Every day, merchants around the world open Shopify and get to work. Shopify's admin has to carry the urgency of a solo founder trying to make their first sale and the complexity of a growing business with teams and systems. It has to meet both where they are.
The new design of the Shopify admin started from that responsibility. The team wanted the product to feel more focused, polished, and distinctly Shopify, while respecting the muscle memory merchants have built.
What has changed
The admin has a cleaner frame and new visual language
Shopify's design team started by looking closely at how merchants work. They traced the reasons behind existing decisions and tested whether those reasons still held. Some pages had years of product decisions layered into them. Some patterns solved one problem well, then stuck around while the product around them grew. Some areas were doing the right job, but kept the action too far from the thing that merchants were working on.
Navigation was a clear focus, balancing having the tools within reach while giving the page more room to breathe. The side navigation can collapse when merchants want more space for their work, or expand when they need it. The team saw how often merchants moved between areas, especially in and out of settings. In the new design, search, notifications, and the store picker have moved from the top bar into the side navigation. Merchants can adjust settings while still feeling anchored in the broader admin.
"The admin needed to be even more useful and more effective for merchants while looking better," says Principal Product Designer, Derek Briggs. "We want merchants to be excited to use the admin. We wanted it to surface more of what they need and what's most important for them to see sooner."
The design team wanted merchants to feel the care that went into every detail and bring more of Shopify's personality to the product. Updated color, type, and icons give the admin a consistent visual language, allowing moving between pages to feel more connected. Every page now leads with what matters most, so merchants can find what they need faster.
Sidekick has a floating chat on every page
Sidekick was conceived as a companion experience. When looking to redesign the admin, the team saw a shift toward merchants using Sidekick as their primary interface for understanding their store and getting work done. Daily Sidekick sessions grew 4.8 times year over year from 2025 to 2026. The redesigned admin had to make room for Sidekick as an everyday collaborator while keeping the page itself focused, allowing the merchant to choose when and how to engage. The design challenge was presence without imposition.
"We wanted a first-class experience with Sidekick, where it's not in your face, but always present with you, ready to work on anything you want to throw at it," says Principal Product Designer, Kevin Clark.
Sidekick now has space at the bottom of each page. The team also understood that not every task needs the same depth. A quick question is different from thinking through and working on complex problems. For short tasks, Sidekick stays in a floating chat. For longer, more complex work, it expands into the side panel with room to go deeper.
Designing around how merchants work
A design system at Shopify's scale can't be proven on one beautiful screen. It has to survive the messy, important parts of running a business. The design team worked across the product, pairing with designers across the company on figuring out how they could strengthen the design system to make hard merchant problems easier to solve at scale.
"I hope the feeling merchants get when they open our product is a feeling of being seen," says Kevin. "That through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, Shopify is there to make their lives easier."
A few principles guided the work:
- Focus. The admin holds a lot of information, so the new design needed to enable merchants to find what they need quickly. Merchants should be able to arrive on a page and understand what matters sooner.
- Directness. Wherever possible, the interface should let merchants work with the thing they are trying to change. The design team looked for places where the object itself could become the path to action.
- De-layering. Flat interfaces are much simpler to understand, so they intentionally combed through every screen to reduce the number of containers, letting the structure of the page do more of the work.
- Personality. Shopify's merchants are creative, opinionated, and building something that reflects who they are. The admin should reflect that energy, allowing moments of character, motion, and polish to show up where they make the product more fun to use.
- Built for what comes next. The new Shopify admin is a foundation for the future. Merchants are asking more from Sidekick, and Shopify is building new ways for people to understand their business and act faster. The admin needs to make room for those possibilities while staying grounded in the way merchants run their business.
The new admin is a product design effort shaped by the daily reality of merchants, the craft of teams across Shopify, and the belief that the tools used to build a business should feel as thoughtful as the business itself.