You no longer need a third-party app to A/B test your Shopify store. On June 5, 2026, Shopify quietly expanded a feature called Rollouts to support native A/B testing of entire themes and checkout configurations, then made it a headline item in the Summer ’26 Editions release on June 17. If you are on the Grow plan or higher, you can now split traffic between two versions of your store from inside the admin, and let real shoppers pick the winner.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Theme-level and checkout-level testing was exactly the territory external tools could never touch cleanly. Now it is built in, with traffic splitting, automatic theme copies, and rollback handled for you.
What Rollouts actually does
According to the official Shopify Changelog entry from June 5, 2026, Rollouts now supports five things: scheduling a new theme or checkout to go live at a specific date and time, temporarily swapping to a different setup with automatic revert (think a Black Friday theme that removes itself), gradually releasing a change to a percentage of visitors, running a true A/B test between two themes or checkout setups, and testing localized content per market.
Two details make this safe to run on a live store. When you start a rollout, Shopify automatically copies your published theme or configuration, so you can keep editing your live store while the test runs. And experiments can be made mutually exclusive, which means you can run more than one at the same time without them contaminating each other’s visitors.
You will find the feature under Markets > Rollouts in your admin.
Who gets what, by plan
Not everything is available on every plan. Per Shopify’s Rollouts documentation, and as broken down in a June 2026 guide from Shopify app maker Qikify, scheduling and gradual launches are available on the Basic plan and up. The actual A/B testing, which Shopify calls an experiment, requires the Grow plan or higher.
The difference matters. A launch shows one version to everyone. An experiment splits eligible visitors between a control (your current store) and a treatment (the new version), and reports results side by side. Only the experiment tells you which version converts better.
Staff permissions are also specific: whoever sets this up needs the Markets > Rollouts permission, plus theme or checkout edit rights depending on what they are testing.
Setting up your first test
Build the challenger first. If you are testing a theme replacement, add the new theme under Online Store > Themes before creating the rollout. If you are testing checkout changes, create the new checkout configuration first.
Then create the rollout, add your change, and set two percentages: the launch reach (how much of your total traffic the rollout touches) and the change percentage (how much of that eligible traffic sees the new version). The moment you drop the change below 100%, Shopify treats it as an experiment and starts comparing treatment against control.
One warning worth repeating from Qikify’s guide: if you launch a rollout immediately at 100%, Shopify collects no analytics and you cannot revert it. A real test needs a start date, an end date, and a split below 100%.
For results, theme experiments report conversion rate, bounce rate, added-to-cart rate, and reached-checkout rate. Checkout experiments report checkout conversion, meaning completed purchases relative to sessions that reached checkout.
What to test first
Whole-theme tests answer big questions. If you have been putting off a redesign because you were afraid of tanking conversions, this removes the excuse. Run the new theme against the old one at 50/50 for two to four full weeks and let the data decide.
Checkout is the higher-stakes target. Test one change at a time: express payment button placement, removing a forced account step, or a different order of form fields. If checkout friction is your problem, start with the login step. We covered why passwords quietly kill checkout completion and how passkeys fix it, and that is exactly the kind of change worth validating with a split test rather than a gut call.
Cart recovery tactics are another natural fit. Instead of guessing whether an exit offer or a trust badge works, test it. Our guide on reducing cart abandonment without constant discounts lists a dozen candidates that are cheap to build and easy to measure.
Where apps still fit
Rollouts compares whole experiences, not single elements. It will not test two headlines on the same page or two button colors. For element-level changes, you still build the variants with your theme editor, a page builder, or apps, then let Rollouts split the traffic between the two versions.
That is actually a sensible division of labor. The apps create the contenders, Shopify picks the winner. If you are assembling a challenger cart or upsell flow, the tools in our roundup of the best Shopify apps for repeat purchases are the kind of thing you would test one at a time.
The catch: you need traffic
Small stores should be honest about sample size. A 6% versus 5% result across a few hundred visitors is noise, not a winner. CRO practitioners typically wait for a 95% confidence level and run tests across at least two full weekly cycles, because weekend shoppers behave differently from weekday shoppers. If your store gets a trickle of traffic, session recordings and customer conversations will teach you more than an underpowered split test.
It is also worth remembering why Shopify is investing here. The same Summer ’26 Editions release that made testing native also switched on agentic commerce for every store. As AI assistants take over more product discovery, the human visitors who do land on your site are worth more per session, and testing what converts them stops being optional. We covered that shift in our guide to preparing your store for AI shopping agents.
The takeaway
The barrier to testing just dropped to zero for most Shopify merchants. Pick one thing you have argued about internally for months, write a one-line hypothesis, set a 50/50 split, and run it for two full weeks. You will either win or learn. Guessing does neither.
Related guides
- How to Reduce Cart Abandonment Without Constant Discounts
- Passwords Are Costing You Sales. Passkeys Fix That
- Best Shopify Apps for Increasing Repeat Purchases
- How to Prepare Your Store for AI Shopping Agents
Sources
- Shopify Changelog, June 5, 2026: Schedule, publish, and A/B test new themes and checkout and customer account configurations
- Shopify Help Center: Rollouts documentation
- Qikify (Shopify app vendor), June 22, 2026: Shopify A/B test on Rollouts: Newest updates and what to test
Last reviewed: July 21, 2026.
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