Shopify Opens Its Catalog to AI Agents and Bets on Agentic Commerce
Shopify announced this week the full opening of its product catalog to artificial intelligence agents, eliminating the manual approval requirement that had been in place since the feature's initial launch. The move is part of the company's broader strategy to become the standard infrastructure for what the industry calls "agentic commerce" — a model in which AI agents act as autonomous shopping assistants, browsing catalogs, comparing prices, and completing purchases on behalf of users.
The Catalog API, which allows AI systems to query products from millions of merchants in real time, is now available to any developer with an API key. There is no longer a review process or requirement to have an active store on the Shopify platform. This opening marks a significant turning point: what was once an exclusive resource for merchants on the Shopify platform has become an open data infrastructure that any brand can use, regardless of where their e-commerce is hosted.
The universal commerce protocol
The Catalog API does not operate in isolation — it is the discovery layer of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard co-developed by Shopify with Google. While the API handles making products searchable and understandable for agents, the UCP defines how the actual transactions should occur: cart creation, checkout, payment, and post-purchase, through any platform and any payment processor.
The UCP already has the support of more than 20 retailers and platforms, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, Stripe, Etsy, Target and Wayfair. The architecture uses established protocols such as REST, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Agent2Agent (A2A), ensuring that agents from different platforms can interact with catalogs in a standardized way.
Gil Greenberg, product manager at Shopify, explained at the time of the WebMCP implementation for checkout that the idea is to provide "structured and efficient APIs, intentionally designed via UCP to ensure accurate commercial facts, mandatory disclosures and delivery requirements." In other words, instead of agents having to scrape HTML pages built for humans — with all the risks of outdated data and interpretation errors — they now communicate directly with structured data layers.
Structured data beats scraping
One of the central points of Shopify's strategy is that agents powered by its catalog convert twice as much as those using scraped web data. This difference is not trivial: when an AI agent needs to present products to a user, the quality of the available information directly determines whether the recommendation will be trusted. Scraped data often presents outdated prices, incorrect stock levels, and missing product context — factors that erode buyer confidence and cost merchants sales.
Harley Finkelstein, Shopify's president, explained during the second quarter 2026 earnings call that "while search engines rank by popularity against a hand-keyed set of keywords, AI agents make multiple calls to the Shopify catalog, working with richer structured data to match products to the buyer's specific intent." The practical result, according to the company, is that half of all AI-referred sessions end directly on a product page — 2.5 times more than what is observed with traditional search.
Shopify also published data showing that 75% of orders attributed to AI in the second quarter of 2026 occurred in categories outside the top 100 by sales volume. This pattern reinforces the hypothesis that agentic commerce has a greater impact on niche products and the long tail of online retail, where traditional shoppers often feel overwhelmed by the choice among thousands of options.
The bet on agentic and scaling challenges
The opening of the catalog to the entire developer community occurs at a time when Shopify itself has positioned itself as the primary beneficiary of the transformation of AI-mediated purchasing behavior. Company data shows that AI-driven traffic and orders tripled compared to the same period last year. The number of conversations powered by Sidekick, the company's AI assistant, exceeded 100 million since January 2025.
The infrastructure behind these figures is substantial. The Catalog API processes billions of products from millions of merchants, normalizing data into a universal taxonomy and verifying prices and stock in real time. With the launch of the Agentic plan, brands that do not operate stores on Shopify can now list products in the catalog and sell through Shopify's "agentic storefronts," without having to migrate their e-commerce.
Not all retailers share this vision. Amazon, for example, blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from making purchases on its platform, and Adidas also restricted AI agents. This divergence reflects a broader debate about how platforms should balance control of the user experience with openness to new discovery channels.
What remains open is how this model will evolve as more AI platforms — beyond ChatGPT, Copilot and Google, already integrated — adopt protocols like the UCP. If agentic commerce consolidates as the standard for product discovery in the coming years, the question is not whether catalog API infrastructure will become as essential as current web API infrastructure, but when this recognition will materialize universally.
Sources: The Verge, TechCrunch, TechCrunch
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