London Fintech Podcast
00:24:34 · Rohit Mishra
[00:24:34] S0: I'll say, like, the the... I'll talk you through the three big pieces that Shopify has been working on. We we referred to, obviously, some some of this catalog, Universal Commerce Protocol, and the work on Shop Pay itself. But catalog is probably the... One of the most underlooked things in agentic right now because agentic commerce or any form of commerce is only as as good as the... Like, it's it's kind of... Think of you walk into a retail store. You are you you are hopeful. Whether it's a single brand store or a multi brand store, you are hopeful that they have good products. Otherwise, why you... Why would you even walk into them? And so the same thing applies equally to agents. You're going to ask an agent, hey. What what jacket should I buy? What shoe should I buy? What television should I buy? You are hoping that the agent has access to a wide diverse set of product catalog that that they can both reach for. They understand the details about that catalog. So I think the most important thing is catalog. At Shopify, we have built a thing called the Shopify global catalog. What this does is it takes products from all the brands on Shopify and makes it available to agents in an agent friendly format. So we do a lot of work on deducing, enriching these products with additional metadata, and then making it available to agents in a structured format so that they can they can more easily consume and and and and surface these products. We we are seeing some very, very strong signs of when products show up in in the Shopify catalog, those products get a lot more traffic and conversion via agents versus otherwise. So that's that's, I would say, is the the one the more... One of the more important pieces. And then you go into Universal Commerce Protocol and and and how agentic checkout works. And if I want... If I really... For my business, it's really important that the buyers picks a delivery date because my delivery has some nuances. It's important that as a... Both is on the consumer end and the merchant end that whether I'm buying on by... On the Internet or I'm buying via my my favorite agent, that information is still collected. And so what we have done with Universal Commerce Protocol is let merchants in a very seamless way express what their unique things about their business are, the information that they need from the buyer.
00:27:01 · Rohit Mishra
And so that and so that agents can then deal with how to collect that information or part... Or or bring the user in in in use... In Universal Commerce Protocol, we have the concept from escalation because in some in some cases, for example, age verification, you want the user to be able to consent to that. And it says it might be a compliance requirement for that the merchant carries. And so we have done a very seamless integration of the con... The transaction can happen agentically, But where needed, if needed, the agent can say, hey, user. You have to really provide me this additional information so I can complete the transaction. So that's what you... The Universal Commerce Protocol and the products that Shopify has built around that with how Checkout and Checkout Kit really come into play. And then then I would say is is the Shop Pay layer because Shop Pay, what it does is it it when you use Shop Pay, merchant... It already understands the things that merchants need. It has all the buy information, their payment methods, their shipping addresses, and it... It's a one click experience for you to complete the transaction. And so those are the three large bodies of work for us on catalog, the the protocol itself on checkout, and then... And Shop Pay and bringing that into the agent tech interface. I would say that those have been the three main massive things that we have done. And and now we have, just a couple of weeks ago, what we did is launch this new thing called shop. Dev. Shop. Dev takes all of our work and makes it available to agents in a really simple format. You talked about MCP. We are massive fans of MCP and the beauty and simplicity of MCP. And so shop. Dev is basically a a large MCP server that's helping agents discover discover products, run checkouts, use Shop Pay on anything on the Internet. And and so that's the combination that's really helping us drive more agents to adopt commerce.
00:29:02 · Tony Clark, Rohit Mishra
[00:29:02] S1: So there's there's sort of the agentic storefront. So I hadn't thought of that. So the concept of, as you put it, I think, deduplicating and presenting the data of the product catalog in a way that agents will find very easy to, consume. So if I'm a merchant, so I've got my shop and I want to Shopify it. So presumably, one of the advantages here is that I would provide my catalog information to Shopify, but Shopify would then present that in a way that is agentic friendly. [00:29:35] S0: Absolutely. So merchants already are coming to Shopify. They are giving us all their product details. What we have now done for agents is you can go and and map your... The way you think about your product. So I'll give you specific examples. Right? Like, in apparel, which is one of our, you know, large categories at Shopify, this man... That everybody has treats, for example, sizes differently. You might think this is size x, this is size y for me. And and so how does how do you... How does what... How do how does the way you reason about your business get translated into a more consistent structured format for agents? That's what Shopify enables brands on Shopify to do. But it's all about that cat that catalog mapping. We obviously are doing a lot of work behind the scenes with our machine learning and AI models to make it as easy and seamless as possible. But at the same time, you need to give merchants control so that they can best express their business. And so... And and and that has been a massive part of our efforts here.
00:29:35 · Rohit Mishra, Tony Clark
[00:29:35] S0: Absolutely. So merchants already are coming to Shopify. They are giving us all their product details. What we have now done for agents is you can go and and map your... The way you think about your product. So I'll give you specific examples. Right? Like, in apparel, which is one of our, you know, large categories at Shopify, this man... That everybody has treats, for example, sizes differently. You might think this is size x, this is size y for me. And and so how does how do you... How does what... How do how does the way you reason about your business get translated into a more consistent structured format for agents? That's what Shopify enables brands on Shopify to do. But it's all about that cat that catalog mapping. We obviously are doing a lot of work behind the scenes with our machine learning and AI models to make it as easy and seamless as possible. But at the same time, you need to give merchants control so that they can best express their business. And so... And and and that has been a massive part of our efforts here. [00:30:35] S1: Yeah. I like that example. Aperol. So shoes. Right? So I'm an I'm an eight in The UK. You guys in The States had a half a size. Don't know why. So I think I'm an eight and a half and and a forty two in Europe. So you you build that context in so the agents can understand they're buying the right product?
00:30:55 · Rohit Mishra
[00:30:55] S0: Absolutely. Right? Because you might be sitting in The US, but you want to be able to... Your agents to think about brands worldwide. Why not? Because you're you're... You don't want to you don't want to be restricted by what you want to buy. And... But how does the agent reason about Tony's size eight. Right? But actually, not size eight in The... Size seven and a half in the in The US. We go one size up. Right? Or one size lower. I I always mix it up. Is The UK... Is The UK size shoe size one size bigger or one size smaller? I should I should remember. This is how I end up with wrong shoe shoe sizes. You and I, having bought a few dozens of shoes in our lifetime, are still thinking about it. Agents are agents are just trying to model how our brains work. So like we are confused, they can be confused. And I think that's the that's the advantage of Shopify being a full end to end commerce platform and how we don't look... When we approach these problems, obviously, you know, in my world, I deeply think about payments and payments protocol and liability, etcetera. But but all of those only work in the broader context of commerce that that that we really deeply focus on. And so the... Our goal is that imagine in a in a in an old... If this thing... If agent ecommerce had shown up ten, fifteen years ago, what would have likely have happened is the largest brand... Retail... Retailers of the world, the largest marketplaces of the world, they would have been able to take advantage of it, and most small businesses would have had to sit it out because they couldn't deal with the complexity. And and we are very excited about all the work that we are doing and which makes it... This is making it that agents recommend more small businesses. The buyers, when we when we did our survey this year, what we saw in in across many regions is buyers want to reach for brands that are more differentiated. And and so there is a deep desire to to go support more small businesses, have more... Like, buy more differentiated brands. And that's what Shopify is all about. So so so we so we are... We we are working hard to make sure that our merchants fully capture this opportunity.
00:33:08 · Tony Clark, Rohit Mishra
[00:33:08] S1: Yeah. So you're democratizing access to buyers for the merchants, and you're also democratizing access to the independent brands for the purchaser. So [00:33:21] S0: Absolutely. Absolutely. We we we deeply we deeply believe that the con... That most consumers want access to a wide variety of brands. They obviously want the... A great experience. They want trust. And similarly, the most important thing for... From the... On... From a brand and small business perspective is discovery, being able to find and serve more buyers. And our job with our... Is to is to make both... Connect both sides as well as we can do. We have done that in many different ways, and now agents seem like a great way to to make more of that happen. [00:33:58] S1: And as we've just been talking, you know, the agentic commerce revolution, if I can call it that, is is is happening now, and the numbers support the ever faster adoption. What do you see happening over the next twelve months? What's ahead?