Shopify Editions Summer 2023: What Shipped and Why It Mattered

Note: This post covers the Shopify Editions Summer 2023 release. For current Shopify feature updates, see our latest Shopify features roundup.

The thing with tech announcements is that a lot of what gets announced doesn’t actually exist yet. On the other hand, they give useful insight into where a platform is heading, and for that reason we look forward to Shopify Editions every six months.

Summer 2023 was a notable release. A few things we were genuinely glad to see:

Native Bundles

Finally. Shopify’s native bundle support had been a long-standing gap — merchants had been cobbling together bundle functionality with third-party apps for years, and the results were often fragile. Native bundles mean inventory tracking works correctly across bundled SKUs without workarounds. This alone was worth the wait for a meaningful portion of Shopify’s catalog.

Native Subscriptions

Shopify added native subscription infrastructure through its Subscriptions API, which allowed apps like Recharge and Appstle to integrate at a deeper level than previously possible. The benefit is more stable subscription flows and theme-level integration that doesn’t require workarounds. Merchants who’d been running subscriptions on older infrastructure saw meaningful reliability improvements.

B2B and Wholesale Improvements

The addition of a PO number field to wholesale orders was a small change with outsized practical impact — B2B buyers have been asking for this for a long time. Combined with the broader B2B feature expansion on Shopify Plus, this release moved the needle meaningfully for merchants selling to business customers.

Combined Listings

Combined listings allow merchants to group product variants that were previously separate SKUs into a single unified product listing. For apparel brands, in particular, this reduced the catalog management complexity that comes from managing colors and styles as separate products.

What Actually Shipped vs. What Was Announced

As always with Editions, the gap between announcement and availability varied. Native bundles and the B2B improvements were available quickly; some of the more forward-looking AI features were previews rather than shipped products. That’s worth keeping in mind when reading Editions coverage — the announcement and the release are often months apart.