Shopify Unveils Over 150 Enhancements in Summer '25, Boosting Merchants with Artificial Intelligence, Design Freedom, and Global Resources
Shopify has unveiled its Summer '25 Edition, delivering a significant overhaul to its platform with a focus on enhancing storefront design, the POS system, and global commerce capabilities. The updates aim to provide more flexibility, AI-powered automation, and international capabilities to online businesses.
Storefront Design: A New Era of Customization
The new Horizons theme architecture, with 10 fully customizable themes, is at the heart of the storefront design enhancements. The smarter editor offers merchants the ability to create branded experiences faster while retaining full design control. New theme options such as Flex Sections and Reusable Blocks enhance layout flexibility.
Moreover, Shopify's AI Store Builder can automate and speed up storefront creation with AI assistance. The integrated AI Store Builder can generate full designs based on a simple brand description. Horizon, the brand-new theme foundation, allows merchants to quickly translate their store vision into reality without needing to code.
A Modernized POS System
Shopify POS has received a major refresh, aiming to improve speed, user experience, and brand customization. The updated POS system, now at version 10, advances to better support omnichannel retail operations, integrating more tightly with updates to checkout and inventory systems.
The redesigned interface includes a new "Ship and carry out" feature, smarter navigation, and Tap to Pay capabilities that turn phones into payment terminals. The Shopify POS system's redesign also allows sellers to customize how AI assistants present their products and brand messaging during buyer interactions through the Knowledge Base app.
Global Commerce: Simplifying International Selling
Several new features streamline global selling and commerce workflows. Unified Listings allow merchants to manage product listings across multiple marketplaces and social platforms from a single interface, ensuring consistency and easier global inventory control. Combined Listings for Global Sellers further support international selling by consolidating product data across channels.
The one-page checkout has evolved into a more flexible, infrastructure-ready system supporting cross-border drops, product bundles, and advanced commerce models. Tax and Duty Customization for B2B Markets enables Shopify Plus merchants to display taxes and duties dynamically by region and customize pricing/display for B2B and B2C customers separately, aiding compliance and localization for cross-border transactions.
AI Integration: The AI-Powered Sidekick
The AI-Powered Sidekick acts as a digital assistant to merchants, automating tasks such as product listing optimization, inventory management, customer service, and strategy recommendations using machine learning tailored to the merchant’s store data. The Sidekick AI assistant has received significant upgrades, now supporting voice chat, screen sharing, and multilingual interactions in 20 languages.
Other improvements include a rebuilt checkout with extensibility, native subscription support, enhanced fraud protection, smart discount combinations, and image optimization with AVIF format.
Overall, Shopify Summer ’25 delivers a more unified, intelligent, and global commerce platform with advanced tools for designing storefronts, managing retail POS, and expanding international reach. The Shopify Shop app has also been upgraded to deliver a more dynamic and personalized shopping experience, featuring real-time recommendations, collection creation, and visual product swatches.
Merchants with international operations can now manage multiple business entities from a single admin, consolidating reporting and operations across legal structures and regions. The Shopify POS system's redesigned interface includes a new "Ship and carry out" feature. The Shopify Shop app now allows users to create and share collections.
Shopify Payments has expanded to Mexico and 15 new European markets, and now supports multi-currency payouts in over 130 currencies. Preston Arroyo, retail tech manager at Tecovas, plans to deploy the refreshed Shopify POS system to 14 stores this year. Ben Attwood, founder of Clubhouse Skin, stated that Horizon could have saved him £5000-7000 in external support costs for launching his store.
- The AI Store Builder, an integrated feature within Shopify, can now generate full designs for small-business owners based on a simple brand description, utilizing AI assistance to speed up the process of creating storefronts in the technology-driven small-business domain.
- Shopify Plus merchants, particularly those involved in international finance, can now display taxes and duties dynamically by region, customize pricing and display for both B2B and B2C customers separately, and comply with local regulations more easily thanks to the Tax and Duty Customization feature in the Global Commerce update.
