Shopify just released its Spring '26 Edition.

As usual, it came packed with new features, AI announcements, and enough updates to make every e-commerce operator rethink their roadmap for the rest of the year.

At the same time, I've been having a lot of conversations with founders asking the same question:

"Where can we find the next few million dollars of growth?"

This week, we're breaking down some of Shopify's biggest announcements and exploring three growth levers I believe more brands should be paying attention to before Q3.

Let's get into it.

But first, I’m curious:

Topics we'll cover today:
💠 Shopify's Spring '26 Edition: Everything You Need to Know
💠 3 Growth Levers $10M Brands Should Explore in Q3
💠 Latest news in the DTC space

Over the last few weeks, I've had multiple conversations with founders asking essentially the same question:

"How do we add another $2M, $3M, or even $5M before the end of the year?"

It's a fair question.

Q3 is around the corner, and if you're sitting around the $10M mark, you're probably not looking for incremental improvements anymore.

You're looking for meaningful growth.

What's interesting is that most founders immediately start looking inside their ad accounts.

Can we improve ROAS?
Can we launch new creatives?
Can we find another audience?

Those things matter.

But if you're trying to unlock millions in additional revenue, the answer is often somewhere else.

Here are three growth levers I'd be looking at.

Most acquisition channels eventually become crowded.

The brands that benefit the most are usually the ones that arrive early.

That's why I believe TikTok Shop deserves serious attention this year.

Many established brands still dismiss it because they think it's only relevant for impulse purchases, low-ticket products, or Gen Z audiences.

Meanwhile, some brands are quietly building entirely new revenue streams through creators, affiliates, and live shopping.

The biggest opportunity isn't necessarily the platform itself.

It's the fact that consumer behavior is changing.

People are discovering products, consuming content, and purchasing in the same environment.

That shortens the customer journey dramatically.

Will TikTok Shop work for every brand?

No.

But if you're a $10M brand and haven't seriously evaluated it yet, I'd argue you're making a strategic mistake.

Because once everyone decides it's important, the easy growth will already be gone.

We've spent the last few months helping brands understand whether TikTok Shop deserves a place in their growth strategy. If it's on your radar for Q3 or Q4, feel free to reach out. Happy to share what we're seeing work.

Some of the most successful brands I know generate meaningful spikes in revenue not because they launch more products, but because they launch products better.

However, one of the biggest mistakes I see brands make is treating product launches like inventory updates.

→ A product arrives.
→ It gets added to the website.
→ An email gets sent.

And that's about it.

The best operators do the opposite.

They build anticipation.
They create waitlists.
They educate customers.
They tease the launch across multiple channels.
They create urgency.

They make the launch feel like an event!

A strategic product drop gives existing customers a reason to buy again.

In fact, product launches are one of the few moments when customers actually want to hear from you.

This is probably the most overlooked growth lever of all.

Everyone talks about creative diversity.
Very few people talk about offer diversity.

The reality is that customers buy for different reasons.

Some respond to discounts.
Others respond to bundles.
Others respond to gifting opportunities.
Others care about convenience.
Others care about value.

Yet many brands spend years presenting essentially the same offer to everyone.

The result is predictable.

The business eventually plateaus.

One exercise I recommend is mapping the entire customer journey and documenting every offer customers see from first click to repeat purchase.

Most brands are surprised by what they find.

The same product.
The same promotion.
The same message.

Repeated over and over again.

When you start building a proper value ladder, introducing different offer structures, and aligning messaging to different buying motivations, you create entirely new growth opportunities without acquiring a single additional customer.

And that often becomes the foundation for better ads, better emails, and better conversion rates across the board.

If I were running a $10M brand today and trying to add another few million in revenue, I wouldn't start by looking for another ad hack.

I'd ask three questions:

What channel are we underinvesting in?
What products should we launch next?
And are we giving customers enough reasons to buy?

The answers are usually more valuable than any campaign optimization you'll make this quarter.

--
Follow me on LinkedIn for more growth marketing content in the e-commerce space.

Over the past few months, we've audited more than 50 7- and 8-figure brands.

Most weren't struggling to grow.
They were struggling to grow efficiently.

Revenue was there.
Profit wasn't.

And the same patterns kept showing up:

The problem?

Many brands enter Q3 thinking they need more traffic, more campaigns, or more creative.

What they actually need is a stronger foundation.

Because once Q4 arrives, there's very little time to fix what's broken.

The brands that perform best during the second half of the year typically start preparing months before BFCM.

They identify the bottlenecks.

They fix the leaks.

And they build a clear plan for growth.

At BSR, we help brands uncover where revenue and profit are leaking across ads, email, offers, and the customer journey, then build a practical roadmap for the next 90 days.

If you're planning to make a strong push in Q3 and Q4, now is the time to get the foundation right.

Shopify just released its Spring '26 Edition.

As usual, there are hundreds of updates.

But unlike previous Editions, this one has a very clear theme:

Shopify is no longer trying to be just an e-commerce platform.

It's positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for AI-powered commerce.

And if you've been reading this newsletter over the last few months, many of these announcements won't come as a surprise.

We've already talked about AI shopping assistants, product feeds becoming more important than websites, and large language models becoming new discovery channels.

Now Shopify is putting all those pieces together.

The biggest announcement is that Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is now open to all developers.

In simple terms, this allows AI assistants and third-party applications to search products, add items to cart, apply discounts, and complete purchases using Shopify's checkout infrastructure.

The implications are massive.

For years, brands optimized for Google.

Then they optimized for Meta.

Now they're starting to optimize for AI discovery.

And Shopify wants every AI assistant to use its infrastructure when that transaction happens.

The company is also expanding Shopify Catalog, its structured product database that's already feeding information into ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode, Shop, and other AI experiences.

New capabilities include image search, richer product attributes, personalized recommendations, and better product matching.

In other words, Shopify is making it easier for AI systems to understand, recommend, and sell products.

Another announcement that caught my attention is Campaign Autopilot.

Shopify describes it as an AI agent capable of planning, launching, and optimizing marketing campaigns across Meta, Instagram, Shop, email, and additional channels coming soon.

If it delivers on that promise, this could become one of the most disruptive updates for agencies and in-house marketing teams.

We're still early.

And human strategy isn't going anywhere.

But we're clearly moving toward a future where campaign execution becomes increasingly automated and marketers spend more time on positioning, offers, customer journeys, and creative direction.

The same trend appears across other updates announced this week.

Shop Campaigns now expands into channels like ChatGPT, Pinterest, and the open web.

Sidekick continues evolving into a central operating system for merchants.

And Shopify Inbox now includes an AI sales assistant that can answer questions, recommend products, and assist shoppers directly on the storefront.

The takeaway isn't that AI is replacing e-commerce teams.

It's that AI is becoming another discovery and buying environment your brand needs to be present in.

Just like brands had to learn SEO for Google and content for social platforms, they'll now need to learn how products get discovered, understood, and recommended by AI systems.

The brands that start preparing their product data, catalog structure, merchandising, and customer experience today will have a significant advantage as AI commerce becomes more mainstream.

Because increasingly, the question won't be whether customers can find your products.

It'll be whether AI can.

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Follow me on LinkedIn for more growth marketing content in the e-commerce space.

If you found this interesting, please leave us a review. It’d mean the world to me.

📰 TikTok's New AI Feature to Create Whole Videos from Text Prompts [read more]
📰 Meta Updates its Livestream Shopping Tools [read more]
📰 Meta introduced AI Mode [read more]

Brian Roisentul is the founder & CEO of BSR, a growth marketing agency he started in 2013 to help e-commerce brands unlock hidden revenue by identifying misalignments between their marketing and customer behavior. He is also the host of The DTC Insider podcast, where he interviews thought leaders, founders, and directors in the e-commerce space.

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