Shopify Opens Catalog to More AI Agents for Purchases

The catalog includes items sold on and off Shopify storefronts. To set up the feature, customers connect an agent with their account on Shop, a Shopify-owned platform that consolidates orders, tracks packages, and recommends products. As with the Muse partnership, customers use the one-click Shop Pay feature to check out within the conversation with the agent. Orders placed through the agent are funneled back to the Shop app.

Shopify is presenting the feature as a personal shopper that people can give rules to, such as budget guardrails or a preference to show only products with fast shipping. Buyers must approve each purchase.

In September, Shopify announced it was partnering with Meta to allow Muse to browse and purchase items on a human's behalf. Under the new arrangement, shoppers can use any agent without a partnership integration.

E-commerce has become one of the battlegrounds in the AI era. Many demonstrations of agentic tools end with a transaction, whether the task is buying clothing, booking a flight, or ordering takeout on a human's behalf. Technology companies, including large commerce players such as Google and Amazon, are investing in AI-driven shopping tools whose end goal is an agent purchasing things for a human user. The same question is at the center of an ongoing dispute between Amazon and AI companies such as Perplexity and, more recently, Meta's Muse: whether agents should be able to shop on a customer's behalf.

Editor's Summary

Shopify will let shoppers link any AI agent to their Shop account and use Shop Pay to buy from more than a billion listings, with each purchase requiring approval. The expansion follows Shopify's September Meta Muse partnership and adds to competition among commerce and AI companies over agent-driven shopping.