Shopify merchants’ products can now be discovered on artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, after the Canadian e-commerce giant announced agentic storefronts in its latest update.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke says the company is making every Shopify store “agent-ready by default.”
The winter edition of the biannual Shopify Editions newsletter, called “the RenAIssance edition,” was released Wednesday. It contains over 150 product updates across the platform, many focusing on integrating and improving AI features for sellers. This includes agentic storefronts–an overhaul to Shopify’s AI-powered assistant Sidekick–and automations like a program to send an email to staff once a certain inventory level is reached.
Building on Shopify’s early-access partnership with ChatGPT’s in-app shopping experience in September, agentic storefronts allow merchants to sell their products across popular AI chatbots once each product page is set up. Merchants define their schema, or the machine-readable code on a product’s page that gets picked up by web crawlers, and group products by attributes and metafields for AI agents to use when presenting products in searches.
The AI agents will also pull Shopify merchants’ policies, frequently asked questions, and brand voice to answer customer questions about brands and offerings, while giving merchants insight into the search trends and topics customers are asking about.
When Shopify’s initial partnership with OpenAI was announced, the ChatGPT maker said merchants would have to pay a small fee for each purchase, and that its chatbot would “optimize the user experience” based on availability, price, and quality.
Shopify said that more agentic storefronts, in addition to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, are “coming soon.” In a statement, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said the company is making every Shopify store “agent-ready by default.”
“In a world where there are new shopping experiences cropping up every few weeks, we’ll make sure Shopify merchants are there and show up strong,” Shopify vice-president of product Vanessa Lee said in a statement.
The winter Editions update continues Shopify’s AI feature push, including another iteration on its AI-based store designs feature through a Sidekick update. Shopify claims merchants can now “talk” to their store theme by telling Sidekick to modify elements through natural language commands like “make this button rounded.”
Other new Sidekick features include Pulse, which delivers personalized advice to merchants based on their store, and a prompt-based custom app builder for the Shopify admin. Merchants can also use Sidekick’s new Flow feature to automate tasks by describing what needs to be accomplished, like tagging customers if they place an order worth more than $200, rather than doing it manually.
Shopify temporarily regained its status as Canada’s most valuable company during the second quarter of 2025, before falling back to second place behind RBC. The e-commerce firm recently set yet another Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales record, generating $14.6 billion USD ($20.2 billion CAD) in total sales over the shopping-centric weekend—a 27-percent jump compared to 2024.
Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
All images courtesy Shopify.