Agentic Commerce: How AI Shopping Agents Could Reshape eCommerce

For the past decade, the eCommerce playbook has been largely the same: attract a customer to your store, guide them through a curated experience, and make the path to purchase as frictionless as possible. But a fundamental shift is emerging that could rewrite these rules entirely.

Agentic commerce - the concept of AI-powered agents that browse, compare, and even purchase products on behalf of consumers - is moving from theoretical to tangible. And while widespread adoption is still on the horizon, the implications for how brands build and optimise their online stores are worth paying attention to now.

What is agentic commerce?

At its simplest, agentic commerce refers to AI agents that act autonomously on a consumer's behalf throughout the shopping journey. Rather than a customer browsing a collection page, reading product descriptions, and comparing options manually, an AI agent does this for them - filtering, evaluating, and in some cases completing the purchase based on the customer's preferences, past behaviour, and stated needs.

This goes beyond the chatbot experiences we've seen over the past few years. Where a chatbot responds to prompts, an agentic system takes initiative. It can research across multiple stores, weigh up shipping options, assess reviews, and make a recommendation - or a decision - without constant human input.

Think of it as the difference between asking a shop assistant a question and sending a personal shopper out with your credit card.

Why it matters for eCommerce brands

The shift matters because it fundamentally changes who - or what - your store needs to convince.

Today, eCommerce is designed almost exclusively for human decision-making. Visual merchandising, lifestyle imagery, brand storytelling, and emotional design all play a critical role in how a customer perceives value and moves toward a purchase. These elements work because humans make decisions that are as much emotional as they are rational.

An AI agent, however, evaluates differently. It prioritises structured data: product specifications, pricing, availability, delivery speed, return policies, and review sentiment. It doesn't respond to a beautiful hero image or a compelling brand narrative in the same way a human does. This doesn't mean brand and design become irrelevant - they still matter enormously for the human who sets the agent's preferences and ultimately receives the product. But it does mean that stores optimised purely for visual appeal, without equally robust structured data underneath, could find themselves at a disadvantage.

What this looks like in practice

Several early signals suggest agentic commerce is moving beyond the conceptual. At Shoptalk 2025, US retailers discussed real deployments of AI-driven conversational search and autonomous customer service - stepping stones toward fully agentic experiences. Lifestyle retailer Tillys, for instance, is advancing conversational search using agentic technology to create a more intent-driven discovery experience.

On the platform side, Shopify has been steadily building the infrastructure that makes agentic commerce possible: robust APIs, structured product data through its Storefront API, and a growing ecosystem of AI-native apps. The recent push toward headless and composable architectures also plays into this - giving brands the flexibility to serve content to both human browsers and AI agents from the same backend.

Beyond Shopify, the broader tech ecosystem is moving quickly. OpenAI, Google, and a host of startups are building consumer-facing agents that can navigate the web, interact with stores, and complete transactions. When these tools reach mainstream adoption, the stores that are already structured to serve them will have a meaningful head start.

How brands should be thinking about this now

The opportunity isn't to rebuild your store for AI agents today. It's to make considered decisions now that position your store well as these technologies mature. There are a few areas worth focusing on.

Invest in structured product data. Rich, accurate, and consistent product information has always been good practice, but it becomes essential in an agentic world. This means complete product attributes, well-maintained inventory feeds, structured size and specification data, and schema markup that makes your product catalogue machine-readable.

Strengthen your API layer. If your store is still entirely reliant on a templated front end with no API exposure, you're limiting how external systems can interact with your product catalogue. Shopify's Storefront API provides a strong foundation here, and brands on Shopify Plus have even more flexibility to expose product, pricing, and availability data programmatically.

Think about your value proposition beyond the visual. When a customer sends an AI agent to find the best product in a category, what will make your product win? Competitive pricing, fast and reliable shipping, a strong returns policy, and high-quality reviews become differentiators in a way that's arguably more measurable than brand sentiment alone.

Don't abandon the human experience. This is not an either/or situation. The brands that will navigate this shift well are those that maintain exceptional experiences for human visitors while simultaneously ensuring their stores are legible and navigable by AI. The human still chooses the agent, sets the preferences, and ultimately lives with the purchase. Brand trust, emotional connection, and post-purchase experience remain critical.

The balancing act

Like most emerging technology, agentic commerce will likely follow a familiar adoption curve. Early movers will experiment, the technology will improve, and over time, consumer behaviour will shift - gradually, then all at once.

The retailers who were early to mobile-first design, or who leaned into social commerce before it became mainstream, didn't do so because the data already justified the investment. They did so because they recognised the direction of travel and made sensible, proportionate moves to be ready.

Agentic commerce deserves the same measured attention. Not panic, not a complete overhaul, but a thoughtful evaluation of how well your current setup would perform if the customer journey increasingly started with an AI agent rather than a Google search.

The stores that get this right won't just be ready for the next generation of shoppers - they'll be ready for the next generation of shopping itself.