Shopify Winter ’26: AI, Agentic Commerce and B2B Features Our Team Is Watching

With the Winter ’26 Edition, Shopify isn’t just adding “nice-to-have” upgrades. It’s pushing hard on two fronts that matter to our clients right now: AI that actually runs parts of the business, and native B2B features that make wholesale simpler and more global. Over 150 updates are live, but a handful will have an outsized impact on how merchants operate, test, and grow their stores.

Below, our specialists team breaks down six Winter ’26 features that we believe will generate the biggest performance gains for ambitious B2B and B2C merchants.

1. Sidekick becomes a true eCommerce copilot

Sidekick has evolved from a helpful chatbot into a hands-on operator inside your admin. The goal is simple as to give merchants a way to delegate complex, repetitive work to AI, without handing over control.

With Winter ’26, Sidekick now:

• Executes multi-step tasks, not just one-off commands. It can plan and run sequences of actions, keep track of context, and follow up automatically when something needs review.
• Builds custom apps directly from prompts. Think internal tools like a bulk B2B company importer, a return-eligibility checker, or an event prep app that generates discounted checkout links, without writing code.
• Generates automated workflows in Shopify Flow just by describing what you want (e.g. “Tag customers who place an order over $5,000 and notify my sales rep”).
• Produces advanced analytics and reports in ShopifyQL, so you can ask business questions in natural language and turn them into visual dashboards.

For growing teams, Sidekick starts to look less like a “nice AI feature” and more like an extra operator by building tools, automating back-office workflows, and turning data into concrete next steps.

2. Shopify Agentic Storefronts: selling directly inside AI chats

Commerce is increasingly happening in conversations, not in browser tabs. Shopify Agentic Storefronts is Shopify’s answer. You could connect your catalog once, and your products become discoverable directly inside AI agents like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Perplexity, with more platforms to come.

Key ideas to understand:

• One configuration, many agents: You set up your data once in Shopify, and Shopify syndicates your products across supported AI platforms. No custom integration per agent, no extra apps to manage for each ecosystem.
• Your brand, your attribution: You decide how your brand appears, which channels can surface your products, and how attribution flows back into your admin. Customers can discover, evaluate, and buy without leaving the chat, but you still own the checkout experience and the relationship.
• Foundation for agentic commerce & “Universal Cart”: Under the hood, this is aligned with Shopify’s broader agentic commerce initiative: Catalog APIs, MCP servers and the ability for AI agents to search across Shopify’s global product catalog, add items from multiple merchants to a Universal Cart, and trigger checkout flows with Checkout Kit.

For brands that want to stay visible as consumer behavior shifts to AI-first journeys, Agentic Storefronts is a strategic surface, not “just another channel.”

3. Rollouts & SimGym: experimentation with real and simulated shoppers

Winter ’26 also brings a new experimentation stack that lives inside Shopify, built around two pieces as Rollouts and Shopify SimGym.

• Rollouts: native A/B testing and staged launches Rollouts lets you schedule theme changes and run A/B tests on key storefront updates directly from the admin. You can plan launches ahead of time, compare variants, and ship the winner, all without relying on third-party tools or ad-hoc scripts.
• SimGym: AI shoppers that stress-test your store SimGym uses AI agents trained on billions of anonymized transactions to simulate shopper behavior before you go live. You can test scenarios like a new theme, a reworked navigation, or a different merchandising strategy and get early signals about friction points and conversion impact.

Together, Rollouts and SimGym allow eCommerce teams to move from “we think this will work” to data-driven releases, combining offline simulation with real A/B tests on production traffic.

4. Shopify Messaging & Shop Campaigns: owned marketing gets a central brain

On the marketing side, Winter ’26 turns Shopify Messaging plus Shop Campaigns into a more complete engine for owned media, especially for teams that want to consolidate email, SMS, and first-party data.

Highlights:

• Native SMS marketing inside Shopify Messaging: You can create, schedule, send, and track SMS campaigns directly in the Shopify Messaging app, alongside email. This includes a calendar view for planning and recommendations on what to send, when.
• Smarter segmentation and dynamic content: A refreshed segmentation template library, better search, and new options to segment customers by product categories they’ve viewed or purchased make it easier to target high-value audiences. Dynamic product sections in emails automatically pull in best sellers or specific collections.
• Shop Campaigns everywhere: Shop Campaigns now extend to the online store and new paid channels (including X, Snapchat and Bing), while still operating on a performance model, pay when customers convert.

For brands that want to reduce their dependency on third-party marketing stacks, these updates make it more realistic to run a performant, data-driven lifecycle program directly in Shopify.

5. B2B & Shopify Collective: a serious step toward global wholesale

For B2B merchants, Winter ’26 is one of the most meaningful Editions in years. Shopify is pushing hard on native wholesale, with a particular focus on Shopify Collective and payment options.

What stands out for B2B eCommerce:

• Shopify Collective goes global: Shopify Collective is now available in 35 additional countries, making it far easier to source and sell other Shopify brands directly from your admin. Retailers can import products faster and publish them across channels with fewer manual steps.
• More ways to get paid (and pay)
  • ACH payments for B2B at checkout (Plus, US-only), with the ability to charge saved bank accounts from the admin.
  • Payment requests per fulfillment, so you can charge per shipment on multi-fulfilment orders, critical for complex logistics.
  • Store credit for B2B and pickup in store for B2B customers, directly within native flows.
• Deeper ERP and EDI integrations: Pre-built connectors to NetSuite, Brightpearl, Fulfil, Sage, and Acumatica now sync companies, orders, and payment terms more reliably. EDI purchase orders from providers like Crstl and SPS Commerce can be synced into Shopify as draft orders.
• Horizon themes fully B2B-ready: All Horizon themes now support volume pricing, quantity rules, and quick order lists out of the box, reducing the need for custom theme work just to meet basic wholesale expectations.

For manufacturers, distributors, and complex B2B operations, this is a clear signal. Shopify wants to be a primary wholesale platform, not just a B2C base with B2B add-ons.

6. Agentic Commerce for developers: Catalog API, Checkout Kit, and Dev MCP

Behind the scenes, Winter ’26 introduces Agentic Commerce as a first-class way to build shopping experiences where AI agents can search, recommend, and check out products across the Shopify ecosystem.

Key building blocks:

• Shopify Catalog for all: Developers can use MCP servers or REST APIs to search billions of products across Shopify merchants, with standardized data structures that group duplicates under a unified product identifier.
• Universal Cart and Checkout Kit: AI agents can add items from multiple merchants to a Universal Cart and then launch a secure, branded Shopify checkout flow in a browser (or via SDKs for iOS, Android, and React Native) using Checkout Kit.
• Shopify Dev MCP & platform tooling: The Shopify Dev MCP server lets development teams use AI tools to browse docs, validate API calls in real time, and generate production-ready code, including for Hydrogen, Storefront API, POS extensions and more.
• Scripts officially sunset in favor of Functions: Shopify confirms that Shopify Functions will replace Scripts in June 2026, offering faster execution and better feature parity. Merchants on Scripts should start planning migrations now to avoid last-minute pressure.

For brands and ISVs working with Novatize, this opens the door to AI-driven shopping assistants, universal carts, and deeply customized logic, all while staying on supported, future-proof components of the platform.

What these updates mean for merchants

If Summer 2025 was about unifying channels and maturing B2B, Winter ’26 is about handing more of the work to AI while solidifying B2B as a core use case.

• For B2B and wholesale merchants, Shopify Collective’s expansion, ACH support, richer payment terms, and ERP/EDI integrations make it much easier to scale complex account-based sales globally, without leaving Shopify.
• For growth and marketing teams, Rollouts, SimGym, Shopify Messaging, and Shop Campaigns bring experimentation, segmentation, and owned media closer to where your data lives.
• For technical teams and partners, Agentic Commerce plus Dev MCP mark the beginning of a world where AI not only supports your store, but also powers the front-end shopping experience and the developer workflow itself.

At Novatize, we help merchants turn these releases into concrete gains as higher conversion rates, cleaner B2B workflows, more accurate data, and a roadmap that keeps you ahead of Shopify’s product curve.

Ready to explore what Shopify Winter ’26 could change for your eCommerce operations?

Pierre-Olivier Brassard

Vice President - Products and Technology, Partner

contact@novatize.com+1 844 932-6682

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