What Horizon is and how the app is laid out

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Once you are signed in, everything you do lives inside a single shell called the Control Tower. It has a sidebar on the left, a top bar across the width of the window, and one page at a time in the middle.

The sidebar starts with “Control Tower” on its own, with no heading: it is the app’s home. It shows what needs you today; see The Control Tower home page. Four sections follow, in this order: “Orders & shipping”, “Products & stock”, “Purchasing & imports” and “Analytics”. “Admin” is pinned at the foot of the sidebar, below a divider, so it stays in reach however far you scroll.

Each section holds a handful of pages:

“Orders & shipping”: “Orders”, “Returns”, “Tracking”, “Customer emails”, “Automation”
“Products & stock”: “Products”, “Inventory”, whose tabs hold stock, movements, batches and locations, and “Digital Passports”
“Purchasing & imports”: “Purchasing”, “Suppliers”, “Freight & customs”
“Analytics”: “Insights”, “AI Analyst”
“Admin”: “Billing”, “Settings”

The “Purchasing” entry carries a badge with the number of open reorder alerts, so you can see it without opening the page.

“Automation” holds what runs on its own. It opens on “Activity”: what the automations did today, and a “Waiting for you” card with the orders and connection problems that need you. Its other tabs are the “Shipping rules”, the “Checkout methods” mapping and “All automations”, which lists every engine with a link to where it is edited. The rules and the mapping were in “Settings” until September 2026, and old links to them open their tabs there. See Automation rules.

Your stores, carriers and ERP are connected in “Settings”, next to your printers and API keys. They were an Integrations section of the sidebar until September 2026, and old links to them open their Settings sections. See Stores in Settings.

On a phone the sidebar is a drawer: the menu button at the top left opens it, and Escape or a tap outside closes it.

The top bar

The top bar reads, from left to right: a search pill that opens the command palette, your shipping balance, the help shortcut, the alerts bell, the language switcher, the light and dark controls, and your account menu.

The balance shows what is available in your shipping wallet, in your account currency, with “Top up” beside it. Pressing it opens “Billing” at its top up card. It only shows for the account owner, once a wallet exists. On a tablet it shrinks to the amount, and on a phone it is hidden; “Top up shipping balance” stays in the account menu at every width. See Automatic top-up.
The question mark opens “Help & Support”. It is no longer in the sidebar. See Help and support.
The account menu, the round button with your initials, shows the address you are signed in with, then “Top up shipping balance” (when there is a balance to show), “Your profile”, which opens your profile in “Settings”, and “Sign out”. Inside the Shopify admin there is no “Sign out”. See Sign out and sessions.

The command palette lists every page of the sidebar, “Help & Support” and the Settings sections your role can open, the same ones the Settings list shows you, so it can never offer you a page that is not really there. Beside each page it shows where that page lives: “Home” for “Control Tower”, the section heading for a page in a section, “Admin” for “Billing” and “Settings”, and “Settings” for a Settings section. Open it with Ctrl and K, or Command and K on a Mac.

How screens are addressed

Every page in the shell is reachable as a query parameter on the app’s own address, in the form ?tab= followed by the page’s name. That means you can bookmark a page, share a link to it with a colleague, and reload without being sent back to the start.

Pages that have their own sub-views add a second parameter of their own, such as an inventory view or a passports view. Those are described on each page’s guide. “Orders” opens on its “Needs attention” view, the orders waiting for you, rather than on its first stage. See Orders.

Settings works the same way: the section you have open stays in the address. Reloading, sharing the link or following a link from another page opens that same section.

Your browser’s back and forward buttons move between the pages you opened in the app, and through the sections and views you opened inside a page. They work the same way inside the Shopify admin. Each entry in the browser’s history is named after its page.

If you have unsaved changes in Settings and leave for another page, from the sidebar, the command palette, the back button or “Resume guided setup”, or you sign out, the app asks first. Choose Cancel to stay on the page and keep your changes. Switching between Settings sections keeps your changes without asking.

Links made before the app was reorganised still land somewhere real. A link to the invoices tab opens the Billing page, which now contains invoices. A link to the passports tab opens “Digital Passports” at its passports view. Links to the retired Locations, Warehouse and Dispatch pages open wherever each of their views lives now; see Inventory, batches and locations and Dispatch.

When you reload, the app returns you to the page you were last on. If it has nothing to go on, it opens “Control Tower”.

What is not in the shell

A few screens sit outside the Control Tower entirely: the sign-in and sign-up surfaces, the legal pages, the passport wizard and bulk import, and the portals you send to your suppliers and your customers. Each has its own guide.