Every six months, Shopify releases a major update to its platform, bringing together dozens of new features, improvements, and tools in one single publication: the Shopify Editions. It’s a key moment for anyone working daily in e-commerce.
The Summer 2025 Edition is called Horizon. A name that already tells us something: it’s a new starting point for building seamless, intelligent shopping experiences without technical barriers.
Horizon: a new design foundation for your store
The main highlight of this edition is Horizon itself: a new theme foundation for Shopify, designed to combine beauty and flexibility.
Horizon introduces a new starting point for Shopify store design: flexible, visually powerful, and easy to use even without technical skills.
With the new Theme Blocks, Shopify now offers a more modular and flexible system to build store layouts: composable sections, easy to move and customize, designed to fit any need—without writing a single line of code.
The editor has also been improved for a smoother and more intuitive experience:
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Live block previews
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Organized categories for sections and components
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Streamlined and customizable sidebar
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More effective predictive search
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Quick actions like copy/paste, renaming, contextual shortcuts
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More interactive product cards and in-cart promo code entry
An optional feature also lets you generate blocks with AI (e.g., “seasonal sale banner”), but the core of Horizon is its visual flexibility—empowering brands to design autonomously without compromising on performance or conversions.
This marks a significant shift in how merchants can build and manage their storefronts. The rollout will be progressive—we’ll test it as soon as it’s available in our partner stores.
The features that impressed us the most
Each Edition includes dozens of updates. Here are the ones we believe will have the most meaningful impact for the brands we support:
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Horizon, the new design system with Theme Blocks: lowers technical barriers and speeds up store building.
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Multi-entity: finally, a native solution for managing international businesses with multiple legal structures. A key upgrade for growing merchants.
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Faster checkout loading: checkout loads nearly 2 seconds faster. Shopify now claims the fastest checkout in the world—an essential boost for reducing cart abandonment.
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GDPR updates: new privacy and cookie consent tools, with automated tag blocking based on user region.
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Advanced AI Sidekick: now capable of suggesting A/B tests, analyzing performance, and recommending data-driven actions.
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Improved Checkout Extensibility: more customization options, now available beyond Plus merchants.
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Major improvements to Flow and Functions: more triggers, advanced conditions, support for external events—giving merchants flexibility to build both simple and complex automations.
Why these updates really matter for Italian merchants
Many of the new features address pain points we encounter daily with our clients: international expansion, performance, compliance, operational efficiency.
The introduction of Multi-entity opens new opportunities for brands selling in multiple markets. Faster checkout can truly improve conversion rates. Updates to Flow, Functions, and GDPR tools make the platform stronger and more ready to handle complex scenarios.
And Horizon? We’re excited to test it in real projects and explore its real limits and strengths. But it's already a clear step toward a more fluid, accessible and autonomous way to build stores.
Our perspective
At NAMA, we approach every Editions release with a critical yet constructive lens: we ask what we can implement today, what’s worth testing, and what’s worth explaining to our clients.
This Summer 2025 Edition feels especially rich in practical tools. AI is finally being used to support real day-to-day work—not just as a buzzword, but as a way to remove friction and free up time.
Want to make the most of Shopify Editions? Nama Studio is here to help. Get in touch for a consultation and see how we can help take your Shopify store to the next level. 🚀
