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| This one is brought to you by our friends at Shopify. |  |
We have spent twenty years obsessing over the add to cart button. Testing the colour. Arguing about whether it should say bag or cart. Moving it up, moving it down, moving it up again.
Turns out the question now isn’t where the button should sit or what colour it should be. It’s whether a human will be the one pressing it.
There is a lot of noise, hype and false starts around agentic checkouts right now, and plenty of it deserves to be dismissed. But if we take the ten-year lens, I am fairly confident that agentic shopping is just shopping.
Here is the good news for anyone feeling behind. If you are on Shopify, a fair chunk of today’s agentic shopping capabilities is already switched on, and there are some simple steps you can take to get up to best practice.
CHEERS
BUSHY
| 20% | of digital commerce transactions will run through AI by 2030. Gartner |
THE TL;DR
In this special email, we’ve outlined five features you can implement and optimise before peak to get your store agentic-ready.
On Shopify? You are most likely already showing up in ChatGPT and Copilot.
In Australia, agents can find you. They just cannot take payment inside the chat yet.
Go deeper: watch Shopify's on-demand AI commerce session with James Johnson.
| Five features to get you started | ||||||||||||
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01
UNIVERSAL COMMERCE PROTOCOL
What is it? The plumbing. UCP is an open standard co-developed by Shopify and Google that defines how AI agents transact with merchants.
Why it matters. Every agent using the protocol can reach your store, represent your products and potentially buy them directly. If you are on Shopify, it is already built in.
Do this today. Nothing. No need to touch a thing. Just know it is running underneath everything below.
 | From the archive · EP 597 James Johnson Shopify |
Think UCP is the plumbing. We've built this open standard so others can build on it. As a consumer, you will use UCP, but you won't interact with it in any discernible way. You'll be interacting with an agent that will allow you to purchase.
02
AGENTIC STOREFRONTS
That's Shopify's demo. Discovery in ChatGPT, then the product page. In Australia today, you get that far and no further. The agents can find you and send the shopper your way. They just can't take the money inside the chat yet. That part is coming.
What is it? A new sales channel in the Shopify admin, launched in March 2026 and live in Australia since May. It puts your products in front of ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode, Meta’s Muse and more.
Why it matters. It is active by default for eligible stores. Which means you are either already in those channels doing okay or already in those channels but invisible. I know which I’d rather be as these channels grow.
Do this today. Go to Sales Channels > Agentic in your admin and look at which channels you are appearing in. Worth knowing: this is available to non-Shopify storefronts too, on Shopify's Agentic Plan.
03
SHOPIFY CATALOG
What is it? If UCP is the plumbing, the catalogue is the water. It pushes your product descriptions, attributes and schema fields to every AI channel in real time.
Why it matters. Agents cannot recommend what they cannot understand. Thin product data does not get you a bad ranking, it gets you left out of the answer entirely. The more long-tail, consumer-problem language you use, the better.
Do this today. Open Catalog Mapping in the admin and check your top 20 sellers. If there are blank attributes, use Sidekick to get them sorted.
This is what an agent sees. Backrest type, chair features, colour, upholstery material. Fill those in and the agent knows what it is, who it is for and why it should recommend it when appropriate.
 | From the archive · EP 526 Abel Butler HealthPost |
The best AI-ready catalogue we’ve seen in this market was built entirely by accident. Abel Butler at HealthPost makes suppliers hand over sourcing, ingredients and production methods before he will range a product, because he will not sell something he cannot stand behind. Suppliers gripe about how much he asks for. Turns out he had been building the exact dataset LLMs need, years before anyone was asking for it.
04
KNOWLEDGE BASE
What is it? The Knowledge Base app lets you review and customise what AI platforms know about your store. Brand voice, policies, FAQs. It gives agents context on your brand and your customer experience, rather than just relying on the product itself. It builds a JSON-LD structure that tells LLMs how to shop your store as a customer would.
Why it matters. This is the difference between an agent describing your brand and an agent being able to explain what makes you unique or different in the market. It means you won’t always compete on price.
Do this today. Steal Heather's trick below. It takes about fifteen minutes and the LLMs do the work for you.
Download the Knowledge Base app and upskill the AI agents on everything they need to know about your store.
 | From the archive · EP 551 Heather Earl Nutrition Warehouse |
300%
Heather Earl from Nutrition Warehouse told us her team saw a 300% increase in ChatGPT-driven traffic over six months after fully building out their Shopify knowledge base. She asked the LLMs directly: "If you were building our Shopify knowledge base, what would you want to find in there?" Then she added whatever each one asked for. Very smart.
05
SIDEKICK
What is it? Shopify's in-platform AI helper, which has come a very long way in twelve months.
Why it matters. It is not an agentic checkout tool, but it is the fastest way to do the unglamorous data work the four features above depend on. SEO-optimised titles and descriptions, image alt text, more natural language, and finding the holes in your product data.
Do this today. Go in and give it a challenge. Start with "find the gaps in my product data". You will probably be surprised.
 | From the archive · EP 597 Rosa Willis Crockd |
I'm not so much like a graphs person, so I love that there's this like qualitative little Sidekick... I don't want to read a report. I don't want to look at a graph. I just want to talk to Sidekick forever.
BONUS
CLAUDE COMMERCE AGENTS
What if you did not wait for the agents and built your own instead?
Earlier this month, Anthropic released Claude Commerce Agents, an open framework for building a front-end shopping agent so customers can research, compare, get service and be remembered, all inside the chat. Anthropic are claiming carts up to 35% larger and shoppers 60% more likely to complete a purchase.
Shopify did not muck around when they got wind of it. They shipped their own GitHub examples of how these agents deploy in Shopify almost immediately.
Do this today. Send Shopify's GitHub examples to your developer (or the Claude-curious team member) and ask what it would take to put one on your store. Start with your development store if you have one.
So the future of agentic checkout is still being shaped and nobody knows the final form - including Shopify! That is not a reason to sit still. Getting found by the agents, getting your data clean enough that they will actually recommend you and getting your checkout ready for whoever turns up are all things you can get ready before peak.
The add to cart button is not going anywhere yet. But it is worth asking who is going to be pressing it.
Want to go deeper? Shopify's James Johnson, long-time Friend Of The ATC Show, sits down with Holly Freeman and Inside Retail's Adam Thorn for an on-demand session on what needs to be true in your data, pricing, inventory and checkout before you scale AI. It is Australian, it is practical, and it is ready for your non-AI eyeballs.
A big thank you to Shopify for making this one possible. We really do appreciate their support.
QUICK QUIZ
