It's that time of the year! After spending considerable time going through Shopify's Summer 2025 Edition and experimenting with some of the features that became available over the last few months, we are excited by the platform's latest releases: Shopify continues to push the boundaries of what's possible in e-commerce, with remarkable new features and expanded capabilities.
Still, while the overall direction is encouraging, we've also identified some implementation challenges, particularly for the type of mid-market and enterprise client we serve.
Let's take a look at what's changed, what it means for developers and merchants, and where we think Shopify should focus next!
Horizon: Who’s Thinking About the Developers?
Shopify's new Horizon theme created a lot of excitement, especially with the no-code/low-code crowd: with the new nested blocks and AI-powered block generation, merchants have more flexibility than ever.
While we appreciate all the love that went into Horizon, our team also had some concerns:
"What happens to Dawn now?" was the recurring question. With Horizon being the new standard, we expect Dawn to be left behind, forcing agencies and merchants to adjust.
As most developers learn at some point, giving non-technical users more content management flexibility often comes at the expense of UX and brand consistency. Could Horizon be too flexible for a merchant's own good?
While Horizon is great, it primarily addresses Shopify's SMB merchants. Meanwhile, developers still need to build custom CI/CD pipelines if they want a robust theme management workflow.
The Shopify theme ecosystem is already renowned for its friendliness towards non-technical users. As Shopify gains traction in the mid-market and enterprise segment, we were also expecting the platform to invest in more robust primitives, tooling, and workflows for theme development—especially since larger merchants are increasingly choosing Liquid over headless in an effort to simplify (more on this below).
As an example, an improved GitHub integration could streamline theme development significantly, and it would be the perfect complement to Shopify's marketing- and simplicity-centered narrative.
Markets: Segmentation Evolves Beyond Geography
With the latest updates, Shopify has turned Markets from an internationalization tool into a more comprehensive segmentation platform. Merchants can now segment markets by customer type (B2C vs. B2B), geography and channel (online vs. retail), all from a unified interface.
However, despite the new experience finally putting an end to the discrepancies between B2B, POS, and the old Shopify Markets, we also think there's room for improvement...
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