Shopify Japan Co., Ltd., the Japanese subsidiary of Shopify, a leader in global commerce, is pleased to announce its latest update for summer 2025, “Summer ’25 Edition – Horizons.”
This Summer ’25 Edition is an update across the entire Shopify platform, centered on the new AI-powered store design platform “Horizon,” and provides a more efficient and intuitive new-age commerce experience through over 150 new features and improvements. This will reshape the shopping experience, including how to build a high-conversion store and the process consumers go through to discover products. Horizon, which combines beautiful design and AI capabilities, is the core of the update, and enables businesses to build attractive, high-conversion stores without the need for coding.
Sean Broughton, Managing Director, APAC, Shopify, commented on the announcement:
“Today’s merchants need tools that are as flexible and intuitive as the efforts they make. This Edition is a big step forward in helping merchants spend less time on technology and more time on building their brand. These updates further improve operational efficiency and customer engagement, paving the way for what we call ‘declarative commerce,’ a world where merchants simply ‘declare’ their goals and the best means are determined. This major change will allow merchants to focus on innovation and strategic growth, rather than time-consuming tasks.”
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Shopify’s new theme platform, Horizon, unlocks design freedom
This edition sets a new standard in online store design through its flexible theme platform, Horizon. Horizon combines AI-powered, best-in-class UX and a fully customizable layout system to create high-converting stores, no coding required.
10 High-Converting Presets: Horizon offers 10 beautifully designed presets to jump-start your online brand. Each preset is designed with conversion in mind, with clear, engaging sections, intuitive product search, full-screen hero banners, powerful collection and product pages, optimized carts and more to guide your customers towards a purchase.
New Theme Blocks: A new feature to customize your store. You can freely move elements on your pages or copy and paste blocks to place them under different parents or sections. There are 30+ block presets that you can preview before adding, making the customization process much more efficient.
AI-Block Generation: Horizon includes an AI-powered block generation feature that allows you to automatically generate new content blocks and layouts using AI in the theme editor. Layout suggestions optimized for your design goals are instantly presented, allowing you to build high-performing pages in no time
Launch your store faster with AI Store Builder
Whether you’re building your first online store or are already an established business, AI Store Builder lets you enter just a few keywords to generate three unique store designs that you can then start customizing right away.
Create your store in seconds: Just enter a few keywords and three store layouts, including images and text, will be automatically generated. This significantly reduces the time and labor costs of designing a store from scratch, allowing merchants to focus more on customization and personalization.
New home feed in the Shop app
Home feed evolves to be more personalized as you tap and scroll
The Shop app’s home feed has evolved to better connect merchants with high-intent shoppers. Every time a user interacts with the Shop app, such as refreshing the feed or browsing or adding products to their cart, content is dynamically updated based on the user’s preferences, resulting in a more personalized shopping experience.
Enhanced Home Feed Recommendations: The new Home Feed uses shopper behavior data to surface merchants’ products in a more relevant way. Content updates based on real-time behavior to help increase engagement and retention, and boost product visibility on Shop’s most-trafficked screens.
Create and share collections: Consumers can organize their saved items into collections based on a theme or purpose and share them with others. This expands on the existing “favorites” list and provides collaborative creation and shopping capabilities.
Native and Custom Swatches: The Shop app now supports the same swatches as your online store, allowing you to replicate the same color and variant selections in-app, without the need for dropdowns, to visually see color variations and more. There will also be better ways to show pre-orders, bundles and your entire lineup, for a more consistent shopping experience.
Building a brand in the age of AI
New app Knowledge Base enables AI-optimized SEO for brands
Now that conversations with AI are becoming an important purchasing channel, if brand information is not properly conveyed to AI, business opportunities will be missed. Shopify’s new AI-enabled app Knowledge Base, which acts as a software engineer for AI, can generate and customize store information and frequently asked questions (FAQs) so that generation AI and shopping assistants can correctly read them, improving the ease of being found by AI.
Shopify Knowledge Base automatically generates store information for AI: Automatically generates store information and FAQs optimized for shopping AI agents such as ChatGPT and Claude. The generated content can also be customized to reflect your company’s brand image and values. This enhances the brand’s ability to disseminate information in the search and purchasing process through AI, helping consumers to find information themselves.
Put data to work
in your business with the new Sidekick. Commerce is full of complexity: changing sales patterns, scattered data, and tedious workflows. Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick, goes beyond answering questions to proactively detect problems, suggest solutions, and even help execute on the spot.
Smarter, faster Sidekick : Sidekick connects with multiple data sources, performs multi-step inference, and surface deep insights and actionable actions in a single interaction, enabling faster decision making without switching dashboards or jumping between reports.
Sidekick supports 20 languages, including Japanese.
Reach a wider audience with Shopify Catalog:
With the new Shopify Catalog, developers can build apps and AI agents that connect merchants with customers at every touchpoint, from product discovery to purchase.
Clear, accurate, and structured data in real time : Apps and AI agents can search and retrieve product data in real time from millions of merchants on Shopify to surface the most relevant products to consumers. A comprehensive catalog of products for any size, industry, or geography allows businesses to reach more consumers with their products.
“Shopify Catalog gives consumers seamless access to products from millions of Shopify merchants, enhancing the shopping experience with accurate, real-time information as they shop,” said Taz Patel, head of advertising and shopping at Perplexity .
Shopify’s Storefront MCP Powers a Smarter Shopping Assistant
Storefront MCP empowers developers to build AI shopping agents tailored to their brands, delivering engaging shopping experiences that drive real business outcomes.
Adoption of Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) : By adopting Anthropic’s MCP, the platform will enable external partners developing AI shopping agents to access Shopify Catalog and merchant information to support AI-powered product discovery and purchasing experiences, simplifying the shopping experience for consumers and enabling merchants to access new sales channels and provide accurate product information.
SOURCE: PRTimes
