Last week, Shopify released their Winter '25 Edition, aptly named “The Boring Edition.” Despite containing over 150 updates, the Winter '25 Edition contains very few new features, but rather a broad sweep of improvements touching everything from checkout to developer tools.
And honestly, we couldn't be happier about it.
While Shopify’s pace of innovation has delivered powerful new capabilities like Markets, Customer Accounts, and POS over the past few years, it has also created complexity within their ecosystem. Each new feature brings its own set of integration challenges and edge cases.
For merchants operating at scale, these seemingly minor compatibility issues can cascade into significant operational hurdles. Even when individual challenges have workarounds, the cumulative effect of managing multiple partial solutions creates friction in day-to-day operations.
By following up the Summer '24 Edition (“Unified”) with one that’s even more focused on stability, Shopify demonstrates a clear commitment to addressing these foundational challenges. This approach is particularly crucial as they continue expanding their enterprise presence, where system reliability and seamless integration are non-negotiable requirements.
Let’s explore how these improvements work together to create a more robust platform for enterprise commerce.
Product Management and Discovery: Enhanced Control and Visibility
At the heart of any e-commerce operation is the product catalog, and this release brings several improvements to how merchants can manage and present different types of products.
Key updates include:
- Combined Listings now allows merchants to choose if parent or child products should appear in search and product recommendations, providing better control over catalog presentation.
- Bundles have been significantly improved with new analytics, more consistent presentation across admin and customer touchpoints, and accurate inventory status when using fulfillable inventory.
- Subscription management has also been enhanced with oversell protection, ensuring renewals respect inventory settings and preventing out-of-stock issues.
All of these improvements aim at consolidating and improving interoperability between different features of the platform, making life easier for larger and more sophisticated merchants. We have run across several of these limitations in our own work in the past, so we’re glad to see them being addressed head-on.
Checkout and Payments: More Flexibility and Customization
Building on the enhanced product management capabilities, Shopify has also made significant strides in making the checkout process more flexible and customizable.
Notable updates include:
- Split shipping is now available to all merchants, allowing customers to choose different shipping methods for different parts of their order when items will be fulfilled separately. This is critical for marketplaces, where the same order may be fulfilled by multiple vendors.
- Checkout Blocks is now available on the thank you and order status page, and [chat apps can now hook into the checkout flow.] This unlocks completely new capabilities and customer touchpoints, and we can't wait to take the new customization APIs for a spin!
Checkout is an area where Shopify has historically been very restrictive. However, they have been opening up more and more customization APIs over the last couple of years, allowing merchants to build their own customizations without relying on ugly workarounds. We expect this trend to continue, enabling new use cases and further reducing the effort of checkout customizations for Shopify merchants across the board.
Global Commerce and Compliance: Expanded International Capabilities
As merchants continue to expand globally, Shopify has introduced several features that make international selling more manageable and compliant.
This release brings significant improvements for merchants operating internationally:
- Semantic Search is now available in more languages, allowing customers worldwide to search using natural, everyday language. While Shopify's native solution cannot compete with more robust paid offerings, it's an excellent starting point for brands looking to elevate their search experience—and now, it's available to even more merchants!
- Shopify Tax has expanded to the EU and UK, offering automated VAT compliance including automated calculation and VAT invoice generation.
- Customer account extensions have finally entered general availability, allowing merchants to customize the New Customer Accounts UI with proprietary and third-party apps. We’ve been using these in beta for a while now (e.g., see Nick's excellent blog post on POS extensions), so we’re pretty excited about this!
On the compliance front, we would have loved to see a hint at more robust compliance primitives for international merchants and regulated industries (e.g., alcohol). However, this doesn't seem to be an area that Shopify is interested in exploring at the moment, which means these merchants will still need to rely on custom-built or third-party solutions.
Order Management: Better Control Over Complex Fulfillment
The enhancements to global commerce capabilities are matched by improvements to order management, particularly for complex fulfillment scenarios.
Significant improvements include:
- The ability to use custom metafields to inform order routing rules, allowing merchants to create more sophisticated fulfillment logic based on their specific business needs.
- Several improvements to Shopify Flow, the platform's built-in automation platform. Flow now supports all Admin API actions, can be triggered by metaobjects, and can automate returns.
- Product catalogs can be synced via custom IDs, which makes it easier for brands to integrate with in-house or third-party ERPs/PIMs. Shopify has also introduced a new Upsert API to reduce the number of API calls needed for data sync.
Granted—these are all quality-of-life improvements, especially since most of this logic was already achievable via other approaches. Still, they will help a lot of brands and agencies to simplify their customizations, allowing them to redirect their efforts to initiatives that actually move the needle!
Organizations and RBAC for More Robust Multi-Store Setups
As operations scale and become more complex, team management becomes increasingly critical. Shopify has responded with several improvements to their billing, authentication and authorization systems.
Key changes in this area include:
- The ability to group all your stores into a single organization with consolidated billing and user management, a feature previously reserved for Plus merchants.
- A new role-based access control system that lets you define granular permissions and assign multiple roles to staff members. This was announced in the Summer '24 Edition and is now entering general availability.
- Improved support for custom authentication flows in the admin, allowing organizations to roll their own authentication provider rather than leveraging Shopify.
These organizational improvements reflect Shopify's growing focus on enterprise-level merchants who manage multiple stores and complex team structures. By democratizing features previously limited to Plus merchants and providing more granular control over permissions, Shopify is building a foundation that can better support sophisticated organizational hierarchies and security requirements. This is particularly valuable for brands operating across multiple markets or running several distinct storefronts.
Developer Tools to Support More Complex Implementations
When it comes to developer tooling, Shopify has been hard at work to make custom storefronts and custom apps more powerful and more customizable.
Significant changes include:
- A lot of limits being raised: function executions now support carts with up to 200 line items (useful for B2B) and payloads of up to 128 KB. Plus, brands can now have up to 25 app-based automatic discounts.
- A number of improvements to Hydrogen, including support for gift cards, a Sitemaps API, and a richer GraphQL API with support for menus, pages, articles, and blogs.
- Self-serve return endpoints as part of the Customer Accounts API, allowing brands and apps to easily build self-serve return experiences.
These developer-focused enhancements demonstrate Shopify's commitment to supporting more sophisticated implementations while reducing technical limitations that previously constrained larger operations. The increased limits and expanded APIs give developers more flexibility to build complex, custom solutions that enterprise merchants often require, making the platform increasingly viable for technically demanding enterprise implementations.
B Is For Boring, B Is For Better
For enterprise and upper mid-market merchants, all of these improvements mean fewer workarounds, better operational efficiency, and a more reliable platform for complex implementations. This release shows that Shopify understands the needs of larger merchants and is willing to do the “boring” work necessary to support them effectively across all aspects of the platform.
As always, we recommend reviewing the full Editions changelog to understand all the changes that might impact your business.
If you need help implementing any of these new features or would like to discuss how they could benefit your operation, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team for a consultation!
