Amid the agentic commerce race, Shopify has been investing heavily in new products, features, and infrastructure to help merchants selling on its platform take full advantage of AI, which many believe is poised to reshape online retail.
The Ottawa e-commerce giant announced yesterday that it has co-developed a new open standard for AI agent-based shopping with Google, partnered with Google and Microsoft to help consumers find and buy its merchants’ offerings more easily through their chatbots, and is launching a new customer plan to expand its product catalogue to non-clients.
“I like to think that we’re building the pickaxes for this gold rush of creativity.”
Vanessa Lee, Shopify
These moves mark the latest developments in Shopify’s push into agentic commerce, which entails the use of autonomous AI agents to buy products online. Consumers are increasingly turning to AI to find, research, and buy products, and many companies and analysts expect that agents will play a significant role in the future of online shopping. While implementing agentic commerce has brought challenges, Shopify appears well-positioned to take some of them on.
“I like to think that we’re building the pickaxes for this gold rush of creativity,” Shopify VP of product Vanessa Lee said in a statement. “All of the work that we’re doing has been about how we set up all of the builders of new shopping experiences so that they can add shopping seamlessly and easily.”
Last year, Shopify and nearly every major retailer, e-commerce platform, and AI incumbent entered the agentic commerce race. Shopify and its e-commerce peers are placing big bets that agentic AI will play a significant role in the future of online shopping, while large tech firms and Shopify partners like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft appear to view agentic commerce as a potentially lucrative path to monetizing their chatbots.
In September, Shopify partnered with OpenAI to let merchants sell through ChatGPT, and at the firm’s bi-annual product showcase in December, Shopify followed that up by unveiling agentic storefronts to improve discoverability of its merchants’ products through other popular chatbots as part of its efforts to make every Shopify store “agent-ready by default.”
For its part, Morgan Stanley estimates that agentic shoppers could capture $190 billion to $385 billion USD of US e-commerce spending—or 10-to-20 percent market share—by 2030.
AI-powered shopping has been on the rise. During Shopify’s Q3 2025 earnings call, president Harley Finkelstein said the firm saw AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores surge 7x and orders attributed to AI jump 11x in 2025. A KPMG survey from later that same month indicated that 78 percent of Canadians are likely to use AI before choosing where to shop, though it also found that concerns regarding privacy and control remain key barriers to adoption.
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This new, increasingly popular channel for selling products could lead to more revenue for Shopify and its merchants. But retailer enthusiasm for AI shopping remains an open question, as while it could boost sales, it could also hurt brand reputation if it leads to poor experiences.
While people are already flocking to chatbots for product recommendations, turning those conversations into purchases has proven complicated given the need to coordinate between a variety of platforms and the lack of standardized data across merchants. For OpenAI, challenges wrangling product data appear to have slowed its AI shopping ambitions, according to The Information. While Shopify has been working to help, making their shared plans a reality has reportedly required lots of hands-on, up-front work.
Agentic commerce could also mean fewer consumers visiting stores directly on platforms like Shopify. Were Shopify to fail to reorient itself for that possibility while competitors like Amazon do, it could be left behind.
Some analysts agree that AI will reshape commerce, and think Shopify is well-positioned to benefit from this shift—provided that it continues to act quickly. In the meantime, Shopify has already reaped some rewards from its AI push: on the back of these efforts and a string of strong quarters, the company’s stock is trading near its all-time high.
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One way Shopify aims to play a role in agentic commerce is through the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard it co-developed with Google to help AI agents to connect and transact with any merchant. Established by Google, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, among others, the UCP is endorsed by over 20 retailers and platforms.
Shopify is also rolling out native shopping on Google Search and the Gemini app soon and updating its Microsoft integration to let Shopify merchants sell via Microsoft’s new Copilot Checkout, as Shopify continues to strike deals with a variety of players in the AI shopping race.
Elsewhere on the agentic commerce front, Shopify is opening up Shopify Catalog—which lists eligible products sold by stores on the company’s platform—to brands not currently using Shopify for their online stores. This will let brands on any platform use Shopify’s infrastructure to sell their products through AI channels. It could be a useful customer acquisition tool, and appears to signify Shopify wants to help build and power agentic commerce more broadly.
This year should bring more clarity as to how popular agentic commerce actually is among consumers and who the winners in the space might be.
Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Feature image courtesy Burst.