Shopify Horizon arrives, the new design standard for online stores driven by AI

Shopify presents Editions Summer 2025, the seventh installment of its semi-annual updates package. In this edition, the platform introduces more than 150 updates in design, payments, point of sale, and AI, with the purpose of continually assisting merchants in boosting their businesses.

Among the main new features in Editions Summer 2025, Horizon stands out especially, an AI-powered design tool that redefines the way to create attractive online storefronts, eliminating the need to write code.

Paolo Picazio, Head of Iberia Partnerships at Shopify, stated: “In a context where consumer preferences, technologies, and regulations are constantly evolving, innovating in commerce is no longer a choice: it is a necessity. Each edition of Editions represents a further step in building an increasingly powerful and user-friendly platform. Horizon and the more than 150 new updates are designed to help Spanish businesses – from SMEs to large corporations – to grow, streamline, and remain competitive in a rapidly changing market.”

Main Features of Shopify Editions Summer 2025

Horizon

This new solution offers 10 customizable templates from which to define your own store design. By integrating AI block generation capabilities, companies can create sections easily through prompts.

Some of its most notable features are:

• Copy and paste blocks between sections: offers greater control over design and provides more flexibility.
• Drag and drop components without losing settings: so that configurations remain intact.
• Preview of blocks: displayed before adding them, ensuring better management and avoiding errors.
• AI Store Builder: allows the creation of three store proposals with just a few words. Currently available only in English.

Shopify POS v10

The company has also announced the new version of its Shopify POS app, which includes enhancements in navigation, search, and sales process. This application is a point-of-sale system aimed at facilitating the integration between the physical and online stores.

Some new features integrated into POS v10 are:

• Ship and Carry Out: allows combining in-store pickup and shipping in the same order.
• Customizable customer display with logo, colors, and brand background.
• Greater visual consistency between physical and online stores.

Shopify Payments

The Shopify Payments solution, which facilitates merchants in accepting payments online and in-store, has just expanded to 15 new European countries. Additionally, it has introduced the following options:

• Payments in more than 130 currencies and settlement in 8 currencies.
• Selling from multiple entities globally through a single control panel: in this way, merchants can unify online and offline operations through a single administrator with Shopify Payments’ multi-entity management. This offers advantages such as:
  • Operating online and offline entities worldwide from a single store.
  • Conducting national and international transactions from a single store, avoiding international commissions, currency exchange, duplicate applications, and multiple integrations associated with additional stores.
  • Easily attributing orders to the entities and generating optimized reports that reduce the administrative burden on financial teams.

Sidekick

Since its launch in 2023, Sidekick, Shopify’s AI assistant, has not stopped evolving. Now, this digital work companion will do much more than answer questions, as it can suggest solutions, execute complex tasks, and guide you via voice or screen sharing. The new features of Sidekick are:

• Voice chat and guided navigation through the interface.
• Generation of images from scratch for campaigns or products.

Klavs Steenhof, Digital Area Director at the INTERSPORT Group, comments on Sidekick: “In our initial trial, Sidekick proved to be extraordinarily effective in inventory management, identifying the exact restocking priorities that our purchasing team would have chosen. The businesses that will thrive are those that adopt AI in all their operations, and Shopify, by enabling this so seamlessly, means that we can focus on what matters most: growing our business.”

“Storefront MCP”

The “Storefront MCP” or “MCP Storefront” of Shopify is an ecosystem that allows developers to create AI agents to act as reliable shopping assistants. To achieve this, they rely on the “Model Context Protocol” (MCP) by Anthropic.

For configuring AI shopping agents, developers can access the product catalog and store information to facilitate searches and purchases. Thanks to this, consumers can enjoy a seamless shopping experience without having to leave their AI conversation.

The main contributions include:

• Searching product catalogs and managing shopping carts.
• Integration of customer accounts for searching and managing orders.
• Real-time access to accurate store information and policies.

Image: Shopify