Shopify Editions
6 min readUpdated
Shopify's Fall '26 Edition, Exponential, for UK and Nordic brands: the updates worth acting on, the US-only features you can skip and where to start.
By Paal SobergFounder, Think Commerce
Shopify’s Fall ’26 Edition, branded “Exponential”, ships more than 150 updates. If you run a UK brand turning over £500k–£1.5m, about a dozen of them change how you trade over the next six months:
This post covers those updates, flags the US-only features you can skip and links to our deeper posts in the Fall ’26 series.
Shopify says more than 1 billion products in its catalogue can now be discovered across AI channels, and more than 400 million shoppers hold Shop Pay accounts (as of 30 September 2026, according to Shopify’s Fall ’26 Edition page). Fall ’26 pushes checkout into more of those chats: Google AI Mode and Gemini, plus Shop Pay inside third-party AI agents.
There’s a catch for UK brands. Google’s direct checkout currently requires you to sell to customers in the US, Canada or Australia. Your store can be based anywhere, but UK shoppers aren’t covered yet.
The groundwork applies to everyone, though. A new admin page shows whether your store qualifies for Shopify Catalog, and a knowledge base lets you approve the facts agents repeat about your policies and FAQs. Our guide to agentic commerce on Shopify explains how to get your products sold inside AI chats.
Shopify Protect brings Shopify’s fraud and dispute tools together. It declines near-certain fraud before payment is authorised, explains the risk on every order, drafts chargeback responses with AI and attaches carrier proof of delivery automatically. Shopify says it is live for every business on Shopify Payments, largely at no extra cost. We cover what to switch on, and when, in checkout, payments and fraud in Fall ’26.
Built-in custom fields for delivery instructions and gift messages remove the need for an app. Plus stores also get text, date, choice-list and checkbox fields. Payment methods move to a tiled layout and the form tightens up.
Shopify’s help centre is explicit that custom fields won’t be released before or during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), so plan them for the new year.
Rollouts bundle a theme change, a checkout configuration, catalogues and discounts into one scheduled launch, event or experiment. An event rolls back automatically when it ends, which suits a Black Friday sale that must disappear on time. A/B experiments need the Grow plan or higher.
Our checkout post includes a step-by-step plan for running your Black Friday sale as a rollout. For experiments, read our guide to A/B testing with Shopify Rollouts.
Sidekick can now plan several changes and apply them after one approval, write code, research the web, and test its own suggestions against simulated shoppers in SimGym. Shopify reports that daily Sidekick sessions have grown 4.2x year on year. Canvas, the new whole-store editor, is built around it, and Shopify says it takes a store from no theme to launch 20% faster. Read how to put Sidekick and Canvas to work without losing control.
Managed Markets adds all-in prices with guaranteed duties and taxes, plus flat-rate shipping. Shopify reports 50% higher international conversion for brands using it, on Shopify’s Fall ’26 Edition page.
Shipping profiles, return windows and cancellation rules can now be set per market. UK businesses can also buy DHL Express labels in the admin and ship to Royal Mail pickup locations.
If you’re opening a market in Norway, Sweden or Denmark, we run that as a fixed-price Nordic market launch.
Apps can no longer create or update script tags, and Shopify stops loading existing ones on 1 March 2027. App Store apps must switch to expiring access tokens before January 2027 to stay listed.
If your store relies on older apps, or on a custom app built a few years ago, audit it now.
Managed US sales tax, HSA and FSA payments, US-only payment approval improvements, Canadian carrier updates, Shop Pay Installments in Australia, and multi-currency payouts in Australia, France, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Several catalogue, Markets and discount features from Spring and Winter ’26 matter more now that Fall ’26 lets you set shipping and returns per market: variant-level publishing, discounts by market and 2,048 variants per product. Our round-ups of Shopify’s Spring 2026 Editions and Winter ’26, the RenAIssance Edition cover what else is still worth acting on.
Shop sign-in can now be added to stores that are not on Shopify, and Shop Pay is available to multi-entity businesses off the platform. That’s a useful halfway house, but most of this Edition only pays off on Shopify itself. If you’re on WooCommerce or Magento, see how we handle moving from WooCommerce to Shopify or migrating from Magento to Shopify Plus.
Want a second pair of eyes? Ask us for a Fall ’26 store review. We’ll go through which updates apply to your store and what to switch on first.
Shopify Editions
5 min read
Managed Markets flat rates, per-market shipping and returns, DHL Express labels and the EU withdrawal rule: what Fall '26 means for UK brands selling abroad.
Shopify Editions
5 min read
Shopify Protect is live, Rollouts can run your Black Friday sale, and checkout custom fields arrive after Cyber Monday. What to switch on, and in what order.
Shopify Editions
8 min read
Shopify's Spring 2026 Editions, feature by feature: agentic commerce, Campaign Autopilot, POS V11, Markets and discounts, and the five things to act on first.
