Summer 2025 Shopify Updates for Beauty Businesses
Summer’s here and so are the latest Shopify updates!
The Shopify Summer 2025 Edition is packed with new and updated features across the board, and a lot of those you can use to benefit your beauty brand and its storefront.
These updates will definitely simplify and speed up the customization of your Shopify store. If you’re only starting a skincare business, this is a good time to jump on the train and introduce yourself to the updates to keep up with competitors.
Buckle up and let’s dig into the updates and see what it means to your skincare business!
Create a beautiful storefront in minutes or make one from scratch
With this summer update, Shopify has introduced some major features to take your theme from meh to WOW. That includes new themes, AI help, UX updates, and more. Let’s check them out one by one.
Horizon
Horizon is a new Shopify design system which includes 10 brand new themes, focusing on design flexibility, fast performance, and ease of customization.
What sets this system apart from its predecessors, is the fact that Horizon is created to support fully block-based designs. You can use features like block nesting and drag-and-drop to create custom layouts easily.
Source: Shopify
And the best part? With Horizon, Shopify’s also fine tuned the performance, making your website load faster, which is great for both SEO and user experience overall.
AI block generation
Source: Shopify
This feature might blow your mind: these Shopify updates also include the ability for you to generate custom blocks based on your description with the help of AI.
Yes, you heard that right. You can just type what kind of block you’d like to add to your site and it’ll generate one for you on the spot. Customizing your Shopify theme has never been easier.
Source: Shopify
But what if you want to set up your whole website quickly and without a hassle? They’ve thought about that too! You can describe your brand and Shopify will generate a store in seconds.
Visual editor upgrades
Shopify also improved UX in its visual editor to make the creation of your skincare store even more intuitive and easier.
You can now hover over blocks to preview them, copy and paste blocks and sections, create custom names for blocks, do one-click text editing, and so much more.
Use the improved AI tools for a seamless store management
Source: Shopify
Shopify has also bettered its AI assistant Sidekick with a lot more useful features for skincare brands and beyond:
Enhanced reasoning abilities allow Sidekick to give more detailed and deeper answers to your questions. For example, if you’re wondering why your sales have dipped last month, instead of simple data, it’ll thoroughly analyse your store, marketing efforts, and even seasonal trends to give you the best possible insight.
Task automation is another big upgrade for Sidekick. With your permission, it can perform tasks in the background, such as creating reports and customer segments, filtering orders, setting up discount codes, and more.
Sidekick can now speak 20 languages, allowing you to give it commands in the language you feel most comfortable conversing. Plus, you can not only talk to Sidekick via text, but also voice chat.
Free image generation is another of the useful updates of Sidekick. You can just describe what image you need and it’ll create one then and there!
Grow your brand with Shopify updates for retail
For skincare brands that are looking to expand in-store, go wholesale or just set-up pop-up shops, Shopify updates have something up their sleeve for you too.
Revamped Shopify POS
Source: Shopify
Shopify’s POS has been completely redesigned in its Version 10. This change turns the point-of-sale software into a strong brand storytelling tool — it personalizes customer experiences through design, streamlined workflows, and customizable displays. Here are the four main things you should know about the new POS design:
Lots of customization options for your customer-facing display. Add idle screens, have your brand’s colors across the entire checkout flow, and even customize the PIN screens with your visual identity.
Better cart experience for your customers. The new cart view shows more line items, minimizing scrolling and helping your staff stay engaged with customers. Dynamic headers indicate transaction types, like new sales or draft orders, while bold checkout buttons and clear totals make it easier to complete purchases.
The redesigned vertical navigation bar in Shopify POS places essential tools like Register, Lock Screen, and Connectivity just one tap away. This smart reorganization maximizes screen space, eliminates the need to dig through menus, and boosts efficiency.
Faster and smarter search is formed to speed up service, no matter if your staff are looking for products, checking orders, or taking customer details. The search now has context-awareness so it’s become even more efficient.
Sell globally with ease
This season’s Shopify updates also make selling globally easier and more efficient. And here’s the lowdown of features that can make your skincare business go international.
Source: Shopify
First, Shopify Payments is now available in 16 more countries, providing a safe checkout experience for your customers in countries like Croatia, Greece, Luxembourg, Norway, and more!
And speaking of Payments, you can also now accept Apple Pay for subscriptions in all countries that have the ability to use Shopify Payments!
Then there’s a big one: no matter the Shopify plan you have, you can collect duties, taxes, and tariffs directly in the checkout, reducing unpleasant surprises for your end customers. Or alternatively, you can embed duties and taxes in the product prices, whichever makes more sense for your business.
You can now also create submarkets from existing Region markets — this way you can customize your European region, for example, specifically for shoppers in the UK.
Take your store to the next level with new developer tools
Shopify’s summer updates have also brought us a cleaner and more advanced developer platform. Hit up your developer after reading this, because you’ll have things to chat about!
One of the most impressive changes is in the ability to work locally without needing tunnel services or repeated deployments. You can see the previews of the changes you made in real time localhost and hot reloading, cutting down setup time and keeping your workflow smooth.
Developers can also make real dev stores tailored to each Shopify plan (from Basic to Plus). Shopify’s new isolated environments let you test full app setups without tinkering around the real environment—ideal for experimenting and iterating quickly.
Shopify has also advanced in API flexibility and frontend design. You now have direct POS API access, app-owned metafields, and unified Polaris components across admin, checkout, and customer accounts. And with new AI-first tools like the Hydrogen Cookbook and interactive, LLM-powered documentation, developers can build smarter and faster!
Top 5 features from Shopify updates for busy brand owners
As you can see, there are a plethora of Shopify updates this season, so let’s run through a quick list of the most striking that’ll help elevate your skincare brand’s Shopify presence.
Horizon
The brand new Shopify design system that offers 10 new themes and block-by-block customization, and more.
AI theme customization
You can now describe blocks you want to add to AI and it’ll create them for you or you can also generate full themes by describing your brand.
Sidekick
The new and improved Shopify’s AI assistant Sidekick now has better reasoning and analytical skills, and can perform complex tasks for you in the background.
Shopify POS
For brands going brick-and-mortar, the Shopify POS system now comes with many more customization options, all throughout the shopping journey.
Developer stores
Now on the developer platform you can create stores tailored to any plan (from Basic to Plus), letting you test out all changes without impacting the real environment.
Source: Shopify
Your Shopify store is ready for a glow up!
This summer’s Shopify updates have brought us, dare I say, game-changing features that make it way easier and more efficient to build, customize, and launch your store.
From intuitive and AI-powered design tools to upgraded POS systems, these updates can help your store stand out both online and in-store.
Now is the best time to jump on the bandwagon and go explore all the new features Shopify has to offer on your own. Hopefully, this article gave you a good head start and inspiration to take advantage of all the new tools! Good luck!