Shopify Editions – Summer 2025 (Horizons)

Horizon Themes and Visual Editing

• 10 New Conversion-Optimized Themes: Designed for different industries and selling strategies, with visual polish and built-in best practices.
• AI-Powered Theme Generation: Input your brand’s description and generate a complete theme layout within seconds.
• Modular Theme Blocks: Reuse and remix components for seasonal campaigns or product launches.
• Revamped Theme Editor: Includes predictive search, block categories, conditional logic, hover-to-preview, and one-click text edits.

Benefit: Dramatically shortens the time to launch new storefronts or redesigns, reducing dev cost and improving agility. For retailers, this means faster time-to-market for seasonal promotions or new product lines. For ecommerce managers, it enables more frequent A/B testing and quicker updates without requiring extensive design or developer cycles. It also unlocks the ability to empower non-technical team members to create branded layouts independently.

Sidekick AI Enhancements

• Multi-step Reasoning and Strategy Suggestions: Get insight into store trends, drops in sales, and suggested next steps.
• Visual and Image Generation in Admin: Generate branded visuals by inputting prompts.
• Mobile and Voice Access: Use Sidekick in the Shopify mobile app, and even interact via screen share and voice.

Benefit: Sidekick lowers the barrier to smart decision-making and content creation. For ecommerce teams, this means accelerated campaign planning, faster insights on performance, and quicker content iteration. Sidekick’s mobile access helps teams stay productive on the go, while its visual tools cut the need for external design support.

Retail POS Enhancements

• Shopify POS v10: Features custom branding, faster navigation, smarter search, and device-level payment settings.
• Ship and Carryout in One Checkout: Process mixed-fulfillment orders from a single cart.
• Store Credit and Multi-entity Selling: Manage store credit and run multiple international stores in one admin.

Benefit: These updates give brick-and-mortar teams more flexibility, reduce checkout friction, and support global physical store rollouts. POS branding reinforces in-store consistency while the mixed cart feature makes hybrid retail feel seamless to customers.

Checkout Innovation and Security

• Faster Load Times: Improved by up to 2 seconds for a smoother experience.
• Discount Codes in Cart: A native option without relying on third-party apps.
• Flat-Rate Split Shipping: One flat fee when shipping from multiple warehouses.
• Apple Pay Across More Scenarios: Wider compatibility while preserving custom checkout flows.
• PCI DSS V4 Compliance: Ahead-of-deadline security compliance for peace of mind.

Benefit: Higher conversion rates, more predictable shipping experiences, and a secure checkout aligned with compliance mandates. Ecommerce teams can reduce friction in the purchase process, leading to lower cart abandonment rates. Security teams can rest assured knowing the platform meets regulatory standards out of the box.

Global Commerce and Localization

• Shopify Payments in 16 New Countries: Expands payment coverage for growing markets.
• Multi-Currency Payouts: Reduce conversion losses by settling in up to 8 currencies.
• Duties and Taxes Embedded in Prices: Offers clarity to international buyers, improving trust and conversion.
• Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) Labels for DHL: Simplifies customs handling and fulfillment.
• Custom Submarkets in Regions: Create granular regional setups under one market (e.g., France vs. Germany).

Benefit: Makes international expansion and B2B selling across borders easier to manage and more transparent. Retailers can provide localized pricing and payment methods, which improves conversion and customer satisfaction. For operations teams, handling compliance and fulfillment becomes more predictable and less error-prone. These tools reduce the complexity of cross-border selling and eliminate the need for separate stores per region.

Marketing and Shop App Features

• Multi-purpose Discounts: Apply a single code to products, orders, and shipping.
• Customer Segmentation Tools: More powerful templates and geographic targeting.
• Smarter Shop App Feed: Personalized, real-time product recommendations.
• Storefront Sync with Shop App: Ensure consistency across your site and the app.

Benefit: Greater control over customer targeting and promotional execution allows marketing teams to run more sophisticated campaigns. Integration with the Shop App boosts visibility and repeat purchases by tapping into Shopify’s consumer-facing ecosystem.

B2B Selling Tools

• Markets for B2B: Assign catalogs, currencies, and custom storefronts by buyer group.
• Min/Max Order Rules: Enforce buying thresholds without custom dev.
• Gift Cards in B2B Catalogs: Use gift cards in wholesale workflows.
• NetSuite Sync + Expanded ERP Support: Improved backend integration.

Benefit: Makes Shopify a serious contender for wholesale and B2B operations. These updates simplify catalog management, enforce order controls, and eliminate tedious integrations, giving ecommerce and sales teams more power to manage accounts and drive revenue efficiently.

Shipping and Fulfillment

• Bulk Label Printing (250 at a time): Speed up fulfillment.
• Barcode-based Inventory Transfers: Improve internal logistics.
• Split Fulfillment by Quantity: Automatically allocate across warehouses.
• Pick Lists and Admin Search for Fulfillment Methods: Better control and organization.

Benefit: Shipping and warehouse teams can operate more efficiently and reduce human error. With built-in support for logistics, operations leaders can automate key workflows and handle high-volume fulfillment with fewer resources.

Developer Platform Enhancements

• Local Dev Without Tunnels: Test apps and extensions directly with faster hot reloads.
• Plan-Specific Dev Stores: Simulate and test app behavior across Shopify Basic, Advanced, and Plus.
• Polaris UI Components Upgrade: Unified, modern components across admin and storefront.
• Declarative Metafields and Metaobjects: Easier configuration and API access to custom data.
• Expanded Shopify Flow Triggers: Better automation and logic control, with HTTP responses and metaobject access.

Benefit: Reduces time to build and test, while giving development teams more consistency and tooling flexibility. Retailers can launch new capabilities faster and ensure they’re fully functional across different Shopify plans. This streamlines QA, shortens release cycles, and reduces bugs or integration gaps. It also opens the door for more sophisticated integrations with fewer platform constraints.

Operational and Omnichannel Improvements

• Store Credit Refunds (Any Method): Easier return handling and loyalty management.
• Edit Subscription Orders Pre-Fulfillment: Fix mistakes or respond to customer changes more flexibly.
• Web Performance Reports: Access Core Web Vitals at the page level.
• Tap to Pay in Shopify Mobile App: Accept payments directly from mobile devices in-store.
• Mobile Admin UI Upgrades: Faster navigation, customizable analytics, and dedicated settings search.

Benefit: Streamlines day-to-day operations and equips retail teams with better mobile tools and performance insights. For example, customer support can process returns more flexibly with store credit, while in-store teams benefit from mobile point-of-sale and on-the-go admin access. Ecommerce teams can also identify slow-loading pages and prioritize CRO improvements. Admins can make faster, data-informed decisions from any device.

How to Maximize Value with Your Development Agency

Shopify’s Summer ’25 updates open the door to faster innovation and greater operational control—but the real value comes from strategic collaboration with your development agency.

What’s Changing in the Client-Agency Relationship:

These new tools reduce technical overhead for routine updates (e.g., theme tweaks, checkout logic, content blocks), allowing your agency to focus on more strategic initiatives like conversion optimization, systems integration, and custom app development. Horizon, Shopify Flow, and Sidekick provide building blocks your internal team can start, while your agency can refine, validate, and extend them.

How to Get the Most Benefit:

• Prioritize a Quarterly Roadmap: Use Editions as a guide for planning. Ask your agency to map each feature to tangible outcomes—e.g., faster launch cycles, cost savings, or international expansion.
• Run Feature Audits Together: Have your dev partner evaluate which new capabilities (Horizon themes, Flow automations, checkout upgrades) can replace custom code or legacy apps.
• Empower Your Team, Not Replace Your Agency: Give your marketing or ops team control over visual updates, while letting your agency optimize the back-end performance, workflows, and architecture.
• Lean on Devs for Setup and Governance: While Sidekick and other AI tools enable more merchant control, your agency should still establish best practices around performance, compliance, and extensibility.

In short: Editions Summer ’25 shifts your agency’s role from build-and-fix to architect-and-accelerate. The more you collaborate proactively, the more you’ll gain from this evolution.