Hello there. If you ship to Great Britain from more than one country, check your order routing today: it now decides whether VAT is charged at checkout. Also today: catalog changes you can schedule and test, transparent images from Sidekick, how Shopify keeps Sidekick cheaper to run and a Black Friday question about welcome codes.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

• VAT on orders to Great Britain is now based on the location your order routing picks, so big orders routed from outside the UK skip VAT at checkout.
• Rollouts can now switch catalogs on and off at a set time and test one catalog against another on your online store.
• Sidekick can now generate images with transparent backgrounds when you ask for one in the prompt.

MONEY & OPS

🇬🇧 Order routing now decides whether UK VAT is charged at checkout. Shopify now works out VAT on orders to Great Britain from the fulfillment location your routing rules choose, as it already does for the US. An order above £135 before tax and shipping that ships from outside the UK counts as an import, so no VAT is charged at checkout, even if you also have a UK location. To keep charging it, route those orders to a UK location or collect duties at checkout. Northern Ireland orders, orders of £135 or less and existing orders are unchanged.

⚠️ Merchants want dangerous goods in Shopify Shipping. A community thread asks how many stores still buy labels for hazardous items through ShipStation, Pirate Ship, EasyPost or direct carrier accounts because Shopify Shipping does not cover them. The poster calls the extra step real friction and says Shopify is not working on it. If you sell batteries, aerosols or similar products, add your voice to the thread.

SHIPPED

🗂️ Rollouts can now schedule and test catalog changes. You can activate, deactivate or swap catalogs at a set date and time, which controls product availability and pricing per market. Rollouts can also run an experiment between two catalogs on your online store, and launch catalog changes together with theme and checkout updates in one rollout. That makes it easier to prepare a promotion's catalog ahead of time and let it go live on schedule.

🎨 Sidekick now makes images with transparent backgrounds. Ask Sidekick in your admin for an illustration, icon or other graphic and add that you want a transparent background, for example a hand-drawn leaf with no background. The result drops onto banners, product pages and marketing without a solid box around it, which saves a trip to a separate design tool. Shopify has the details in the changelog.

SELL & CONVERT

🏷️ Do you pause your welcome discount for Black Friday? One merchant planning a Black Friday sale realised new subscribers will still get a welcome code that the margins cannot carry on top of sale prices. Stopping the codes from stacking is easy, but they worry it feels like a broken promise to someone who just signed up. The thread has the options other stores are weighing.

⛳ A group discount when friends buy separately. A golf apparel brand wants to test an offer for golf trips and bachelor parties: one buyer gets a link to share with two friends, each person checks out on their own, and all three get money off. They want the link handed out before anyone buys and are asking which apps can do it.

STORE & TOOLS

🧠 How Shopify keeps Sidekick fast and cheaper to run. Shopify Engineering says Sidekick's main model passes its most token-heavy work to open models that Shopify post-trains and serves itself. The team shared the loop it uses to build them and where NVIDIA's models, software and GPUs make each round faster and cheaper.

🔌 Flow and Messaging are still out of reach for AI assistants. A merchant who sends newsletters with Shopify Messaging and automates with Flow says Claude cannot reach either one, even through the Shopify connector, because the API does not expose Flow workflows or Messaging templates. Everything still has to be set up by hand, and the thread asks for workarounds.

REMOTE JOBS