Agents Are the New Users: What It Takes for AI to Shop for Us | Shopify's Rohit Mishra

Shopify builds the rails for a world where agents shop

Shopify is betting that AI agents become a distinct class of shopper, and that owning the rails for them keeps merchants in front of buyers who no longer browse. The bet depends on trust moving faster than it has so far, since shoppers will hand an agent their cart long before they hand it their card. Shopify's answer is to build for agents in the open with Google and the card networks, and to supply the catalog, checkout and wallet layers.

Takeaways

• Agent traffic tripled and converts far better. Orders from searches that started with AI agents tripled in the second quarter, and agent-originated sessions convert 80% better than organic search, rising to 2.4 times better in watches. Mishra says shoppers arrive with more trust and information upfront.
• Shoppers let agents suggest but not buy. Shopify's holiday survey found over half of shoppers comfortable with AI recommendations and 41% willing to let an agent build their cart, but only 28% willing to let it complete the purchase. Fully delegated, end-to-end purchases still need work on trust.
• Agentic tokens keep card protections intact. Network tokens already replaced the 16-digit card number in more than half of internet transactions. Agentic tokens add which agent is transacting, provisioned per agent and per transaction, so the merchant stays merchant of record and the consumer keeps protections and rewards.
• Fraud and bot attacks are rising exponentially. Shopify has seen an exponential rise in card testing and bot attacks this year. It rebuilt its defences so fewer bad actors get through, and Shopify Protect underwrites disputes itself, taking on fraud liability for Shop Pay in the US.
• Platforms decide who gains from agents. Mishra says Shopify's aim is that agentic commerce does not only benefit the largest retailers and marketplaces, and that agents recommend more small businesses. Financial institutions should embrace the shift, since their users will be represented by agents.

Shopify's agentic commerce stack

1. The global catalog turns merchant products into structured data an agent can read, mapping how merchants describe things like apparel sizes into a consistent format. A UK size 8 is a US 7.5 and a European 42.
2. UCP checkout lets an agent and a merchant negotiate products, payment methods, delivery and fulfilment programmatically, through the public protocol Shopify built with Google and other partners.
3. Shop Pay is the wallet layer. It gives buyers a secure stored payment method and order updates, and more than 55% of shoppers on Shopify's UK storefronts already use it.
4. shop.dev, a large MCP server launched two weeks ago, lets agents discover products and run checkouts with Shop Pay anywhere on the internet.