It’s that time of year again, Shopify Editions is here. Not familiar with Shopify Editions? Twice a year, Shopify batches all of their updates together and announces them all at once during their Summer and Winter Editions. Some of these are actual product launches while others are more of a roadmap for whats to come.
We dug through the over 150+ updates in the Shopify Summer Edition to pick out our favorites and some of our duds.
Ready? Here we go.
Our Favorites & Duds
Horizon Theme Foundation
This one is pretty cool. The latest Shopify themes have this feature and you can expect to see updates to 3rd party themes within the App Store pretty soon. These updates allow for a lot of customizations within pages. We are not able to do things like change the order, look & feel of various elements on a collection pages like Title, Subheading, Color Swatches, and more.
This was possible before, but required editing the theme code. These edits would also be over-written by new theme updates. But not anymore. We are really excited about this updated!
Sidekick
Sidekick has been around for a while. It’s changed in function and purpose over the years and is now being billed as Shopify’s do-it-all AI tool. Need an image? Sidekick can help. Need copy for a PDP? Ask Sidekick.
However, in our experience, Sidekick isn’t there yet. The end results are pretty obviously AI generated. We don’t recommend using AI for content creation. There is a great Harvard Business Review article about how AI generated content is considered less trustworthy than human created content. And our job as marketers is all about creating trust. So don’t shoot yourself in the foot with AI.
Checkout
Shopify has been doing a TON of work on the checkout the last year. A perfect example is the Checkout Extensibility that was announced in previous editions. Now we are seeing more and more features come along. Some of our favorites include smarter shipping logic. For example, if an address cant ship USPS, then UPS options or other alternatives will show. Plus there are a ton of other great extensibility options.
Better yet, Shop Pay is now available in Canada.
One Code, Many Discounts
One of our favorite new’ish features is the ability to have a single promo code trigger multiple discounts. This means that Memorial Day sale code can trigger a free shipping discount, BOGO deal, and a product percentage discount. Now only if they could make it so discount codes could be excluded from products with strike through discounting….
Multi-Channel Reporting
This isn’t new, but it is getting better and better. If you go into the MArketing section of Shopify you’ll be able to find the Multi-Channel report. This report is only UTM/Click based, but it does provide multiple attribution models and will show new vs returning customer numbers which is incredibly helpful.
At this time, we are not seeing cost data pulling into the report, although that is being promised as a coming attraction. However, with some pretty simple math you can figure out new customer and returning customer CPA numbers.
Dev Assistant
In our opinion, this is where AI can really shine. Shopify is launching a dev assistant that will help you code custom section in the theme, build SQL queries, or get other custom reports. These can be built into flows and theme and make some pretty awesome customizations, no dev teams needed.
Overall, we are pretty excited about this batch of updates from Shopify Summer Editions 2025. Like past Editions, not all of these features will be available right away but it gives us some direction on what we can expect in 2025.
Of course, a lot of these features wont be compatible with your theme unless you keep it up to date so make sure you are staying on top of that. What are your favorite features from Shopify Summer Editions?