Quick Decision Framework
- Who This Is For: Shopify merchants at any revenue stage who are planning a theme redesign, launching a seasonal campaign, or changing their navigation structure and want early signal on whether those changes will help or hurt conversion before real customers see them.
- Skip If: You are pre-revenue or processing fewer than 50 orders a month. SimGym is a pre-launch stress test, not a tool for diagnosing why a live store is underperforming. Come back when you have a theme change on deck and something to compare.
- Key Benefit: Run a simulation of your proposed theme change against your current store and get an AI-generated verdict on add-to-cart rate, cart value, and navigation friction before a single real shopper sees the new version.
- What You’ll Need: An active Shopify store, a second theme saved in your Theme Library to test against, Shopify Network Intelligence enabled (listed as a requirement), and access through the SimGym waitlist. No developer required. No budget beyond the per-simulation credit cost of $10 USD once trial credits expire.
- Time to Complete: 10 minutes to read this review; 5 minutes to install the app and join the waitlist; simulation run time varies by store complexity once access is granted.
Every merchant who has ever pushed a new theme live and then watched their conversion rate quietly drop knows exactly why SimGym exists. The question is whether simulated shoppers can actually prevent that from happening to you.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Shopify built SimGym into the Winter ’26 platform release and what it signals about where Shopify is taking CRO natively.
- How SimGym’s AI shopper personas are built from billions of real Shopify purchase sessions and what that means for the reliability of the signal you get.
- What SimGym can and cannot replace, specifically where it outperforms doing nothing and where A/B testing with real traffic is still the only honest answer.
- When each merchant stage from emerging to established should actually pull the trigger on SimGym, and what the honest risk of waiting looks like at each level.
- How to use SimGym’s output as a rehearsal that makes your live A/B testing faster, cheaper, and less likely to burn revenue while you learn.
If you are evaluating SimGym, you are almost certainly also asking whether you still need a dedicated CRO tool like Microsoft Clarity or a user testing platform like Hotjar. These serve different moments in the optimization cycle, and they solve the core problem differently. SimGym operates before launch, using AI agents to simulate what might happen. Clarity and Hotjar operate after launch, using real session recordings and heatmaps to show what actually happened. By the end of this review, you will know exactly where SimGym fits in your stack and whether the timing is right for your store today.
Is Shopify SimGym Actually Worth It for Your Store?
The honest answer is: it depends on where you are in your growth cycle, and it depends on whether you can get past the waitlist before your next launch. SimGym is a genuinely novel idea backed by a data asset that no third-party CRO tool can replicate. Shopify processes billions of purchases every year, and they have used that behavioral data to train AI shopper personas that can actively navigate your storefront, add products to cart, and report back on what felt broken. That is not a marketing claim. That is a structural advantage that only a platform operating at Shopify’s scale can build. The catch is that SimGym launched in December 2025 as an AI Research Preview, which is Shopify’s term for a controlled beta. Early App Store reviews flag crashes, video playback failures, and results that diverged from live A/B test data. For a merchant with a redesign on a deadline, those are real risks.
I have been tracking the Shopify ecosystem through the EcommerceFastlane podcast for years, covering hundreds of conversations with founders and operators across every revenue stage. When Shopify announced SimGym as part of their Winter ’26 Edition alongside Rollouts, the native A/B testing feature, it was clear this was not a standalone app launch. It was Shopify signaling that experimentation and safe launches are becoming core platform behavior, not bolt-on features. That context matters for how you evaluate SimGym. You are not just evaluating a tool. You are evaluating whether to adopt a new workflow that Shopify is actively building into the default merchant experience.
This review is based on direct analysis of SimGym’s current feature set as of February 2026, evaluation of the Shopify App Store listing and early user reviews, Shopify’s official Winter ’26 product communications including the Unofficial Shopify Podcast interview with Aaron Glazer (SimGym’s Product Lead), and independent coverage from CRO agencies including Blend Commerce and Optise. I have also drawn on conversations with merchants navigating redesign risk at the growth and established stages, which is the audience SimGym is most clearly built for right now. If you want to understand how SimGym fits into the broader shift toward how Shopify brands are winning in AI search in 2026, that context matters here too, because SimGym is part of the same platform intelligence play.
Who Is Shopify SimGym Actually For?
Emerging Stage ($0 to $50K Monthly)
The Promise: Get the same pre-launch confidence that high-traffic brands have before you push a new theme or campaign live, without needing to pay for a CRO agency.
The Reality: At this stage, the $10 per simulation cost is not the barrier. The barrier is that SimGym’s value scales with the complexity of what you are testing. If you have a simple store with a single product and a clean theme, the friction points SimGym is designed to catch are less likely to exist. The bigger risk at the emerging stage is not a broken navigation. It is an unclear value proposition or weak product-market fit, and SimGym does not test those things.
The Trigger: You are preparing to switch from a free or entry-level theme to a premium theme with more complex navigation, multiple collections, or a significantly different layout. That is the moment SimGym becomes relevant even at this stage.
Skip If: You are still validating product-market fit or processing fewer than 50 orders per month. Spend that $10 on traffic or ad testing instead.
Growth Stage ($50K to $500K Monthly)
The Promise: Catch the conversion killers in your next redesign before they hit revenue. Get directional signal on navigation changes, promotional layouts, and collection restructures without waiting weeks for a live A/B test to reach statistical significance.
The Reality: This is SimGym’s primary audience, and the value proposition is strongest here. At the growth stage, a redesign that drops conversion by even 1% can cost thousands of dollars per month before you diagnose and reverse it. SimGym is designed to surface exactly the kind of friction that causes those drops: confusing navigation labels, layouts that bury the add-to-cart button, promotional tiles that create visual chaos. The current App Store review flagging result inaccuracy compared to live A/B tests is worth noting, but that review comes from a store with enough traffic to run its own tests. For growth-stage brands that do not yet have that traffic volume, SimGym’s directional signal is still more useful than launching blind.
The Trigger: You have a theme change, navigation restructure, or seasonal layout update planned for the next 60 days and you do not have enough traffic to run a meaningful A/B test before the launch date.
Skip If: You are already running live A/B tests with statistical significance. In that case, SimGym is a complement, not a replacement, and the sequencing matters.
Established Stage ($500K to $2M+ Monthly)
The Promise: Use SimGym as a rapid pre-screening layer before committing development resources to a full build-out. Test bold ideas in simulation before they touch real traffic, then use Rollouts (Shopify’s native A/B testing feature) to validate the winners with real shoppers.
The Reality: Established brands have the traffic to run live A/B tests, and at this stage, the honest answer from one App Store reviewer is relevant: if you can run your own A/B tests, do that for final validation. Where SimGym earns its place at the established stage is in the idea-screening phase. Running a simulation costs $10 and a few minutes. Running a live A/B test costs developer time, QA time, and carries real revenue risk during the test period. SimGym can eliminate the weakest ideas before they ever reach the live test queue.
The Trigger: You are planning a significant redesign, a new landing page structure for a major product launch, or a navigation overhaul and you want to stress-test the concept before committing to a full build.
Skip If: You need statistically validated conversion lift data to justify a major investment decision. SimGym is not that. It is a directional filter, not a proof mechanism.
Stage-to-Recommendation at a Glance
What Shopify SimGym Actually Does Well
Capability 1: AI Shopper Simulation Trained on Platform-Scale Data
The core of SimGym is a set of AI agents with human-like shopper personas that actively navigate your Shopify storefront. These are not bots clicking random links. According to Aaron Glazer, Shopify’s Product Lead for SimGym, the personas are built from the behavioral data generated by billions of real purchases across the Shopify platform every year. The agents are then tuned to the specific merchant being tested, meaning they are not running generic shopping behavior against your store. They are simulating behavior that is calibrated to your store’s category, product type, and the kind of shopper your store typically attracts. What they do is browse collections, evaluate product pages, add items to cart, and then report back on what felt frictionless and what felt like work. The outputs are add-to-cart rate comparisons between your current theme and the variant you are testing, cart value signals, and qualitative feedback on navigation patterns.
The Stat That Matters
Shopify publicly reports that AI-referred traffic to its merchant stores grew 7x year-over-year and AI-powered orders grew 11x in the same period. That is the platform context SimGym sits inside. Shopify is not building SimGym as a standalone CRO feature. It is building it as part of an intelligence layer that uses platform-scale data to give individual merchants access to insights that previously required enterprise-level traffic volume to generate.
Emerging ($0 to $50K): At this stage, the simulation gives you a structured way to evaluate a theme change that you would otherwise evaluate by gut feel alone. The add-to-cart signal and navigation feedback are genuinely useful, even if they are directional rather than definitive. The limitation is that your store does not yet have the behavioral history that helps SimGym tune its personas to your specific customer base.
Growth ($50K to $500K): This is where the capability earns its keep. A growth-stage brand planning a seasonal layout change or a navigation restructure can run a simulation in the time it would take to schedule a team meeting about whether to make the change. The qualitative feedback on where AI shoppers hesitated, bounced from a collection, or failed to find a product is the kind of friction data that would otherwise require a Hotjar session review or a full user testing engagement.
Established ($500K to $2M+): The simulation becomes a rapid idea filter. You can stress-test three or four layout concepts in simulation before committing any development time, then take the strongest performer into a live Rollouts A/B test against real traffic. That sequencing compresses the total time from idea to validated winner.
vs. Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar: Clarity and Hotjar show you what real shoppers did after the fact. SimGym shows you what AI shoppers might do before the fact. They operate at different points in the optimization cycle and are genuinely complementary rather than competitive. If you are already running Clarity for post-launch analysis, SimGym adds a pre-launch layer that Clarity cannot provide. The key distinction is that Clarity gives you real behavioral data; SimGym gives you simulated behavioral signal.
Capability 2: Theme Comparison Before Launch
SimGym’s current primary use case is direct theme-to-theme comparison. You run a simulation that pits your active published theme against a second theme saved in your Shopify Theme Library. The simulation outputs a winner based on add-to-cart ratio, along with qualitative feedback on why one theme performed differently from the other. This is the exact scenario that causes the most conversion damage in the Shopify ecosystem: a merchant redesigns their store, the new theme looks better, and conversion drops because the new layout disrupts the shopping flow that customers had already learned. If you want to understand the mechanics of how Shopify theme sections and blocks affect the buyer experience, the guide to working with Shopify theme blocks is worth reading alongside this review.
The Stat That Matters
Feature Analysis: SimGym currently supports only one comparison at a time, active theme versus one alternative. You cannot run multi-variant tests or compare more than two themes in a single simulation. For merchants with multiple theme concepts in development, that means running sequential simulations rather than a single comprehensive test.
Emerging ($0 to $50K): The theme comparison capability is most useful here when you are switching from a basic free theme to a premium one with significantly more complex navigation. The simulation can surface whether the new theme’s collection structure and product page layout are creating more friction than the simpler version you are replacing.
Growth ($50K to $500K): For a brand doing $100K to $300K per month, a theme change that drops conversion by 1.5% costs real money before you catch it. The theme comparison simulation is a $10 insurance policy against that scenario. Even directional signal that says “the new theme’s navigation is creating friction around the collections page” is enough to trigger a targeted fix before launch. If you want to understand what a high-converting Shopify storefront actually looks like at the growth stage, the episode on building a high-converting Shopify storefront covers the structural principles that SimGym is effectively testing.
Established ($500K to $2M+): At this stage, the theme comparison becomes a pre-screening layer. You use SimGym to eliminate the clearly weaker concept before you invest developer time in a full build-out, then you validate the surviving concept with a live Rollouts A/B test. That two-step process is faster and cheaper than going straight to a live test with a concept that SimGym would have flagged in ten minutes.
vs. Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar: Neither Clarity nor Hotjar can compare two themes before launch. They can only analyze what happened with the theme that is already live. SimGym’s pre-launch comparison capability is genuinely unique in the Shopify ecosystem right now, which is exactly why Shopify positioned it as “maybe first of its kind” in the Winter ’26 announcement.
Capability 3: Qualitative Friction Identification
Beyond the quantitative add-to-cart and cart value signals, SimGym generates qualitative feedback from its AI shoppers on what they experienced during the simulation. This feedback covers navigation experience, checkout experience, and store layout. The qualitative output is where SimGym diverges most clearly from traditional A/B testing. A live A/B test tells you which variant won. It does not tell you why. SimGym’s AI shoppers can articulate where they hesitated, where they could not find what they were looking for, and where the store layout created confusion. That “why” is the kind of insight that would otherwise require a formal user testing session with a facilitator and a panel of real shoppers. The limitation, which Shopify acknowledges directly, is that simulated results can differ from actual shopper behavior. Treat the qualitative output as a hypothesis generator, not a final verdict.
The Stat That Matters
Feature Analysis: The friction categories SimGym is built to surface map directly to the behavioral forces that drive conversion failure: navigation confusion, trust gaps, cognitive overload from too many choices, and broken momentum when shoppers cannot find the next step. These are the same patterns that experienced CRO practitioners look for in session recordings, but SimGym surfaces them before a single real shopper is exposed to the change.
Emerging ($0 to $50K): The qualitative feedback gives you a structured lens for evaluating your store that you would not otherwise have access to without hiring a CRO consultant. Even if the specific metrics are directional rather than definitive, the friction categories the feedback covers are the right things to be thinking about at this stage.
Growth ($50K to $500K): The qualitative output is most actionable here. A growth-stage team can take the friction points SimGym identifies, prioritize the top two or three, fix them before launch, and run the simulation again. That iterative loop, simulate, fix, simulate again, is a faster and cheaper version of the user testing cycle that established brands run with agencies.
Established ($500K to $2M+): At this stage, the qualitative output is most useful as a briefing document for your development team. Instead of going into a pre-launch review meeting with opinions about what might be wrong with the new design, you go in with SimGym’s structured friction report and a prioritized list of issues to address before the live test begins.
vs. Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar: Clarity and Hotjar give you qualitative insight from real shoppers after launch. SimGym gives you qualitative signal from AI shoppers before launch. The accuracy gap is real and Shopify is transparent about it. But the timing advantage, catching friction before it hits revenue, is the core value proposition and it is not available anywhere else in the Shopify ecosystem right now.
Shopify Integration: What Actually Works
What Works Natively: Theme comparison between your active theme and any saved theme in your Theme Library; add-to-cart rate simulation; cart value simulation; navigation pattern analysis; qualitative shopper feedback on layout and navigation; simulation results delivered inside Shopify Admin; charges billed directly through your existing Shopify account.
What Requires Configuration: Shopify Network Intelligence must be enabled before SimGym will run. This is a platform-level setting, not a SimGym setting, and it is listed as a hard requirement. If you have not already enabled SNI, that is the first step before installing SimGym.
What Does Not Sync Automatically: SimGym currently cannot compare more than two themes in a single simulation. It does not test checkout flow beyond the add-to-cart event. Video content within themes does not play during simulations based on early user reports, which means stores with video-heavy product pages may get incomplete friction data.
Integration Depth in Context
Feature Analysis: Because SimGym is built by Shopify and runs inside Shopify Admin, it has access to your actual theme code and store structure rather than a scraped or cached version of your site. That is a meaningful technical advantage over any third-party simulation tool that would have to approximate your store’s behavior from the outside. The depth of that native access is what makes the persona-tuning to your specific store possible.
If you want to understand why Shopify’s native platform speed improvements matter as context for SimGym’s simulation accuracy, the article on how Shopify storefronts have gotten measurably faster explains the platform infrastructure that SimGym is running on top of.
Emerging: The native integration means zero technical lift to get started. Install, enable SNI if you have not already, add a second theme to your library, and run a simulation. That is the entire setup process.
Growth: The integration depth matters most here because growth-stage brands often have more complex theme customizations. Because SimGym accesses your actual theme code rather than a rendered screenshot, it is more likely to catch friction points that exist in the real shopping experience rather than in a surface-level visual review.
Established: At this stage, the integration’s limitation becomes more apparent. You cannot test more than two themes at once, which means if you have three or four redesign concepts in development, you are running sequential simulations rather than a single comprehensive comparison. That is a workflow constraint worth planning around.
Pricing vs. ROI: The Honest Calculation
SimGym is a specialist tool that adds a capability your current stack cannot provide: pre-launch behavioral simulation. The ROI calculation is straightforward at the growth and established stages.
The ROI Math at the Growth Stage
- Cost per simulation: $10 USD after trial credits
- Illustrative benchmark: A theme change that drops conversion by 1% on a store doing $150K monthly revenue costs approximately $1,500 per month in lost revenue while you diagnose and reverse the change
- Typical diagnosis and reversal timeline: 2 to 4 weeks, meaning $3,000 to $6,000 in lost revenue before the fix is live
- SimGym simulation cost to catch that risk before launch: $10 to $30 for a series of simulations
- Net ROI: The math is not close. The question is not whether $10 is worth it. The question is whether the simulation is accurate enough to trust.
- The constraint is not the platform cost. It is whether the AI Research Preview version is stable enough to give you reliable signal on your specific store.
Emerging Stage ROI: At under $50K monthly revenue, the ROI math is harder to make dramatic. A 1% conversion drop costs less in absolute dollars. The more honest case for SimGym at this stage is that it gives you a structured evaluation framework for a theme change that you would otherwise evaluate by showing it to friends and family. That is worth $10.
Growth Stage ROI: This is where SimGym is most clearly worth it. The cost of a bad launch is real and measurable. The cost of a simulation is $10. Even if the simulation is only 70% accurate in predicting real shopper behavior, catching one friction point before launch that would have cost $2,000 to diagnose and reverse is a 200x return on the simulation cost.
Established Stage ROI: At this stage, the ROI comes from compressing the idea-to-validated-winner timeline. If SimGym eliminates two out of four redesign concepts before they reach your development queue, you save the developer time, QA time, and live test risk associated with building and testing those weaker concepts. Illustrative benchmark: if a development sprint costs $5,000 and SimGym eliminates one unnecessary sprint per quarter, the annual ROI on $40 in simulation costs is significant.
User Experience and Team Adoption
Who Manages This Day-to-Day:
- Emerging: The founder or operator directly. No technical knowledge required. 30 minutes total from install to simulation results.
- Growth: A marketing manager or ecommerce manager. SimGym fits naturally into the pre-launch review process alongside screenshot reviews and stakeholder approvals. Realistic weekly time commitment if used regularly: under one hour.
- Established: A CRO manager or ecommerce director, used as part of a structured pre-launch checklist. The simulation output feeds into the design review and development briefing process.
The Honest Reality from Early Users
App Store Reviews, February 2026: The most detailed early review, from a store that had enough traffic to run live A/B tests simultaneously, found that SimGym’s results diverged from their actual A/B test data. They also reported frequent crashes and video content not playing during simulations. This is the most important limitation to understand before you commit to SimGym as a decision-making tool. It is in AI Research Preview for a reason.
Pros and Cons: The Honest Assessment
Strategic Advantages
Advantage 1: First-Party Platform Data That No Third Party Can Replicate
(Source: Feature Analysis / Shopify Official Communications)
SimGym’s AI shopper personas are trained on behavioral data from billions of real Shopify purchases. No third-party CRO tool, user testing platform, or AI simulation service has access to that data set. That is a structural moat that makes SimGym’s simulation more grounded in actual Shopify shopper behavior than anything else available in the ecosystem. Whether the current version fully leverages that advantage is a separate question, but the data foundation is real and it will only improve as the product matures.
Advantage 2: Pre-Launch Timing That No Other Tool Provides
(Source: Feature Analysis)
Every other behavioral analytics tool in the Shopify ecosystem operates after launch. SimGym operates before launch. That timing advantage is the entire value proposition and it is genuinely unique. For merchants who have experienced the specific pain of a redesign that dropped conversion, the ability to get any signal before launch is worth something, even if that signal is directional rather than definitive.
Advantage 3: Zero Technical Lift to Run a Simulation
(Source: Feature Analysis)
You do not need a developer, a CRO agency, or a user testing panel to run a SimGym simulation. You need a Shopify store, a second theme in your library, and ten minutes. That accessibility makes it available to merchants at every stage, not just the ones with dedicated optimization teams.
Advantage 4: Native Integration Means Native Billing and Native Support
(Source: Feature Analysis)
Because SimGym is built by Shopify, charges run through your existing Shopify account, support comes from Shopify’s team, and updates happen automatically as the product develops. There is no vendor relationship to manage, no separate contract, and no risk of the tool being deprecated because the company behind it shuts down.
Honest Limitations
Three Things Most SimGym Reviews Won’t Tell You
- The results may not match your live A/B test data. The most substantive early review directly compared SimGym’s output to a simultaneously running live A/B test and found the results diverged. Shopify is transparent that simulated results can differ from actual shopper behavior, but the degree of divergence matters. Until more merchants with live test data publish comparisons, you cannot know how reliable the signal is for your specific store type. Treat SimGym as a hypothesis generator, not a verdict. (Source: App Store Reviews, February 2026)
- The app is crashing in early use. Multiple early reviewers reported crashes and video content not playing during simulations. This is consistent with AI Research Preview status, but it means you should not plan a SimGym simulation the night before a launch. Build in buffer time and treat the tool as experimental, not production-ready. (Source: App Store Reviews, February 2026)
- You can only compare two themes at a time. If you have multiple redesign concepts in development, you are running sequential simulations rather than a comprehensive multi-variant comparison. For established brands with complex design processes, this is a real workflow constraint that adds time to the pre-launch evaluation process. (Source: Feature Analysis / Shopify Official Documentation)
Shopify SimGym vs. Microsoft Clarity vs. Hotjar: The Deciding Factor
Real Results: How Shopify Brands Are Using SimGym
Case Study 1: Growth Stage Fashion Brand, Pre-Redesign Validation
The Problem: A Shopify brand in the apparel category was preparing to launch a new premium theme with a significantly restructured navigation and a revised collection hierarchy. The previous theme had been live for two years and the team was concerned that longtime customers would struggle to find their way around the new structure.
What Changed: The brand ran a SimGym simulation comparing the current theme against the new theme before any announcement or soft launch. The simulation flagged the new collection naming convention as a friction point, with AI shoppers consistently failing to navigate from the homepage to the correct sub-collection without backtracking.
The Outcome: The team revised the collection labels before launch, using clearer, more direct naming that matched how shoppers described products rather than how the brand internally categorized them. The redesign launched without the navigation regression the simulation had identified.
Verification: Merchant-reported outcome based on SimGym simulation output. Live post-launch performance data not available for this case study.
Case Study 2: Established Stage Home Goods Brand, Seasonal Layout Test
The Problem: A Shopify Plus brand preparing for a major seasonal campaign had two competing homepage layout concepts from their design team. One prioritized a full-width hero image with a single featured product. The other used a grid layout featuring four products simultaneously. The team needed to choose one without the time to run a live A/B test before the campaign launch date.
What Changed: The brand ran two sequential SimGym simulations, one for each layout concept, and compared the add-to-cart rate and navigation pattern outputs. The single-hero layout outperformed the grid layout in the simulation, with AI shoppers showing clearer navigation paths and higher simulated add-to-cart rates.
The Outcome: The team launched with the single-hero layout. Whether the simulation’s verdict matched real shopper behavior was not formally tracked against a control, but the brand reported no post-launch conversion regression from the seasonal layout change.
Verification: Merchant-reported outcome. Simulation results directional, not statistically validated against live data.
Case Study 3: Growth Stage Supplement Brand, Navigation Restructure
The Problem: A Shopify brand in the health and wellness category had grown its product catalog significantly and was restructuring its navigation from a flat collection structure to a tiered one with sub-categories. The team was concerned that the new structure would create cognitive load for shoppers who were used to the simpler navigation.
What Changed: SimGym’s simulation identified that the second tier of the new navigation was not visible enough on mobile, with AI shoppers consistently failing to discover sub-category options without scrolling further than expected.
The Outcome: The team added a visual indicator to the mobile navigation that made the sub-category tier more discoverable before launch. The navigation restructure launched without the mobile discovery issue the simulation had flagged.
Verification: Merchant-reported outcome based on SimGym simulation output. Mobile session data post-launch confirmed improved sub-category discovery rates compared to the pre-restructure baseline.
My Verdict by Stage
Emerging Stage ($0 to $50K Monthly) – Conditional Yes
If you have a theme change coming and you have never had any structured feedback on how your store performs for a new visitor, SimGym is worth $10. It gives you a framework for thinking about friction that you would not otherwise have access to at this stage. But do not treat the simulation output as a verdict. Treat it as a checklist of things to double-check before you go live. The bigger risk at the emerging stage is not a broken navigation. It is an unclear value proposition, and SimGym does not test that.
The trigger: You are switching themes and you want more than your own eyes on the new layout before it goes live.
The risk of waiting: You launch a new theme that creates friction you could have caught in ten minutes for $10.
Growth Stage ($50K to $500K Monthly) – Strong Yes
This is SimGym’s home. The cost of a bad launch is real and measurable. The simulation cost is $10. Even with the current limitations of the AI Research Preview version, running a simulation before a theme change or navigation restructure is the right call. The key is to treat the output as directional signal that informs your pre-launch checklist, not as a final verdict that replaces live testing. Use it to catch the obvious friction before launch, then use Shopify’s Rollouts feature to validate the winner with real traffic after launch.
The trigger: Any theme change, navigation restructure, or seasonal layout update is on the calendar.
The risk of waiting: A redesign that drops conversion by 1% costs you $1,500 per month at $150K monthly revenue while you diagnose and reverse it. SimGym costs $10 to potentially prevent that.
Established Stage ($500K to $2M+ Monthly) – Conditional Yes
At this stage, SimGym earns its place as an idea filter, not a final validator. Use it to screen redesign concepts before they reach your development queue. Use Shopify Rollouts to validate the survivors with real traffic. The two-step process, simulate first, then A/B test the strongest concept, is faster and cheaper than going straight to a live test with an unscreened concept. The current App Store review from a store with enough traffic to run its own tests is worth heeding: if you have the traffic to run a live A/B test, do that for final validation. SimGym is the step before that step.
The trigger: A major redesign or new campaign layout is in the concept phase and you want to eliminate the weakest ideas before committing development resources.
The risk of waiting: You invest developer time building out a concept that SimGym would have flagged as a friction risk in ten minutes.
The Question Worth Sitting With
The last time your store went through a significant layout or navigation change, how did you decide whether the new version was ready to go live? If the honest answer is “we looked at it, it seemed fine, and we launched,” SimGym exists to give you a more structured answer to that question. The real question is not whether $10 is worth spending. It is whether you are currently making launch decisions with less information than you could have.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Shopify SimGym and how does it work?
Shopify SimGym is a first-party Shopify app, built and maintained by Shopify, that uses AI agents with human-like shopper personas to simulate buyer behavior on your storefront before you make changes live. The AI shoppers are trained on behavioral data from billions of real purchases across the Shopify platform and tuned to your specific store’s category and customer type. They actively browse your store, navigate collections, add products to cart, and report back on add-to-cart rates, cart value, and navigation friction. Currently in AI Research Preview with a waitlist, SimGym is designed to give merchants early signal on whether a theme change or layout update will help or hurt conversion before real customers see it.
Is Shopify SimGym better than A/B testing?
SimGym and A/B testing serve different moments in the optimization cycle and are genuinely complementary rather than competitive. SimGym operates before launch using AI shoppers to give you directional signal on whether a change is likely to help or hurt conversion. A/B testing operates after launch using real shoppers to give you statistically validated proof of which version actually performs better. Shopify is explicit that SimGym results can differ from actual shopper behavior, which means SimGym is not a replacement for live A/B testing. The right workflow is to use SimGym to screen concepts before launch and Shopify’s native Rollouts feature to validate the winner with real traffic after launch.
How much does Shopify SimGym cost per simulation?
SimGym is free to install. During the AI Research Preview period, Shopify provides trial credits that allow you to run simulations at no cost. Once those trial credits are depleted, the cost is $10 USD per simulation run. Charges are billed in USD through your existing Shopify account. There is no monthly subscription fee. You pay only for the simulations you run, which makes it a low-risk tool to experiment with during the trial credit period.
How do I get access to Shopify SimGym?
Install the SimGym app from the Shopify App Store, then click to join the waitlist inside the app. Shopify’s documentation states that waitlist requests are typically processed within approximately one business day. Before you install, make sure Shopify Network Intelligence is enabled on your store, as this is listed as a prerequisite for SimGym to function. You also need at least one additional theme saved in your Shopify Theme Library beyond your currently active theme, since SimGym compares your active theme against a saved alternative.
Does Shopify SimGym work for stores without a lot of traffic?
Yes, and this is actually one of SimGym’s strongest use cases. Shopify’s Product Lead Aaron Glazer specifically called out low-traffic stores as a scenario where SimGym is “absolutely hugely beneficial,” because those stores cannot run meaningful live A/B tests without waiting weeks or months to accumulate enough data for statistical significance. SimGym lets a low-traffic store get directional signal on a theme change or navigation update in the time it takes to run a simulation, without needing to expose real customers to the change first. The limitation is that the simulation is directional, not statistically validated, but for a store that cannot run live tests, directional signal is significantly better than nothing.
What can I actually test with Shopify SimGym right now?
In its current AI Research Preview version, SimGym supports theme-to-theme comparison: your active published theme versus one alternative theme saved in your Theme Library. The simulation outputs add-to-cart rate comparisons, cart value signals, and qualitative feedback on navigation experience, checkout experience, and store layout. You cannot currently test more than two themes in a single simulation, and video content within themes does not play during simulations based on early user reports. Shopify has indicated that the use cases will expand as the product develops beyond the Research Preview stage, with seasonal layouts, promotional structures, and navigation restructures all mentioned as target use cases.
Who should not use Shopify SimGym?
Merchants who are pre-revenue or processing fewer than 50 orders per month should wait. At that stage, the friction SimGym is designed to catch is less likely to be the primary barrier to growth, and the $10 per simulation is better spent on traffic or ad testing. Merchants who need statistically validated proof of conversion lift to justify a major investment decision should also not rely on SimGym for that validation. Shopify is explicit that simulated results can differ from actual shopper behavior. For final validation of a conversion hypothesis, you need a live A/B test with real traffic. SimGym is the step before that step, not a replacement for it.
Review Information: Published February 2026 | Last Verified: February 2026 | Next Scheduled Review: May 2026 | Reviewer: Steve Hutt, eCommerce Fastlane | Pricing verified directly from apps.shopify.com/simgym | App Store rating verified February 2026 (2.7/5.0, 3 reviews) | SimGym launched December 8, 2025


