Shopify still benefit.

Maciek: Yes, it's a move away from software towards infrastructure, the data layer, the "rails" for processes and transactions.

Is Editions still an event?

Tomek: Exactly. Maciek, I think we've covered the most important things from this latest Editions. Of course everyone will probably find some more nuances and details for themselves.

Maciek: Great. As usual, credit for a nice website, it's worth clicking around. But I think they've fallen a bit into the Editions trap, because they now have to do it every year…

Tomek: Notice there are always 150-plus changes.

Maciek: That's not a problem, at their scale it never was. But I have the impression that lately…

Tomek: I don't think it's so much lately, Maciek. I have the impression it goes in waves. I remember Editions where we sat down and it was: "Damn, they didn't say anything".

Maciek: They didn't say anything.

Tomek: That's how it was. And another time we sat down and said: "Wow, this is a bombshell, there's loads". So it may be that sometimes big ideas pile up at one moment.

Maciek: And remember that things announced as available right here, right now are often early access, or not yet.

Tomek: But to sum up, you can't say nothing is happening in this technology, because I think a lot is happening on their side. And I mean in general, not technology as a market. We see it every day working on projects, seeing how often we have to update what we know about a topic. From one project to the next we can take a completely different approach, because so much has changed in the meantime. So for me Editions is, as you say, a bit of ticking off something that has to happen periodically, while the most important things happen continuously in the background anyway.

Maciek: No doubt about it. I'm still a Shopify fanboy, so I won't say a bad word.

Tomek: No bad word will ever come out of your mouth.

World Cup predictions

Tomek: OK, Maciek, I think that's enough then. We can go back to watching the next matches. I don't know when the Republic of the Congo plays again, but we'd have to keep an eye on it.

Maciek: Yes, I think we'll see nice things from Japan, for example. Japan interests me.

Tomek: Japan were very nice too. I think we can venture some predictions for the finalists.

Maciek: OK.

Tomek: That's a good ending. For now, after the first round, for some reason, maybe some weakness of mine, for the first time I see England going quite far in this tournament.

Maciek: They really went for it yesterday.

Tomek: They played very nicely, and they have a super deep bench. Such talents that any national team would put them in its starting eleven and have stars. I feel they can do something good, although with them it varies after the group stage. So I'd bet on them, and I'm hoping France will pick up even more speed.

Maciek: France, Argentina, I think they'll go further. But I always naively live in hope that some underdog will win. I also liked Norway.

Tomek: Norway.

Maciek: There's a nice story with Bosnia and Herzegovina, you probably know it, where the coach is just a typical Pole who knows football better than everyone.

Tomek: Yes. And now he's become the coach.

Maciek: And he's become the coach. A whole comedy.

Tomek: Interesting. Bosnia play again soon, so we'll see.

Maciek: Bochnia and Herzegovina.

Tomek: Bochnia. Greetings to Kraków.

Maciek: Exactly.

Tomek: OK, so what? Your picks are, on the one hand, Argentina as a strong…

Maciek: Argentina, France. I think so, you know.

Tomek: And the underdog, once more?

Maciek: Norway.

Tomek: Norway. Norway and the Netherlands. OK.

Maciek: But I don't think Belgium.

Tomek: No. Belgium, the Netherlands for me…

Maciek: Germany had too weak an opponent.

Tomek: Exactly.

Maciek: So far.

Tomek: Listen, we'll be eating our words at the end, but OK.

Maciek: We can always cut it.

Tomek: Listen, we have the right, we're Polish, it's our duty.

Maciek: That's right, we can. It's our duty.

Tomek: Thanks a lot, Maciek.

Maciek: Bye.

Tomek: Bye.