Publishing a major update to an ecommerce site is always nerve-wracking and historically involved that one uncomfortable moment where someone had to hit the button that made your new experience live. 

A well-mapped and thorough QA process can reduce the risk of something unexpected happening, but it can never fully recreate the behaviour of real people interacting with a production store. This can make major theme redesigns, checkout updates, seasonal experiences and other high-impact releases particularly stressful for Shopify merchants.

Thankfully, with the recent launch of Shopify Rollouts, merchants have even more control over that final, anxiety-inducing stage of development. 

Instead of immediately exposing a change to every shopper, Rollouts can schedule changes, gradually release them to a percentage of visitors, run A/B experiments, and automatically revert temporary changes. 

In this blog, we’ll break down everything you need to know about Shopify Rollouts, from how the tool works to what you can do with it and how it stacks up against other, seemingly similar Shopify features and QA concepts. 

What Is Shopify Rollouts?

Launched during the Winter ‘26 Shopify Editions showcase, Rollouts is a native Shopify feature for controlling how changes to a merchant’s online store are released. 

Available for Basic plans and above, users can access the tool by heading to Markets > Rollouts in their Shopify admin. From there, they can create a set of changes and determine when they launch, which markets they apply to and how much eligible visitor traffic will see them. There are two types of Rollouts: launches and experiments (more on that later!).  

In June 2026, Shopify further expanded the feature: Rollouts can now schedule, gradually publish, or A/B test entirely different themes and checkout/customer account configurations. Shopify specifically highlights use cases like switching from Dawn to Horizon on a scheduled date, temporarily activating a BFCM theme, gradually introducing a redesigned customer account experience, and comparing different checkout configurations.

What Can You Do With Shopify Rollouts?

The most obvious use case here is a Shopify theme rollout. Teams prepping a new storefront can add the replacement theme to Shopify and then use Rollouts to schedule it, gradually introduce it, or run an experiment against an existing theme. Shopify automatically creates a copy of the published theme or configuration so the live experience can continue to be edited independently of the experiment.

This allows for safer launches, redesigns, rebrands, navigation changes, new merchandising experiences, product page updates, cart experiences, and more. 

Rollouts also brings native Shopify checkout A/B testing to the platform. Merchants can replace checkout and customer account configurations and compare different setups through an experiment. For example, you could evaluate a new checkout configuration containing an upsell block against its existing experience.

Rollouts is also exceptionally useful for merchants with international stores. For eligible stores, Rollouts can also incorporate Shopify Markets, allowing merchants to schedule or test experiences for specific markets. Shopify currently reserves per-market theme and checkout/account customizations for Advanced and Plus plans, however.

Finally, temporary Rollouts are also handy for seasonal campaigns. For example, you could activate a BFCM theme for a week and automatically revert it afterward. No need to set any reminders or assign the task to a team member.

One important Rollouts caveat, however, is that Rollouts support only online store checkouts. Headless and custom storefront checkouts aren't supported and can't be tested with Rollouts.

Launch Rollout Vs. Experiment

As we mentioned earlier, Shopify offers two different kinds of Rollouts: launch rollouts and experiments: 

1. A launch is designed for releasing changes. It can push an update to all eligible shoppers or use a Shopify gradual rollout to expose the change to only a percentage of traffic. The update can also be temporary, with Shopify reverting the experience when the scheduled Rollout ends.

2. An experiment introduces a control and treatment so merchants can compare how a change performs against the existing experience. Shopify Rollouts are available on Basic and higher plans, while experiments require Grow or higher. Shopify Plus stores have access to both.

Basically, you should use a launch Rollout when the change has already been approved, and the main concern is controlling how it reaches customers. A new theme, for example, could initially go to a limited percentage of eligible visitors before being made permanent.

Use a Rollouts experiment when there’s still a business question to answer. Does the new product page increase conversions? Does the revised checkout perform better? Does one storefront experience encourage more shoppers to add products to their carts?

It’s worth noting that Shopify supports multiple simultaneous experiments on the same resource. When Rollouts overlap, Shopify assigns mutually exclusive traffic segments so a visitor can only participate in one Rollout for a given resource at a time.

Shopify Rollouts Vs. Launchpad

While both Rollouts and Shopify’s Launchpad app can schedule theme-related changes, the purpose of each app differs greatly:

1. Launchpad is focused on ecommerce event orchestration. It can schedule sales, product releases, inventory changes, theme switching, and other tasks around events such as product drops or major promotions.

2. Rollouts is more focused on controlled experience delivery. Its traffic allocation, gradual publishing, control-versus-treatment experiments, market targeting, analytics, and rollback capabilities make it better suited to managing how storefront and checkout experiences reach shoppers.

The tools can contribute to the same broader campaign, but they shouldn’t be assumed to control the same theme resource simultaneously. Take a BFCM campaign, for example: Launchpad could handle pricing, products and inventory while Rollouts manages a supported checkout or storefront experience, depending on the release configuration.

Feature Flags Vs. Shopify Rollouts 

Rollouts also overlaps conceptually with Shopify feature flags, but they aren’t interchangeable. 

Traditional feature flags operate within application code and allow developers to expose or disable specific functionality without necessarily deploying a completely different Shopify theme or checkout configuration.

Rollouts, on the other hand, operate at a Shopify experience level. This means that for a native Shopify storefront, Rollouts can cover a growing number of release scenarios without additional experimentation infrastructure. Custom apps, backend services, headless storefronts, complex code-level features, and sophisticated targeting requirements, however, can still call for a dedicated feature-management approach instead. 

Shopify Rollouts Analytics: What Can You Measure?

When you launch a rollout in Shopify, that rollout will start collecting analytics that you can view from the Rollouts section of your Shopify admin. After a scheduled Rollout launches, Shopify begins collecting Rollout-specific analytics that merchants can review from the Rollouts section of the admin. Shopify Analytics and external analytics tools can still be used alongside these reports.

The metrics available will differ depending on the resource and whether the rollout is a launch or an experiment. 

A theme experiment currently provides conversion rate, bounce rate, reached checkout rate, and add-to-cart rate. A checkout and accounts experiment provides checkout conversion rate. Shopify also provides broader sales and behavioural metrics for various launch configurations.

There is one important limitation, though: merchants currently can't customize the metrics included in Rollouts. Shopify also doesn't collect Rollout analytics when changes are launched immediately.

This means that for serious CRO programs, use Rollouts analytics to complement the rest of your measurement stack rather than rely on them alone. GA4, server-side analytics, session replay, error monitoring, and other tools might still be needed to understand why a treatment behaved the way it did.

Why Shopify Rollouts Matters for Larger Ecommerce Stores

For small theme changes, publishing isn’t really that intimidating, but the stakes look much different when thousands of shoppers could land on your brand new storefront minutes after launch. 

Consider a large Shopify redesign project. The conventional Shopify theme deployment process often looks something like this:

Development → QA → approval → publish to everyone

With Rollouts, teams can add another controlled stage:

Development → QA → approval → limited Rollout → monitor → expand, revert, or permanently apply

That extra step can shrink the number of shoppers exposed to an unexpected issue while the team watches how the new experience behaves under real-world conditions.

It can also make larger changes easier to evaluate. Instead of launching a redesign and comparing this month's performance with last month's, a Shopify theme A/B test can place a treatment alongside a control and measure them during the same period. 

This is important because other factors like seasonality, advertising campaigns, inventory, promotions, traffic sources, etc. can affect your numbers in a way that might make simple before-and-after comparisons misleading. Using a controlled experiment via Rollouts can give you a cleaner view of the big picture. 

Do Shopify Rollouts Replace Shopify QA or Development Workflows?

As exciting a feature as Rollouts is, you shouldn’t be trashing your usual QA and deployment workflows just yet. Shopify doesn't let merchants edit Liquid templates as part of a main-theme edit Rollout. Code-level changes should still be developed through the usual theme-development and source-control workflow. A completed replacement theme, including its code changes, can then be used as the replacement theme in a Rollout. 

Rollouts also support only Online Store checkouts, meaning headless and custom storefront checkouts can't currently be tested through the feature. This means that Rollouts shouldn't replace Git-based theme development or version control. Shopify's GitHub integration continues to synchronize theme code between GitHub branches and Shopify, including changes made through the Shopify admin.

Instead, include Rollouts in your usual release workflow that should include source control, code review, proper QA, stakeholder approval, performance testing, and post-release monitoring. Rollouts fits near the end of that process, where teams decide how an approved experience should reach customers.

Another issue that we, as an agency, hope Shopify will resolve is that Rollouts currently don't provide a supported, shareable preview URL. That can complicate client approvals and stakeholder review, making conventional draft-theme or staging QA valuable before the customer-facing Rollout begins. 

Conclusion

Shopify Rollouts is proving to be yet another powerful addition to Shopify’s ever-increasing set of tools to help merchants grow their online presence with fewer hurdles. The most interesting part of this feature launch isn’t just that Shopify now offers a native way to quickly set up A/B tests, but rather that it changes how merchants can think about launching customer-facing experiences. 

Publishing a change no longer means having to immediately give that experience to every single shopper at once. Now, you can schedule your deployments, limit initial exposure, monitor real-world performance, compare a treatment with a control, pause an active Rollout, or roll changes back instead. If your results support the decision, you’re free to apply it permanently; if not, no worries! Head back to the drawing board and try something new. 

Planning a Shopify theme, checkout, or customer experience release? As a Shopify Plus Partner agency, we at Blue Badger can help determine where Rollouts fits into your deployment workflow, test the experience before launch, and build a release plan designed to protect both conversion rates and customer experience. Get in touch with us today to learn more.