What makes Shopify more than software: Fall '26 Edition

A merchant opening their first store today inherits everything Shopify has learned from millions of businesses before them: how to stop a fraudulent order before it ships, which ads bring in a first customer, how to recognize a regular who's never left an email at the register, and countless other insights. Some of that would take years of effort to learn alone, and other learnings would be impossible to match without Shopify's scale. Every business on Shopify, whether it grew into a household name or stayed small on purpose, adds to that network. Shopify is always finding new ways to turn that scale into something useful for every merchant, and that collective wisdom is the idea behind the Fall '26 Edition. 

“With all the leverage the network gives them, people can start a business faster and more easily. That includes a portion of the world that maybe didn't think entrepreneurship was for them,” says Vanessa Lee, Shopify's VP of Product, who leads the product teams behind each Edition. “I believe there will be more people trying to build businesses in the next five years than there were in the last 15.”

Below, Vanessa explains what this Edition means for anyone who shops, sells, or builds on Shopify. For the full list of updates, read the merchant and developer Edition highlights.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

AI dominates most conversations about commerce right now. Where does it fit in Shopify's story?

AI is just a piece of it. We represent the knowledge and collective wisdom of millions of businesses across hundreds of verticals and thousands of geographies that have started, learned, kept going, and succeeded. 

So this is more about how we're leveraging that to help users. How are we leveraging the network of merchants to help merchants? There's always going to be an element of AI in that, but AI accelerates what has already been happening.

This Edition focuses on the power of Shopify’s network. What does that network mean to you?

Every merchant that joins Shopify benefits from every other merchant that has ever been on Shopify.

In other words, the more merchants there are, the better Shopify gets for everyone. The better Shopify gets, the more merchants come on board. Then that flywheel keeps accelerating, and that's exponential.

How does this show up for merchants day to day?

Shop Pay, Shopify's accelerated checkout that saves a shopper's payment and shipping details, is one example. Because I've shopped at other Shopify merchants, I can land on your store for the first time and Shopify recognizes me and I can checkout in one click. I benefit because I can checkout faster and the merchant benefits with the highest conversion possible. We've had that network effect for years. It's not new. 

Now we’re expanding this for retail. Shopify POS can now recognize more in-store customers. When a shopper taps their card to pay, POS can recognize them through Shopify’s network of hundreds of millions of shoppers who’ve checked out from stores powered by Shopify Payments. So even if it’s my first time shopping at your retail store, if I have shopped with another Shopify merchant in the past, POS will know me and give me the option to share my information and get a digital receipt by email, SMS or to the Shop app. If I choose one of those options, my purchase gets matched to a customer profile and the merchant gets my contact info. No awkward interactions where I need to spell out my email address. 

And if I choose to get a receipt through the Shop app, all my future purchases at Shopify merchants will automatically have my receipts sent there, making my life easier with a central place to find and manage my purchases. Knowing who's shopping in-store lets a merchant personalize the experience, market to them, and give them a reason to return. They can see their repeat customers across online and in-store, and invest in their lifetime value. And our data shows that a known in-store customer has an over 60% higher lifetime value that one you don’t know.

What can a merchant get on Shopify that even the biggest brand couldn't build alone?

Our buyer network is so vast. We understand who shoppers are and what they've bought, on your surface and on other surfaces. We’re able to do that in a way that still protects merchant privacy and buyer privacy.

Even the largest retailers in the world don't have a complete picture of a shopper's buying behavior across millions of stores. Shoppers buy gifts over here, their everyday goods over here, their housewares over here and their clothing over here. Our buyer profiles are so rich, and honestly, no one else has them at that same breadth.

Inbox is one place where we put that to work. It's the chat on a merchant's storefront, where shoppers can ask questions and get recommendations. When shoppers sign in with Shop, Inbox recognizes them and personalizes those recommendations, which helps you sell more intelligently on your storefront. Buyers recognized by Shop convert better in Shopify Inbox chats.

Fraud protection is interesting, too. With Shopify Protect, you can now see a clear view of the fraud being prevented across your store right from within your admin. We can recognize when the same card or address is used at different stores on Shopify, helping us spot fraud patterns across the network. So if they've attacked one store and go to another, we can deny them.

Disputes are similar. Merchants usually have to go fight with banks and credit card companies over customers saying, “You didn't deliver my package.” We're using AI to make that process way easier. We can see when the package was delivered and we put it in the format the credit card company needs, so merchants can win more disputes. Merchants have seen up to 1.6x higher dispute win rates by category.

For years, most shoppers knew Shopify as the purple Shop Pay button at checkout. Now there's Shop.com and Shop Pay inside AI agents. What changes for merchants as more buyers know Shopify directly?

Ultimately, merchants get more leverage. Even though we're building experiences for buyers, we always have our merchants' backs, and that guides how we design features like Shop Campaigns.

As we reach more consumers, that leverage grows, and it becomes more valuable for merchants. That's the goal with Shop.com, Shop Pay, Shop.md, and Shop sign-in: build amazing consumer experiences, then turn that into what merchants need, like reaching new customers.

Merchants are now selling inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Muse, and other personal agents. Some worry about losing the customer relationship. If someone buys a sweater through ChatGPT, is the merchant losing something?

No. The order is still the merchant's. The customer relationship is still the merchant's. That's very important for us to protect.

Any order that comes through an AI channel lands in the merchant's admin with the customer's name, email, and shipping details, just like any other sale. The customer isn't an anonymous user or a hidden email. Shop sign-in takes this further: when a buyer connects their Shop account, merchants get a returning customer with purchase history and preferences, not just a first-time order.

What's become clearer to you about agentic commerce over the past year?

For buyers, checkout is important, but not nearly as important as discovery. Getting rid of latency in the final purchase is a really important thing, but discovery is the bulk of what people want when they're shopping agentically.

They're shopping that way because they're not window shopping. They're doing a pointed search for a particular kind of product and know what they're looking for. This is not perusing Instagram to get inspired. This is hunting. When that happens, discovering something I wouldn't be able to find without tons of effort is where the magic happens for agentic shopping.

For merchants using any agentic channel, if you can nail that, you're eons ahead. Users will choose your product over others. A seamless checkout experience is important, but it never supersedes discovery. No consumer wants to use an agentic channel with a really fast, easy checkout that doesn't help them find the product. 

For a developer deciding where to spend the next six months, what's the opportunity on Shopify that doesn't exist anywhere else?

Hands down, building for Catalog. You can search over a billion products from Shopify merchants, with current prices and inventory, and now products from brands that don't sell on Shopify, too. When a shopper signs in with Shop, the results are personalized to them, and no other API can do that. And through shop.dev you get Shop Pay, so shoppers can check out right inside your app or agent without you building a checkout.

The second, very close behind, is building something with enduring network effects: any product or service that connects to a real-world scenario. Reviews are one category. You actually have to get reviews verified, and there's a whole verification system in order to be compliant. Compliance is still really hard to vibe-code your way through. So if you can create a product or service that helps a merchant with some sort of compliance or physical problem, and integrate it into Shopify, that's still probably the largest opportunity right now if you want to build for merchants.

AI innovation is moving at a dizzying pace. What should merchants, especially smaller ones, understand the most? 

You're still in the control seat. You're still able to express your brand and your identity, but you can do it a lot more efficiently.

You see this with Campaign Autopilot. It uses the collective wisdom of Shopify, from seeing thousands of merchants place ads, to understand how to place better ads and get your first order out the door. In this Edition, we rolled out Autopilot to every merchant on Shopify, added more channel integrations and unlocked support for SEO, so that it can help merchants of all sizes automate more of their marketing. Merchants set their budget, approve anything before it goes live, and can adjust anytime.

If I look at all the features we've built that a small business will want, we're taking all of these advantages that come from being with Shopify and trying to make them accessible. 

Canvas is a good example of that. It puts Sidekick and visual editing right into your admin, so you don't need to learn new tools. You can bring your vision to life and get your product and your story out there as easily as possible. Then you can focus on the high-leverage things only you can do.

Five years from now, what will merchants take for granted that feels remarkable today?

Probably the fact that Sidekick can identify areas of your business that are broken, suggest changes and help make them for you. You can ask Sidekick to do something, or Sidekick can tell you that something is wrong with your store. 

That feels magical. That would have taken time, energy and money in the past. Being able to completely change your store in an hour, by just talking to Sidekick, is going to feel very normal soon. But right now, it's still magical.