Shopify this week announced ‘Agentic Storefronts,’ a new capability that allows merchants to surface products and complete purchases inside AI chat environments such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. The company says the feature is designed to help brands appear “where decisions are made,” as shopping increasingly shifts toward conversational AI interfaces.
According to Shopify, Agentic Storefronts enables merchants to make their products discoverable across multiple AI platforms through a single setup in the Shopify admin. Instead of building separate integrations for each service, Shopify’s catalog syndicates product data automatically, keeping pricing, inventory and availability in sync across channels. Shopify says this approach also preserves attribution and reporting within the merchant dashboard.
A central focus of the announcement is brand control. Shopify states that merchants retain ownership of customer relationships and remain the merchant of record, even when purchases happen inside AI chats. Brands can define how products are structured using schemas, attributes and metafields, while policies, FAQs and brand voice are managed through Shopify’s Knowledge Base app. The aim, Shopify says, is to ensure AI agents represent products accurately and consistently.
“AI gives us all a new tool to build experiences that weren’t possible before,” said Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s VP of Product. She added that Shopify’s goal is to help merchants show up across fast-emerging shopping experiences without losing control of their brand.
Shopify is also leaning on the scale of its existing commerce network. Its catalog aggregates signals from millions of products to infer categories, extract attributes and cluster similar items so AI agents can return more relevant results. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke described the move as making “every Shopify store agent-ready by default,” positioning the platform as a foundation for AI-driven commerce.
For shoppers, the experience is designed to be seamless: customers can ask for products, receive accurate recommendations, ask follow-up questions and complete checkout either in-chat or on the merchant’s site. Orders flow into Shopify as normal, with post-purchase experiences remaining under merchant control.
Still, the shift raises practical considerations. Merchants may need to invest time in structuring product data and maintaining knowledge bases to avoid inaccuracies in AI responses, and reliance on AI platforms introduces new intermediaries between brands and customers.
Why this matters to ecommerce merchants
Agentic Storefronts point to AI conversations becoming a new discovery and sales channel. For merchants, the appeal is broader reach without complex integrations — but success will depend on how well product data and brand messaging are prepared for AI agents. For newer businesses, this could lower barriers to emerging channels; for established brands, it adds another surface where consistency directly affects sales.
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Matt Walsh is the Head of Content at Ecommercetrix. He also creates video content for the site and its associated YouTube channel.
Having gained a degree in Literature and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in International Relations from Dublin City University, Matt worked in the marketing world for a decade before taking up an education role — teaching languages, literature and creative writing in London.
Matt is an Adobe Certified Associate in Photoshop and Illustrator, and also holds a certificate in digital marketing from DMI (Digital Marketing Institute), along with a postgraduate certificate in Design Thinking, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Creative Thinking from Trinity College Dublin.