The most significant strategic pivot in this Edition is Agentic Commerce—the practice of optimizing your store so that AI models, large language models (LLMs), and voice assistants can discover and buy your products on behalf of consumers.
Shopify has introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open-source framework co-developed with Google. Alongside it come specific Model Context Protocols (MCPs) for your storefront’s Catalog, Cart, and Checkout.
Why it matters: AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity can now read structured product data, build active carts, and trigger checkouts natively inside an AI chat conversation.
While eligible Shopify catalogs are opted-in by default, winning in this landscape requires a shift in product data management. Titles, rich meta-attributes, and variant data must be cleanly structured so AI models can confidently pull and recommend your items over competitors.
June 21, 2026
