Shopify is launching a new system to help AI agents shop online and opening up a key feature to more businesses as it tries to capture more chatbot-based commerce.

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which the Ottawa-headquartered firm developed with Google, aims to create a common set of rules and definitions for how AI agents connect to retail systems to complete transactions. For merchants that adopt the new standard, buyers will be able to check out via their chatbots or automated assistants, including steps like inputting discount codes or signing into their loyalty accounts.

Shopify will also now sell spots in its all-encompassing Catalog service to companies that aren’t using its other e-commerce tools. That means those retailers’ products will show up when people shop using generative AI tools hooked into the database. Shopify’s “agentic storefronts” already work with ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity—on Sunday the firm added Google’s AI Mode and Gemini app to the collection.

“There are many new entrants into this space who have not done shopping before,” Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s vice-president of product, said in a statement. The UCP is designed to ease that entry and keep customer service and usability consistent with what consumers expect. 

Technical standards such as UCP that let agents talk to each other and to other software tools are crucial plumbing for the AI era. In November 2024, Anthropic launched the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which lets agents access data from and make changes to apps and business systems. The open-source MCP has quickly become the default for AI developers, though poor implementation can lead to security risks.

With UCP, Shopify hopes to do something similar to Anthropic’s protocol for online transactions, starting with shopping. The firm won’t directly make money off those purchases unless they flow through its payment processing service. But if the standard catches on like MCP did, its merchants could have a head start on the new age of AI-driven commerce. Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2030, agentic shoppers could make up as much as 20 per cent of online buying in the U.S.—by far Shopify’s biggest market—up to US$385 billion.

“It’s still obviously very, very early,” Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said on the firm’s November earnings call. “But what we’re really trying to do is laying the rails for agentic commerce.”

Catalog isn’t the first service Shopify has broken out of its core software offering. In January 2023, it began letting large brands and retailers buy its services like checkout and payment processing à la carte rather than as part of a package.