Shopify recently rolled out its Summer ’25 Editions, and there’s genuinely a lot here that could make your day-to-day easier and your store more effective.
What I love most is how Shopify is integrating AI in ways that actually help store owners tackle real tasks and make sense of sales data – which is honestly incredible if you’re someone who feels intimidated by all those numbers and analytics!
Here’s a straightforward breakdown of what’s new and why it matters for your business.
Meet Sidekick – your built-in AI Co-pilot
Sidekick has been around for a while, but it just got a serious upgrade that’s worth paying attention to.
What Sidekick actually does: It helps you understand what’s happening in your store by letting you ask real questions like “Why did sales dip last month?” Then it digs into your store data, marketing efforts, and customer behavior to give you useful insights and actionable recommendations.
Beyond just answering questions, it can take action too. Think building reports, setting up discount codes, filtering through orders, or creating customer segments – all the stuff that usually takes forever to figure out.
The best part? It works with natural language. You can literally type or speak your questions (in over 20 languages) and it responds while you’re looking at your screen together. Plus, it now includes image generation, so if you need a quick product banner, Sidekick can create visuals right inside Shopify.
Why this matters: For small stores, Sidekick is basically like having a strategist, analyst and assistant rolled into one – without the overhead.
Control your brand story with the new AI Knowledge Base app
The landscape is shifting when it comes to traditional SEO and what’s now being called AIO (AI optimisation). Shopify is getting ahead of this with their Knowledge Base app.
What the Knowledge Base app does: It helps you build a smart FAQ system for your store that auto-generates answers to policy questions like shipping or returns. The clever bit is that AI bots like ChatGPT can access these answers, and you get to refine them to match your voice.
This is about brand protection too – ensuring that when customers ask AI tools questions about your shop, they get the right information, not some generic or potentially wrong answer.
You also get insight into what customers are actually trying to find out, which helps you improve your website, SEO, and content strategy.
Why this matters: You stay in control of your messaging and make it infinitely easier for customers (and AI bots) to find what they need.
Horizon Theme – finally, more design freedom
As a Shopify designer, I’m genuinely excited about this one.
Horizon is Shopify’s new free theme framework, and it offers so much more design flexibility compared to Dawn, the previous standard theme.
Here’s what this means practically: if you’re just starting out, you probably don’t need to invest in one of those premium themes that cost $300+ because Horizon feels more like a premium theme with even greater flexibility built in.
It also includes a new AI block generator that creates theme blocks or banners just by describing what you want. Fair warning though – it’s still experimental, so don’t expect perfection just yet.
The Real Impact
This update genuinely brings enterprise-level tools into the hands of small, independent businesses without the usual learning curve or complexity that normally comes with powerful features.
This is exactly why I love working with Shopify – the platform keeps innovating in ways that actually matter for real businesses, and I’m excited to see where they take things next.
—Megan at Nutmeg Studio
Building Shopify websites that sell beautifully & strategically
