Shopify Editions Summer 2025: Essential Updates for Ecommerce Managers

Shopify’s Summer 2025 Edition introduces significant advancements aimed at enhancing store design flexibility, streamlining theme customization, and empowering developers with improved tools. For ecommerce managers overseeing complex operations, these updates offer actionable opportunities to optimize workflows and drive growth.

Horizon Design System: A New Era of Theme Customization

At the forefront of this release is the Horizon design system, Shopify’s new foundation for theme development. Horizon introduces a suite of 10 new themes, each optimized for conversion and designed with flexibility in mind. These themes leverage the power of theme blocks, allowing for extensive customization without the need for extensive coding.

The enhanced theme editor within Horizon offers a more intuitive experience, featuring hover-to-preview in the block picker, categorized blocks and sections, AI-generated blocks, one-click text editing, and a simplified sidebar with conditional settings. These improvements enable ecommerce managers to stay in the creative flow, making real-time adjustments to their storefronts with ease.

AI-Driven Theme Generation and Block Creation

Building upon the Horizon system, Shopify now offers AI-powered tools that allow merchants to generate custom theme blocks and entire themes by simply describing their brand or desired functionality.

This capability accelerates the design process, enabling rapid prototyping and deployment of new storefronts tailored to specific campaigns or product lines.

A Smarter Sidekick 

There are multiple updates to Sidekick, the AI-enabled commerce assistant. Shopify’s team has made Sidekick more capable of providing data-driven strategies. It can now support 20 languages. Users can even generate visuals within Sidekick with just a few keywords. And to make it even easier for users on the go, you can access Sidekick in the Shopify mobile app and also speak to it through voice chat.

Enhanced Developer Tools for Greater Flexibility

For developers, Shopify has introduced a range of tools aimed at improving the development workflow. These include the ability to copy and paste blocks and sections, assign custom names to blocks and sections, and utilize right-click shortcuts for faster navigation. This update also mentions developers can create “extensions end-to-end without having to deploy, build on localhost without annoying tunnels, test in dev stores that simulate each Shopify plan, and pair with our Assistant via MCP.” These enhancements streamline the development process, allowing for more efficient customization and maintenance of storefronts.

Enhanced Marketing

Shopify has released many new marketing updates in this round including the ability to create one discount that can be used across products, orders, and shipping.

There are also now pre-built segmentation templates to make it easier to quickly target customers based on characteristics like purchase history and location.

There is now the ability to stop campaign sends mid-send. This is useful if your team notices a mistake like a typo or broken link after sending. Additionally, you can now remind customers of their store credit balance in marketing emails or on-site.

Another useful feature is the ability to issue refunds as store credit, rather than just back to the original payment method.

Speedier Checkout & Flat Rates

Shopify has made their checkout load even faster: almost a full 2 seconds faster! That’s a big deal when it comes to converting customers. A slow checkout means friction which leads to frustrated customers leaving their order behind. And further reducing friction, stores can now offer Apple Pay as a payment method, rather as an Express Checkout option.

Merchants can now also charge a single flat rate for fulfilling orders from multiple locations. One less pain point stopping customers from their purchase.

And lastly, among other updates, Shopify Payments will use an AI-powered fraud model to reduce chargebacks and automatically authenticate risky transactions.

Action Steps for Ecommerce Managers

Given these updates, ecommerce managers should consider the following actions:

• Explore the Horizon Themes: Evaluate the new Horizon themes to determine which best aligns with your brand’s aesthetic and functional requirements.
• Leverage AI Tools: Utilize the AI-powered theme and block generation tools to expedite the design and deployment of new storefronts or landing pages.
• Collaborate with Developers: Work closely with your development team to implement the new tools and features, ensuring a seamless integration into your existing workflows.
• Update Checkout: Utilize the ability to offer Apple Pay as a payment method.

By embracing the Horizon design system and the accompanying tools, you can enhance your store’s visual appeal, improve user experience, and streamline the development process, positioning your brand for continued growth on Shopify.