Shopify Editions.dev 2025: The Future of AI-Native Commerce

Earlier this month, our CEO and Founder Tony Hou and I attended Shopify’s highly anticipated annual Editions.dev event in Toronto. This invite-only event is where Shopify lifts the hood on its most ambitious projects, drawing together the platform’s top engineers, partners, and thought leaders for a full day of immersive sessions, masterclasses, and future-focused discussion.

This year’s message was crystal clear: AI isn’t just a feature - it’s the foundation. As Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke noted in a live Q&A, AI is set to be, if not more transformative to commerce as the adoption of mobiles was in the late 2000s. From agentic AI storefronts to global scaling tools into different markets and next-gen developer platforms, Shopify is laying the infrastructure for an AI-native future, and we’re here for it.

Here’s what we learned.

Agentic AI and the Reinvention of Storefronts

Shopify is moving fast into the era of agentic AI-intelligent, conversational agents that streamline both merchant workflows and the customer experiences.

• Sidekick, Shopify’s AI assistant, is expanding its footprint across merchant operations.
• The new Horizon theme introduces prompt-driven storefront generation, allowing merchants to describe what they want (e.g. “add a seasonal banner”), and have it built on the spot, no dev required.
• This shift unlocks a new way of working: rapid, conversational prototyping that reduces the barrier to building high-impact storefronts.

These innovations reflect Shopify’s broader mission to reimagine UX through conversation, accelerating the way merchants launch, adapt, and scale their sites.

Global Selling: Simpler, Smarter, More Scalable

Shopify continues to remove friction for international expansion with major enhancements to Shopify Markets:

• Brands can now operate from multiple entities within a single store, making it easier than ever to manage multi-region businesses.
• Regional pricing, localised catalogs, shipping, and taxes can all be configured from a centralised admin, no need to duplicate stores.

In one masterclass, we explored how these updates drastically reduce operational complexity, allowing brands to go global without the traditional overhead of creating and then managing multiple stores.

Developer Enablement: Build Faster, Smarter

As a development-led agency, this year’s Editions.dev updates to the dev toolkit were especially exciting. Shopify is giving developers better tools to work more efficiently at scale:

• Unified Dev Dashboard & Dev Stores: A connected hub for building, testing, and managing apps with real-time sync across environments.
• Bulk Data Handling with Shopify CLI: Developers can now perform mass updates using a single SQLite file, no more fragile scripts or manual cleanups.
• MCP Server (Model Context Protocol): A context engine for Shopify, now available to partners. It delivers rich, Shopify-specific context, like market, product, and customer data, to supercharge AI-powered development and tooling.

Shopify continues to live its motto of "build for builders", and these tools reinforce why we believe it’s still the best ecosystem for serious commerce innovation.

In the Room: Workshops + Roundtables

Between deep dives and hallway chats, we had the chance to join a range of sessions tailored to developers and tech leads:

AI Shopping Agents

We built fully functional AI-powered shopping agents that can interpret product requests, add items to cart, and guide customers through checkout, all in real time.

Global Markets Configuration

A hands-on exploration of Shopify’s new multi-entity capabilities and how to set up seamless cross-border selling workflows.

AI & the App Ecosystem

Roundtable discussions tackled big questions: Will AI reduce the need for traditional apps? What’s the role of Sidekick in merchant workflows? What happens when LLMs (Large Language Models - Like ChatGPT) start designing storefronts?

Our Key Takeaways

As Shopify enters its AI-native era, three trends stood out:

1. Agentic AI is the future of commerce. Expect fewer dashboards, more conversation. Merchants will talk to their storefronts like they talk to a team.
2. Global is going local. Shopify is making international expansion accessible, streamlined, and fully managed from one store.
3. Developer tools are leveling up. With CLI upgrades, dev dashboards, and the MCP server, building on Shopify has never been more powerful, or more enjoyable.

Why This Matters for Our Clients

At Moustache Republic, we don’t just keep up, we stay ahead. Our attendance at Editions.dev is part of our commitment to bringing clients the most cutting-edge, future-ready Shopify implementations possible. Whether it’s helping brands scale globally, integrating AI into their operations, or optimising site performance with the latest dev tools, we build with what’s next in mind.

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If you’re ready to explore what AI-native commerce could look like for your brand, get in touch. We’re already building it.

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