Why agentic commerce is the new shopping channel

Commerce follows customers. Traditionally, discovery happened through search and social, but transactions primarily happened on a brand's website or in-store. Now, consumers are turning to AI agents to help them browse, find and buy products.

Shopify’s Holiday Retail Report found that 66% of UK consumers planned to use AI for at least one aspect of their holiday shopping - and over half (51%) of Gen Z shoppers now start their purchase journey on AI platforms rather than traditional search engines.

This shift is profound, and one that every merchant must understand to keep up with a future where embedded AI shopping is the norm, not the novel.

AI is reshaping how we shop

Agentic commerce – where customers can discover and buy products directly inside AI conversations – has the potential to transform every interface into a commerce touchpoint. Any surface that can hold a conversation and take actions becomes commerce-capable, whether that’s a search engine, productivity tool or personal assistant.

The data underlines the pace of this shift: since January 2025, orders coming to stores on Shopify from AI searches have increased 15x.

It’s therefore clear brands must optimise for how AI agents operate. That means making their product catalog machine-readable, understandable and consistent so AI agents can find, compare, and sell products accurately. The more structured, reliable, and transaction-ready a shop is, the more likely it is to be surfaced to the right buyers.

Open standards: the foundation for scale

For agentic commerce to scale, there needs to be a common language. That is the thinking behind the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard Shopify co-developed with Google. UCP aims to standardise how AI agents transact across platforms, ensuring merchants can reach shoppers on these new channels as part of a wider unified commerce strategy.

Crucially, it preserves the merchant’s checkout experience, brand identity and customer relationships. When a shopper completes a purchase through an AI agent, the transaction still runs through the merchant’s own checkout logic – complete with loyalty programmes, delivery preferences and payment options.

This means brands’ online stores don't become obsolete, rather the operating system that steers the AI agent, while they remain the merchant of record, keeping control of data, payment, and brand experience.

From channels to orchestration

The most significant shift for merchants is moving from channel to orchestration thinking. Many already run a single commerce backbone across siloed channels like the online store, marketplaces and social. But with agentic commerce, the surfaces where discovery happens are multiplying — including search, chat and assistants.

The same orchestration that powers a merchant’s store and channels must now extend to every surface where AI-driven discovery is taking place.

To equip them for agentic commerce, merchants need a single source of product data that is structured, accurate and syndicated automatically across every surface. They also need portable checkouts that deliver a consistent brand experience, whether a customer finds them through Google, ChatGPT or their own website.

The shift is from managing individual channels to orchestrating an intelligent commerce layer that meets customers wherever they choose to engage.

A collective effort

Looking ahead, open standards like UCP are a vital step but they cannot succeed in isolation. The entire global ecosystem needs to rally behind AI-ready infrastructure, with collaboration between technology providers, retailers and policymakers to ensure that agentic commerce is accessible to businesses of all sizes.

The purchase journey is being rewritten. Consumers are already there. The question for merchants is not whether to participate, but whether they will own the experience when they do. Those who prepare now by investing in unified data, portable checkouts and open protocols will lead the next era of commerce.