On an unexpecting Monday morning, Shopify rolled out its latest edition. This edition, like others, came with a sleuth of changes, that I will summarize.

How did this edition impact merchants?

• The biggest feature for merchants this edition was the introduction of Markets—finally, a new tab on the left-hand side of the admin. As a merchant, if you want to expand into France, for example, it is as easy as a few clicks now to get that started, as well as customize your storefront for that market. I saw the demo of this new feature at Editions.dev, and trust me, another blog about it will come, but suffice it to say that I was impressed.

• Sidekick, Shopify's AI, is now on more stores.

• Split shipping is now available at checkout (finally!)

• New analytics suite for better insights into data. Now this remains to be seen, but I trust that Shopify will continue to make the analytics experience better for merchants.

• Combined Listings are now available

How did this edition impact developers?

• Merchants were not the only ones who experience a swath of changes.

• One thing that Shopify always tries to nail is developer experience, and that is why this editions, they make declarative webhooks available for Shopify apps. Shopify does not want the developer to worry about how to manage web hooks, so now all the developer has to do is declare which ones they need in the toml file and Shopify handles everything under the hood.

• Theme blocks will be replacing theme sections as the "atom" of a storefront. Everything will be based on blocks, but for now sections are not decommissioned.

• Shopify acquired Utopia, a very cool visual editor for Hydrogen. Now all the Hydrogen developers out there just got another tool. Will they decommission liquid storefronts though? I do not think Shopify will ever decommission liquid. I think they have a good thing going with the 3 different ways a storefront can be built (headless, hydrogen, and liquid).