Shopify Winter Edition 2026 has just been released, featuring over 150 updates. Now, I’m not exaggerating, but this would have to be one of the most important updates. Releases that Shopify has ever done in its entire history, because Shopify is evolving. It’s not just a website; you build a storefront anymore. This is the moment that AI and commerce finally come together. But I’m not just talking about a little helpful chatbot that sits on the side and tells you how to run your store. I’m talking about real-time integration. Of your products from your Shopify store directly into ChatGPT, so people can buy them within ChatGPT without even needing to go to your website. This is the continuation of a seismic shift we’re now seeing in e-commerce, where your storefront isn’t as important as it once was.
People are buying directly on the platforms they spend the most time on, such as TikTok Shop. That is one of the fastest-growing platforms. And people don’t even go to an e-commerce website. They buy directly through TikTok. This is what we’re going to be seeing. Inside ChatGPT in the coming months. And this is the update that enables you to do it on your store. So I’ve spent the last six hours going through every one of those 150 updates. And I’ve picked out my top six updates. I’ve tested them in my admin. I’ve played around with them. I’ve got to understand exactly what they do. And I’m going to take you through them right now. If we’re meeting for the first time, my name is Brendan.
And I’ve been growing e-commerce businesses for the last 15 years. And every week, I put out a new video that teaches people how to grow e-commerce stores. So whether you’re going from side hustle to full-time or… Whether you’re going from full-time and you’re looking to scale, I’ve got a video that’s right for you. But you know what’s interesting? I have over 45,000 subscribers on this channel, and 70% of the people who watch my videos aren’t subscribed. So if you’re one of the 70%, why not become one of the 30% and subscribe to this channel? You’ll get notified every time I put out a new tutorial. List of all the updates that have been released in this edition— you need to head to the Shopify Winter Editions landing page.
It looks like this: it’s called the Renaissance Update. If you hover over the word Renaissance, you’ll see it highlight the letters AI. Now, there are so many updates in here, but really, the undertone of them all is how embedded AI is. Into Shopify now, so I’m going to take you through my top six updates that are in this edition that you need to know about, and every one of them has to do with AI. The last one we’ve been waiting for this a while, and it is the biggest game-changer to come out since ChatGPT was released. Now, if we scroll down, the first thing you’re going to see is this guy. Here, and this is Sidekick.
Now, if you’re new to Sidekick, think of it as a combination of ChatGPT and Shopify. They got married, they had a baby, and they named it Sidekick. That’s exactly what it is. It’s basically Shopify’s version of ChachiBT, but it doesn’t know everything ChachiBT does. It knows everything about your business. It knows everything about Shopify. And it’s like having an expert-level e-commerce Shopify AI agent at your beck and call whenever you need it. And I’ve got a few use cases that we’re going to demo today that you’re going to be like, ‘How did I live without this?’ Right? Now, let’s move into my first update you need to know about: it’s called Sidekick Pulse.
Sidekick Pulse is an AI that continually monitors your store, identifying opportunities and offering suggestions to improve it. So think about it like you’ve got an AI army of e-commerce experts that are looking at your store every single second of the day. And they’re looking for little nuances. They’re looking at your traffic. They’re looking at what you’re selling. And they’re continually providing you with ways that you can improve your business. And they’re going to come up in little recommendations like this. You’ll determine whether you need to run B testing, set up different landing pages, or learn how to launch email marketing campaigns. We’ll look at your data, identify what you’re not doing, and give you recommendations on what you need to do.
Now, this is going to be a lot better than the AI recommendations we’ve seen on other platforms because it knows your data and exactly what you want to do. When you’re given access to this, you’ll get a little card in your Shopify dashboard that lets you enable Pulse, and then you can look at all those recommendations. As of this recording, all 100 stores I’ve looked at don’t have it yet. So it’s rolling, anyone? I’ll fully get it next time. Be surenext update. Next, be sure to comment below. If you’ve got it, and what you’re thinking about it.
Now, for this second update, I’m gonna demonstrate this live in my store to give you an example of how powerful it really is. So we’re gonna head over to my store. We’re gonna click the little sidekick icon here, and I’m gonna expand it so I can have a really good chat with it. We regenerate an image directly in Shopify using my product photos and place it in an AI-generated environment. But it looks so real, you can’t tell the difference. Let me show you how we do that. So we’re gonna click in here. I’m gonna say ‘generate me an image for my product I’m gonna click the at symbol. I’m gonna tag my product, ‘liquid instant coffee,’ okay.
We’ll choose that one and put it in a Christmas… scene with marshmallows. Okay. Let’s see what happens. Right. So I’ve been tagging my product, giving it some insights, and it’s going to generate this for me. Okay. So it’s telling me exactly what it’s doing. I’ll generate the festive Christmas scene featuring your liquid instant coffee. This is wild because the way I used to do this was I’d go over to NanoBanana, or I’d go into Chachupati and Sora. I’d have to upload my product image. I’d then have to prompt it and put it together. Export it, then upload it to Shopify. And they used to take like half an hour to an hour. I’ve now been able to do this directly in Shopify.
Let’s see what this does—take a few minutes. Look at that. Not only did it put the product in there perfectly, but it also put it in a mug with marshmallows and a little Christmas scene in the background, right? And I can click ‘Save’ to files, and I can use it directly in my theme editor, right? So I click ‘Save’ to files here. I can now go over to my theme editor. Right? I can edit my theme. And I could go in and change this image here. Right. Select from the library. And that image is right there. Nuts, right? That took me less than three minutes to do, and it looks real. You can’t tell it’s AI-generated, and it’s absolutely wild. All right, let’s move on to update number three.
Demo this one as well, but let’s have a quick look at the additions website to show you what it is. So it’s this one here, called ‘voice-powered mobile chat’. Currently, in Sidekick, we’d have to type in the chat to have a conversation with it. But everyone knows how slow typing is these days. And wouldn’t it be great if you could talk to Sidekick with your voice and have it respond? So you can do that now, but you do it on your mobile app. So you open up the Shopify app. And I’m going to grab it now, talk it out, and ask it some questions. Hey, Brendan. Great to connect with you.
How can I help you with your store today? Please tell me which was my best-selling product over the last 30 days. Let me find that out for you. Over the last 30 days, your best-selling product was Liquid Instant Coffee, with total sales of $12,379. 06. Anything else you’d like to explore around this product? Yeah, sure. Please tell me which traffic source generated those sales. Let’s take a look at which traffic source drove the most sales for that product—one moment. The top traffic source for sales of liquid instant coffee over the last 30 days was social. bringing in $6,546. 27 in sales. That’s the leading traffic driver for this product. Anything else you’d like to dive into?
That’s pretty wild. I can have a conversation with Sidekick there. But the other cool thing is that he actually starts remembering your conversations, so if I go back into Sidekick and start a new conversation. Good morning. Brendan? Great to be chatting with you. We’ve already discovered that your Liquid Instant Coffee is the top seller and that social traffic is driving those sales. What would you like to dive into next? So that’s pretty wild. Not only can it tell you what data it has, but it also remembers what you’re talking about, and you can continue conversations with it. Now, he said good morning. It’s the evening here. So I don’t know which country. He thinks he’s in, but it’s pretty cool. You can have human-level conversations and receive human-level explanations from Sidekick itself.
So, update number four continues AI integration with Shopify. This time, it brings in something called vibe coding. Now, if you don’t know what vibe coding is, it’s basically prompting, but instead of generating text, it generates code. And that means you can build any website, any app, anything you can imagine, just by writing out a prompt. So that is now built directly into Shopify, and you can vibe code your own apps. So let me show you what I mean here. You can go into Sidekick and have it build an app for you. So here’s one: create an app that checks returns and cancellations. Create an app that does event preparation and generates discounted checkout links. Create a bulk B2B app. Create a task tracker.
Create an app that recommends products. You can create anything. I’m thinking about creating an app that matches our batch numbers to the bottles tagged on the back of an order, so we know exactly which bottle from which batch goes to which customer. Typically, we’d have to go to the app store and find an app that gets you 80% of the way there, but 20% isn’t very good. Now you can build your own internal apps for internal requirements directly in Shopify. Now, you can publish these on the app store and make money from them, but you can definitely build them internally within your business and do the stuff you’ve wanted to do.
Now, in one of my Shopify videos, I talked about Sidekick. You’ll see it here. And we talk about how you can code directly. You can code sections into themes. You can ask it and prompt it, and it does all the back-end coding for you. But this takes it to another level, and it doesn’t just handle theme design and theme coding. It creates apps for you. Your imagination is the only thing holding you back for this update. Now, before we move on to update number five and update number six, which is Crazy Town, I want to take you through… You could look through these updates and get ideas for yourself. Over on the left, you’re going to see you’ve got, uh, the different types of updates that we have here.
So what I’d recommend is that you spend some time reading through it and trying to understand, you know, anything that might apply to your business. Because there are so many here, some might be really specific to your requirements. But the way the additions work is that Shopify, you know, takes feedback from people over the last six months, implements it, and adds features to the store. So often when you’ve been using a store, and you’re like, ‘I wish Shopify…’ I usually do that in one of these editions; they do it. So please go through and read everything, because each of these is a different sort of update, and each is assigned a help doc.
So you click the help doc, read through it, and it tells you how it works, right? As you get better and better at Shopify, you want to get better and better at reading these help docs, understanding the insights, and staying up to date on updates. And really making use of the platform. Most people I work with in our elite and mentoring programs are only using like 10% of Shopify, where there’s a whole beast of things you could do that make… Your lives will be easier, all right. Let’s move into update number five: we can use AI for repeatable skills, and we can also use different resources within our shop dashboard. Okay, so let’s get back to our store.
We will open a new Sidekick chat and expand it. What you’re going to see here is— you’re going to see this little plus icon here. Now, this plus icon means you can use different resources in the chat. If you’ve been using ChatGPT, you can see that you can upload files and do lots of things. You can now do it directly in Sidekick. You can upload files, target different parts of the store, mention things just like I did with that product mention, and create these things called skills. So skills are basically predefined prompts that you can use repetitively, right? So let’s say we want to create a skill. And this skill will be called ‘Best Seller Seven Days’.
So, we can predefine a prompt. We’ll call this skill ‘Best Seller’. Cool? And then, basically, what we’re doing here is pre-writing the prompt we want to use when we do this skill. So give me a… list of the best selling products over the Last. 30 days and tell me. How many units? I have sold. So we can use this for repeatable prompts. We click save. And then, when we want to use this prompt, all we need to do is type a forward slash and write the prompt. Click there, then click go. So this is a reusable skill. It’s really awesome. So now it’s going through, and it’s doing it for us. Awesome.
So you can see it’s given the results. I’m blurring my numbers so you don’t see them. But overall, like it’s… done a quick thing. So every week I can pop in and do this. So this is great for reporting. You can basically do any prompt you can think of. So you want to use this plus icon and find out what. Other little resources they have there, this target one is awesome. So you can choose ‘target,’ and it says, ‘select something.’ We could select anything here and use that as our resource. So we could click ‘discounts’ here, and we could say, ‘how can I create Uh, BOGO.
And in theory, it should link to that thing and tell us all about it, right? And you can see it’s pulling in the data. It is basically just doing everything you can. Think of it as ridiculously smart, as I said. ChatGPT Shopify had a baby, and its name is Sidekick. But if you’re excited by that, then Update Number Five is the thing that changes the game entirely. It is one of those updates. It’s basically like when Shopify launched and changed everything about e-commerce, this one update is going to change everything about not only how you market your business, but how people shop and buy products from you using AI. That takes us to this update, called Agentic. So please picture this.
12 months ago, maybe 18 months ago, when you needed something, you would go to Google or another search engine and type in a query. ‘Where to buy this thing,’ right? There’s been a pragmatic shift in the way people use the internet, and now they go to ChatGPT and they type in, ‘What’s the best thing,’ ‘What’s the best coffee,’ ‘What’s the best trainer,’ ‘What’s the best hat and they do it in ChatGPT and then ChatGPT gives a lot of recommendations. Now the problem is, they click, then you go to the website, and then you buy. But imagine you could click ‘buy’ within ChatGPT. And not only that, they could buy your product in ChatGPT. That’s what Shopify is now enabling, which they’re calling agentic storefronts.
And I want to take you through how it works. I’m going to show you how to set it up so that, when it’s released, you’ll have the best chance of being suggested by ChatGPT. So, agentic storefronts are this here. It can sell directly in AI chats with built-in tools. So it’s going to integrate Shopify with ChatGPT. People won’t even have to leave ChatGPT to make a purchase. And that purchase goes directly into your Shopify store, just like that. This. So there’s a little video here. You can watch the video in your own time. Someone places an order, goes into Shopify, dispatches it out, and they don’t even leave ChatGPT. You get the money. Everybody is happy. It’s super wild.
To set this up, we need to prepare your storefront. I’ll show you what you need to do. Go back to your store. You should go to the app store and search for an app called ‘Knowledge Base’. I’ve already installed it here in my store, but you need to install this app because it’s where we fill out all the information about our store that will now feed ChatGPT. Not only will it feed ChatGPT, but it’ll also feed your own AI inside Shopify. So that’s going to help with places like Shopify Inbox and Messenger, and all the things it needs to know. This will create technical schema markup in AI language so that when it scans your store, it knows exactly the language it’s speaking.
So when you get started, it will scan your store. You store and pull in all the information here. But please start adding things to this knowledge base, because it will help you get found in ChatGPT. So that when the storefront is enabled, we’re good to go. But to sell directly online, you’ll need to enable it. Now, enabling isn’t ready yet. You need to get notified when it’s ready. So please go back to the Winter Editions page and click this Get Notified button right here. We open that, and then I want you to put in your email address. Once you enter your email address, click Submit. As soon as agentic storefronts are live, you’ll know, and your store will be set up perfectly. Now that you’ve been so hyped about AI and Shopify, you’re going to go in and start playing with it and seeing what it can do. But before you go and do that, I’ve created a video on exactly how to use Shopify Sidekick on your store to get the absolute most out of it. And here is the video; I suggest you watch it.
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