Every six months, Shopify ships an Edition. And every six months, our clients ask us the same thing: So what's in it for us?
It's a reasonable question. Roughly 150 updates ship in every Edition, and the average brand only needs to care about a handful of them.
But this time, if you step back from those 150 updates and look at the bigger picture, a pattern emerges: for two decades, Shopify has been selling you the software you needed to build the best possible e-commerce website.
This Edition is the strongest sign yet that they are now ready to turn into the digital commerce layer that powers the entire World Wide Web.
For DTC brands, that's both good news and bad news. Here's why.
Your Catalog Is Now Our Catalog
When Shopify entered the agentic commerce race, they did so with their usual strategy: a new discovery channel was just emerging, and they wanted to be front and center, enabling their merchants to succeed in this new world. To accomplish this, they partnered with the major AI platforms (ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity) to syndicate each merchant's product catalog and, in some cases, allow direct checkout.
The technical approach included a few false starts, but ultimately it involved partnering with Google to release UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol), a protocol that enables LLMs (or any third-party system, for that matter) to seamlessly browse a merchant's catalog, manage a persistent cart, and check out. I will spare you the technicalities of the protocol, but if you're curious, I recently published a more detailed breakdown of UCP and what makes it so cool (and better than OpenAI's ACP, in my humble opinion).
Back then, we speculated that this created the potential (and the danger) for the entire Internet to turn into a giant Amazon, where every single product on Earth is just one prompt away. The theory went that, due to the very nature of conversational shopping, this may allow an entire long tail of brands to emerge and compete with the incumbents without having to match their gargantuan marketing budgets. At the same time, we also speculated that this may lead to the decline of the DTC storefront, especially in some of the more commoditized categories.
These were very long-term bets, and we're still waiting to see how they play out. So far, it's turned out that the tricks that make a brand surface in AI conversations are very similar to the ones that make brands surface on Google, Meta, and all the other channels we already know and love. As for the demise of the DTC website, even though we work with tens of brands in eight- and nine-figure territory, we do not have a single client for which AI sales make up more than 0.5% of online GMV (if you exclude Shop, which Shopify disingenuously rolls up into their Agentic dashboard—more on that below).
However, what has changed with this Edition is that Shopify has made its entire merchant base more accessible and omnipresent than ever. In addition to syndicating their merchants' products to all the usual suspects, anyone can now integrate with the Catalog MCP, Cart MCP, and Checkout MCP (the three modules that make up the UCP specification) to build a full-fledged shopping experience powered by Shopify's infrastructure.
While they were at it, Shopify also strengthened the Catalog MCP with:
- Image and similarity search (both pretty self-explanatory).
- Offers from multiple sellers. The same product can be offered by multiple Shopify stores, each with its own listing.
- Affiliate placements (invite-only). By opting into the feature, platforms can surface paid placements in the search results and receive a commission on sales.
To show how some of the new functionality could be used in the wild (and, I guess, to let their dev team have some fun), Shopify released a few cool demos to go with it:
- All Set, where you can tell an AI about your trip and get product recommendations.
- Sourced, where you can upload a picture and buy the products in it.
- Showroom, where you can buy the products featured in your favorite movies and TV series.
- Starred, where you can get product recommendations based on your daily horoscope.
- Pippin, where the 21st-century version of Clippy gives you board game recommendations.
I encourage you to check them out, because they're really fun!
The Shop App and the Buyer Identity Play
If the agentic infrastructure is the plumbing, Shop is where it becomes something a consumer can actually interact with. In this Edition, Shopify has improved the app in several ways.
First of all, Shopify is exposing new surfaces within the Shop app to help consumers discover the products they're looking for. This includes:
- Merchandised categories, curated both by Shopify and by third parties (e.g., Selleb), that showcase select products and brands.
- Shop Minis, third-party mini-apps that run within Shop and create new ways for the consumer to engage with the ecosystem (e.g., recipe trackers).
- The Shop skill, which allows consumers to easily connect the Shop universe to an LLM/harness (e.g., Hermes, OpenClaw).
But the more interesting development, if you ask me, is how Shopify is starting to integrate Shop within the rest of its ecosystem.
Thanks to the years it has spent evolving the Shop app and pushing Shopify merchants to enable Shop-based sign-in in their storefronts and checkouts, Shopify is now sitting on what is probably (after Amazon's) the largest consumer identity graph in the digital commerce industry. They are now starting to activate that data in pretty interesting ways.
More specifically, Shopify has announced that the Catalog MCP will soon support personalized searches. As long as you authenticate users via Shop (which you can now do even outside of a Shopify site), you can pass a buyer-linked token when making requests to Shopify's catalog. When that happens, the search results will be personalized according to the information Shopify has about the buyer's preferences and behavior.
What would be incredible—and this is a very long shot—is if merchants could leverage that same data on their storefronts as well. How cool would it be if you could have your customers authenticate via Shop and use Shopify's identity graph to seamlessly surface personalized collections and search results? Given the privacy issues involved and the architectural limitations of merchandising in Online Store (we have an article coming out about this soon), I don't see this coming any time soon—but hey, a man can still dream.
With these features and improvements, Shopify has turned Shop into the de facto demo for what can be accomplished with their catalog. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Shop app had been recently rewritten, at least in part, to use the new UCP specification rather than Shopify's internal APIs, so that it can serve as a sort of reference implementation for the new capabilities.
How Should Merchants Feel About All This?
For two decades, Shopify has told its merchants that it had no plans of becoming a marketplace (despite some marketplace-y functionality coming to Shop way before ChatGPT was ever a thing). Instead, they were focused on providing the best possible tools for each merchant to build their beautiful walled garden.
What no one could foresee is that a new shopping surface would come along that would force the entire Internet to turn into one huge marketplace.
When that happened, they decided the best strategy was to ride the wave rather than hide from it. And Shopify being the powerhouse it is, they nailed it: between their work on UCP and the identity graph they are building with Shop, it's not an exaggeration to say that they have become the commerce infrastructure for the open Web—so much so that they have now got Amazon scrambling to catch up. Whatever shifts happen next, I fully trust that Shopify merchants will be in the best possible position to benefit from them.
At the same time, make no mistake: some disintermediation is coming. Just like marketplaces, agentic commerce offers merchants a new distribution channel but also requires them to give up control over the shopping experience. Sure, UCP affords some flexibility, but it will never be able to replicate your merchandising strategy or your in-cart upsells, nor should it necessarily: when a consumer is checking out via ChatGPT, they are often in a very different state of mind than when they are browsing your site.
This last point, I think (hope?), is the point we should all be focusing on: as agentic shopping channels get bigger and bigger, the website is not going away, but it will definitely evolve: rather than being a channel consumers have to interact with, it will gradually become one consumers want to interact with.
Because of this, DTC websites may end up getting less traffic than before, but (most of) that traffic will likely be much more engaged. Customers will end up on your site having already done their homework, and looking to really immerse themselves in your brand universe. This will allow merchants to create much richer, deeper, weirder DTC experiences that aim to create a connection, not just usher the customer out the door as quickly as possible—what our friends at Future Commerce called Dork Mode in a prescient 2021 article.
And while no one knows what form this will take (more on our possible futures in an upcoming article) or how long it will take for us to get there (remember: on average, agentic sales make up 0.5% of GMV for our clients), that is something I can get excited about.
