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Shopify D2C & B2B Updates That Matter

Shopify D2C & B2B Updates That Matter

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Podcast Recap:

Every Shopify Editions release drops around 150 updates, and the hard part isn't reading them — it's knowing which ones move the needle for your store. In this episode, Michael sits down with Joe, Anchor Group's resident Shopify expert, to cut through the "Sell Everywhere" Spring 2026 release and pull out the D2C and B2B changes worth your time.

Sell everywhere now means selling inside AI chats

The headline theme is "Sell Everywhere," and the biggest piece is agentic storefronts. Your Shopify products can now be discovered and purchased directly inside AI chats like ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google. A new agentic dashboard lets you see how your products surface in each of those storefronts and even prompt them the way a shopper would, so you can check your visibility and ranking in one place.

Let the Shopify catalog handle your AI optimization

The practical, do-this-now step is the new Shopify catalog. You choose which products to send to the AI storefronts, and Shopify does the answer engine optimization (AEO) for you — formatting your product data into the right schema and pushing it live. Change a price, description, or image and it stays in sync automatically, with no waiting on a crawl. Shoppers can even check out inside the chat. Good data in, good data out: clean titles and descriptions still matter.

Sidekick can finally work inside your apps

Sidekick, Shopify's built-in AI assistant, has been hit or miss. This release connects it to some of your installed apps — around six to start, with more coming. That means you can ask it to pull the five most recent reviews for a marketing campaign, or run import/export tasks through a tool like Matrixify, without opening those apps yourself. Less bandwidth spent on busywork.

Customer accounts remove friction to buy

Building on last year's passwordless, email-verification sign-in, Shopify redesigned customer accounts to be cleaner and mobile-first, with less scrolling and better address autocomplete. The login period now stretches to 365 days, so returning shoppers stay signed in — one less barrier between a customer and checkout.

B2B is no longer locked behind Plus

Two B2B changes stand out. First, B2B features are now on all plans, not just Plus: companies as customers, multiple contacts per company, stored payment methods, and payment terms are available to everyone. Plans below Plus also get three catalogs, letting you show specific products and pricing to specific customer groups (trade discounts, region-restricted products, and the like). Second, variant-level publishing lets you send individual product variants — not just the parent product — to different channels and catalogs, ending years of clunky workarounds.

Bottom line

Shopify is clearly testing the waters in B2B while doubling down on frictionless, AI-driven selling. For D2C merchants, the agentic storefronts and catalog open a genuinely new addressable market with little added overhead. For B2B merchants, dropping the Plus requirement makes Shopify a realistic place to start — or to run a focused D2C storefront alongside a B2B site on another platform. It isn't the full B2B overhaul some hoped for, but it's a clear signal of where Shopify is heading.

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Need help mapping these updates to your store? As a BigCommerce Certified Partner and Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner, Anchor Group helps merchants build and integrate ecommerce systems that scale. Get in touch at anchorgroup.tech.

Podcast Transcript:

Michael

Hey everybody, thank you for tuning in to this edition of the Anchor Group podcast. Today we have another exciting one for you. A couple of weeks ago, Shopify Editions, Spring Editions 2026, came out. And today with us we have Joe, who is our resident Shopify expert here at Anchor Group. I'm based out of our Minneapolis, Minnesota office. Joe is going to be walking us through some of the most important things he's seen in the most recent Shopify Editions release. So we're going to focus on a couple of things. First, the D2C changes and updates that were released. Second, we're going to dive into a little bit of the B2B feature releases we've seen. At Anchor Group, we have a lot of experience in both D2C and B2B, but a lot of people are wondering, specifically about Shopify and B2B, what that's going to look like in the future. Well, each edition release, we get a very clear look at what Shopify is doing to improve that part of their feature set. So today we're going to dive into all things Shopify. Thanks for tuning in. Joe, thanks for joining the Anchor Group podcast today. Great to have you on.

Joe

Yeah, thanks for having me. Been excited to get on the podcast.

Michael

Well, like I said in the intro, you are our resident Shopify expert here, and you have firsthand expertise, right? Running a really successful Shopify website, and now you help our clients here at Anchor Group. So we wanted to have you on to take a deep dive into Shopify Spring Editions 26. We know there's some D2C. Right off the get-go, what stood out to you as some of those changes?

Joe

Yeah, so I do want to say, every year when the editions roll out, I'm super excited. They make it nice and pretty. It's a big, long, scrollable page. There are 150 updates. You're itching to see what's new and what you can use. So it's a really exciting time. But it's also very hard to get a grasp of what's actually important in that mess of 150 updates — what relates to you, your business, and your model.

Michael

Yeah, and I would say that's one thing. It's great when these software platforms come out with updates, but 150, that's no joke, right? So distill it down for us. What are some of the most important ones? And let's focus on D2C first. What did you see that stood out for you there?

Joe

Sure. So in general, this edition's launch is called the Sell Everywhere Editions. Everywhere being the big word — trying to make sure that you can sell your products on any platform easily. And a big piece of that this year is the agentic storefronts. What that means is that your products on Shopify can now be discovered and purchased directly through agentic chats. So that's your ChatGPT, your Anthropic's Claude, your Google, directly from what you set up in Shopify. That's their large push this year, and there's a lot of pieces to it. A big thing is an agentic dashboard where you can quickly see each of the storefronts — what's being sold in ChatGPT. You can even prompt it like you would in actual ChatGPT and see how your products would rank and show up. So it's really just making it more accessible for people to see and manage what's being surfaced on these AI chats.

Michael

Yeah, and I think in e-commerce as a whole, we've seen a shift toward agentic shopping. That's very hot on the radar for many e-commerce platforms. Shopify, as we see here, is in a sense leading the charge in that arena in many ways, and I'd expect other platforms to be fast follows on that as well. A lot of consumers these days are going to their LLM, their AI of choice, and asking it purchase-decision-type questions, and ultimately it's leading to the path of purchase quicker. I know I do that when I'm chatting with ChatGPT. So it's cool to see that Shopify's making substantial progress toward that.

Joe

Yeah, and to distill it down to what the actual actionable step is: Shopify's released something they call their Shopify catalog, where you essentially determine the products you want to send to these AI storefronts. And what that's going to do is the work of the AEO. That was a big term around COVID, when these agentic stores and chats first came out — answer engine optimization. It's doing all that work for you. So it'll take your data — obviously you need good data in for good data out. If your titles and descriptions are written well for the shopper, it will format that into the right schema and automatically push it to these storefronts, so you don't have to wait for a crawl to search your site and update that information. It'll keep everything live and up to date when you change a price, a description, an image, all of that. And it'll allow them to actually check out within the chat. So a lot of huge features here that before really had to be managed manually.

Michael

Yeah, those are all really big improvements, and I can see easily how that can impact the D2C companies out there. And really, what it's becoming — omnichannel has been such a big thing. The way I think it's easy to conceptualize this is that it's just a part of many companies' addressable market. These groups of people, potential clients or customers, who are using AI to chat and get the information to make their purchase decision — it's just another addressable market. And I talk with a lot of companies that are legitimately very excited to be able to address this part of what many view as a new addressable market for their business.

Joe

Yep. And with most companies being pretty new to this, not having their own in-company team around AI, it's nice to have some of these tools built in.

Michael

Yeah, it decreases the amount of bandwidth you have to put on your team for sure.

Joe

That's right. So that's a big one. In terms of decreasing bandwidth on your team as well, the Sidekick feature in Shopify — their AI agent to actually manage things within the Shopify environment — has not been the most useful in the past. You'd give it a prompt and it would get stuck, or give you data you could fact-check very quickly, like, that's not quite right. They've made a lot of big updates on that in this release. One of the key things is that it now has access to some of your apps. So if you're using an app for reviews or email automation, or even one I really like called Matrixify, which is an import-export tool, you can feed prompts that act within those apps. For example, you could say, I want to make a marketing campaign featuring reviews on this product, give me the five most recent reviews on this product, and it'll come back with that information without you having to go into those apps yourself.

Michael

Yeah, that's amazing. And do you have any sense of how big the ecosystem of apps is that it can actually plug into? Because it sounds like it can't plug into everyone, right?

Joe

Yeah, it's starting pretty small here. In the editions documentation there were about six. But there are some of the larger ones, and they're certainly working on more.

Michael

Yeah, and I'd say that's the cool thing about Shopify. Companies of many different sizes are able to use it, and I think it's really attractive from a platform that's trying to become a more cohesive, all-in platform — bringing even those apps into the fold with the tool set they're developing. That's important. It makes the ease of management Shopify is so well known for continue forward as things grow and iterate. That's cool. All right, any other things notable for D2C? I want to make sure we have some time to get to B2B.

Joe

Our big one is the customer accounts on Shopify. Last year they updated to a newer customer account that's a passwordless sign-in where you get email verification. Pretty standard now, but it certainly lowers the lift of trying to remember your login. And one thing they've done is again redesigned the customer interface where it's much cleaner, more modernized, less scrolling on mobile. So for all your Shop app customers coming from mobile, that's a huge improvement. Better autocomplete on some of the fields, especially addresses — there were some big problems with address validation in the past. And the last thing is they've increased the login period to 365 days. So you can visit a site in 2025 and still be logged in when you come back in 2026, which takes out that barrier to buy — which is really all Shopify is about. Trying to make it as easy as possible: fastest checkout in the world, most converting checkout. So you can clearly see they're working toward that.

Michael

Yeah, that's a good point, man. Removing barriers in the path to purchase. Frequently when I talk to clients, we focus on: what is the least amount of clicks on that path to purchase? And Shopify does a very good job of that. And to your point, being able to stay logged into an account seems valuable for reordering. I'd assume subscriptions are managed there too — oftentimes subscriptions are managed in the account. So I see that as being valuable. Good to see them making improvements. All right, Joe, thanks for sharing about the D2C updates. But how about B2B? If you look on LinkedIn, or if you're in the e-commerce circles, you hear people questioning where Shopify is and where it's going — or where it's not going, rather — in the B2B e-commerce ecosystem. And when these editions are published, it gives you a clear look under the hood at what they're thinking internally. So let's dive into that a little bit. What are some of your hot takes or quick takeaways from Shopify B2B?

Joe

Yeah, people have always really complained about the B2B features on Shopify, especially in these editions when they don't really address some of the key things. But there are two big notable things I want to mention for B2B from this release, knowing there will certainly be more in upcoming releases. The first one is B2B features on all plans. Now, this is huge. In the past, most of these B2B features were only available on the Plus plan, which is pretty expensive and not needed for most of its features for many companies. So right there, you're removing that barrier. Everyone has access to B2B features. Key features there are creating customers as companies, multiple contacts per company, addresses, storing cards, and setting payment terms on a company record. Other options include creating catalogs. On any tier under the Plus tier, you now get three catalogs, which may not be enough, but it's more than zero, which is what it was in the past. A catalog is how you segment certain products to only be shown to certain customers, and certain products at certain price levels for certain customers. So if you have a trade discount for one group of customers and a steeper trade discount for a different group, or products you can only show in America and not in Europe — that's what these catalogs are for, and something that was not native to these cheaper, lower-level accounts before this. And one thing I want to point out with these two — what we'd call the most major updates for Shopify and B2B — is that it really shows Shopify is testing the waters with B2B. We know of companies that have what we'd call light B2B on Shopify and they're running successfully. However, we feel this really sets up not only your enterprise-level merchants, but also some lower-tier merchants, because you no longer need that higher tier to get access to some of these.

Michael

What this does, we feel, is allow some companies to start testing the waters for B2B — the same way Shopify's testing the waters for B2B and making a little bit of movement there. Now merchants can do the same thing. As Joe pointed out, the three catalogs. We work with some smaller companies at times, and sometimes they're like, hey, we're primarily D2C, but every once in a while we get the government calling us, the local municipality calling us, or local companies we want to work with, and we really need to treat them like B2B customers — give them their own catalog, for example. If you're running a Shopify website, you may have the option to do that. And I've worked with companies where they test the waters for one or two years and realize there's a whole other part of the market they can address. By going this B2B route, they build out their internal team, they build out their tech stack, and that becomes a substantial part of their business. For many companies, being able to address D2C and B2B as they grow and mature over time — you at least have to ask yourself the question: is it worth investing in that arena?

Joe

That's right. And if you start with Shopify like many companies do, now you have that option. That's one thing I like to see out of this edition. Many people wanted twenty to fifty updates for B2B. We didn't get it. But you gotta start somewhere.

Michael

Gotta start somewhere. Yeah.

Joe

It for sure gives me hope that Shopify could be a platform that B2B companies go with as their main platform, and then have that D2C on the side as an addition on Shopify — because it's already built out so strong, because it builds into AI, because it gives you the Shop app users, all the things. Just this week alone, two customers we work with on a different platform reached out and asked if moving to Shopify to host some of these products, just for the additional awareness and customer reach, would be worth it. So you're already seeing companies interested in this.

Michael

Yeah. And if you're watching or listening to this and thinking about whether you should get a Shopify website — as Joe pointed out, that's a use case we see a lot, where a B2B-primary company runs a B2B website on a different platform. Often around here we work with SuiteCommerce, we work with BigCommerce, but sometimes they'll spin up smaller — air quotes "smaller" — Shopify websites to really hone in on the D2C customer. That's a way they can test the waters and figure out what that specific product line or those products are. Sometimes it's even just a marketing play — understanding how to address a specific part of the market that wasn't touched before. So there are a couple of different ways you can go about it. But all in all, it's always exciting when Shopify comes out with these releases. It's fun to analyze and dig into a little bit and understand what's been going on behind the curtain at Shopify as they charge forward and help lead a large portion of the e-commerce ecosystem. Any final thoughts, Joe, as we wrap up today's conversation that you want to leave the audience with?

Joe

Yeah, you want me to hit you with one more?

Michael

Yeah, one more. Let's hear it.

Joe

All right, last one. This impacts B2B and D2C. When I saw this, as a Shopify nerd, I kind of freaked out. I've been wanting this for a long time and don't know why it wasn't in there to begin with: variant-level publishing. This is huge. You can publish products at the variant level, not the parent product level, to different channels and catalogs on their own. So if you have one version of your product, one style that's not available in Europe but is in America, you don't have to make a new product for that anymore. It's right there. If you want certain wholesale buyers to have specific variants at specific customization tiers, that's all available now. That certainly held us back in the past when I was managing a Shopify store and we had to do all these workarounds. So now that it's built in, that further affirms to me that Shopify is working on these things people complain about, especially related to B2B features.

Michael

Yeah, fantastic. Well, there you have it. Joe, thanks for joining today. And for everybody listening, thank you for tuning in. We appreciate it. Thank you for tuning in to this edition of the Anchor Group podcast. Whatever platform you're watching on, feel free to drop a comment if you have questions or if there are things you want us to talk about or dive more into. You can also reach out to us at anchorgroup.tech. Plenty of ways to get in contact with us there. We're always happy to answer questions, share our opinion, and share our expertise with you. So until next time, thanks for tuning in to the Anchor Group podcast, and we'll catch you next time.

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