The New Middlemen

How Shopify is making itself the adapter between AI platforms and merchants.

Our January article on agentic commerce asked who would control the buy button as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Amazon each staked out positions. Two months of market data have produced early answers: AI proved effective at helping people find and compare products, but getting them to complete purchases inside the chat proved far harder.

Online window shopping

OpenAI announced on March 24 that it was scaling back Instant Checkout, the in-chat purchasing feature that it had launched last year with Etsy sellers and select Shopify merchants. The company found that users browsed and compared products inside ChatGPT but rarely completed purchases there. They preferred to switch to merchant storefronts where they already had accounts and saved payment methods.

The redesigned shopping experience leans into that behavior. ChatGPT now offers richer visual product results, image-based similar-item search, and side-by-side comparisons that display price, reviews, and features. Purchases complete on the merchant’s own storefront, either through an in-app browser on mobile or a new tab on desktop.

The Agentic Commerce Protocol, which OpenAI co-developed with Stripe as the technical backbone of Instant Checkout, survives the pivot. The protocol now serves as a connector between AI agents and merchant payment infrastructure, routing transactions to the merchant’s checkout.

The price of discovery

The fee structures across AI shopping platforms have already diverged. OpenAI charges merchants a 4% fee on sales completed through ChatGPT, on top of Shopify’s standard transaction and payment processing fees. Google AI Mode and Gemini currently charge nothing.

A separate standard, the Universal Commerce Protocol — not to be confused with OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol — was co-developed by Shopify and Google and has gained endorsement from more than 20 retailers and platforms. UCP handles discount codes, loyalty credentials, subscription billing cadences, and selling-terms confirmation across AI surfaces, giving merchants a single integration point for commerce logic that would otherwise need to be rebuilt for each AI channel.

The Shopify layer

On March 24, Shopify activated Agentic Storefronts by default for every eligible store on its platform. Merchants did not need to install an app, configure an integration, or manage a product feed. Products from millions of Shopify stores became discoverable across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot simultaneously, syndicated through Shopify Catalog’s structured product data.

The architecture keeps the merchant at the center of the transaction. Orders from AI channels arrive in the Shopify admin tagged with referral attribution, so a store owner can see exactly which AI surface generated a given sale. The merchant remains the merchant of record throughout, owning the customer relationship, the post-purchase communication, and the fulfillment. Checkout happens on the merchant’s own storefront, with their payment methods, their customizations, and their branding intact.

Shopify also released the Agentic Plan, which extends its AI commerce infrastructure to brands that do not use Shopify for e-commerce at all. Any brand, on any platform, can now add products to Shopify Catalog and sell across AI channels through Shopify’s plumbing. The play positions Shopify as the universal adapter between merchants and AI surfaces, regardless of who hosts the storefront.

AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores has increased sevenfold since January 2025, when the first agentic commerce integrations went live. AI-attributed orders have grown elevenfold over the same period, outpacing the traffic growth and suggesting that AI-referred shoppers convert at higher rates than the baseline.

A fragile balance

AI platforms will keep trying to pull checkout closer to the conversation. The 4% fee that OpenAI already charges suggests that the discovery layer will not stay free of transaction ambitions forever. For now, though, the infrastructure has settled around a model in which AI handles curation and the merchant handles the sale.

Shopify built the adapter layer that connects merchants to every major AI surface, and in doing so made its Catalog the product database that AI agents query by default. E-commerce has split into two layers: AI platforms control discovery, and merchants control checkout, with Shopify connecting the two.