Shopify Editions continued - my take on other updates

My last two posts have been focused on Horizon and theme blocks.

Today, I’ll recap some other updates you should know about.

Let’s go!

⏱️ Page-specific speed reports (CWV)

You can now see performance reports for individual pages of your site.

Previously, the score was an average collected from all pages together.

It would not show you if you had one page in particular with horrible loading speed.

If this was the case, you might never notice it, but it would bring the score down for your entire site.

Now you can check for this by going to Analytics > Reports and search for LCP: Page URL

It will show you a breakdown of all the pages on your site and their loading speeds over the last 30 days.

💡 Remember, this is real user data - actual customer visits, not just a score generated by a bot running tests. So it’s worth paying attention to.

You can also do the same thing for INP and CLS, and you can browse by page type (products, collections…) to see if there is something wrong with any of your templates.

For a recap on these different terms (LCP, INP, CLS), check out my Shopify speed tutorial from last year, which is still relevant and worth watching.

Sidekick can analyze your reports

Shopify’s AI companion Sidekick got several improvements, but the most useful is the ability to read and discuss your analytics.

In my opinion, this is one of the best uses of AI. I think Google Analytics, Search Console and others should all have a built-in AI that you can talk to, because it can be difficult to find the exact data and view that you are looking for.

Shopify is ahead of the game with this.

Sidekick can help with writing the Shopify QL language for creating custom reports and getting the exact data you need.

You can then have a conversation about your marketing data, allowing you to get better insights and even suggestions on what you should do.

📘 Shopify Knowledge Base app

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, some stores are already getting sales from ChatGPT.

So far, the information that ChatGPT (and other AI) have is whatever they could glean from reading your website. Their information might not be accurate.

That’s a problem. You don’t want AI misleading your customers when it comes to things like returns or shipping - this could lead to complaints.

So Shopify is giving us a way to provide AI with the correct info via the Knowledge Base app.

Here you can enter some common questions and answers.

But what’s really interesting for me, its that apparently, you will be able to see what questions people are asking about your store and products.

This makes it a valuable tool for SEO/AIO and copywriting.

This app is live already, but don’t expect to see much data just yet. It won’t display anything “until your products start showing up in AI shopping conversations”.

However, you can still add your FAQs right now to be prepared.

To be honest, there is very little information about how this works technically. Where are the actual FAQs stored and how are they sent to AI? Is it like structured data? I will keep you guys updated when I discover more.

[Ad] Fera is built for photo & video reviews

Fera is a visual reviews app. It specializes in collecting and showcasing photo & video reviews.

I always prefer visual reviews over plain text. Customers trust visual reviews because they’re harder to fake, and often show the product in action. Plus, this is valuable user-generated content you can reuse in your marketing.

Fera helps you get visual reviews by offering incentives such as discounts and cashbacks to reward the extra effort of uploading a photo or video. To display your reviews, it has widgets such as media galleries and carousels, which are designed for visual content first.

Fera is also full of features you’d normally only see on more expensive plans elsewhere:

• Import your reviews from other review apps such as Yotpo, JudgeMe or Loox, or external sources like Google, Facebook, Etsy, Trustpilot, etc...

• Sync with Google Shopping to get reviews showing in ads & search results

• Group reviews across similar products or bundles (e.g. different colors all show the same reviews)

• AI review moderation and reply assistance

• They’re also rolling out SMS and even physical postcards for review requests!

👉 Try Fera

Coming soon: Shopify Catalog

Shopify is creating a massive, global database of all products across the millions of Shopify stores in existence.

This database will be used by AI tools to access product data like price, images, options, and availability.

So when people shop with AI, they will be presented with accurate and up-to-date product suggestions.

This isn’t out yet, marked as “coming soon,” and there isn't much information about it. But it’s something to keep an eye on. You can sign up to get notifications about it.

Shopify is future-proofing, setting up merchants with the tools to sell through any interface, whether a website or AI agent.

🛞 Drive game

At the end of the Editions page, there is a fun mini racing game that runs in your browser.

My best time was 1:52.

See if you can beat me: click here to race my ghost.

This has been one of the most confusing and vague Shopify Editions.

It’s partly because of AI - Shopify are guessing what’s next and scrambling to prepare (which is great - I’m glad to be on a platform that won’t fall behind).

But also this year, they did not have a keynote video or presentations from their team. It’s just the Editions page and a couple of faceless videos on YouTube. I kind of wish they told us more.

Thoughts? Please comment on the online version of this post.

See you next time!

Ed