AI is changing how people shop. Consumers are increasingly discovering and buying products through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode. And for merchants, this represents a genuinely new sales channel.

In December 2025, Shopify launched Agentic Storefronts, giving merchants the ability to syndicate their products to AI platforms and sell directly in AI channels. In early 2026, Shopify launched a dedicated plan for agentic selling. I was hand-picked by our Director of Design to help lead the onboarding experience for the plan, working alongside one other designer.

Setting up a regular Shopify store has a clear mental model: add products, set up payments, design your storefront, etc. Agentic commerce works differently. There's no storefront, no traditional shopping experience. Customers discover products through conversations with AI and check out without ever leaving the chat.

Products surfacing in a ChatGPT conversation, with checkout handled natively.

Most merchants signing up for the Agentic Plan had no frame of reference for any of that. On top of that, each channel has its own requirements before it can go live, and the tasks have to be completed in a specific sequence.

The design challenge was helping merchants understand a new kind of commerce while making setup feel clear and manageable.

On a regular Shopify plan, completing a task builds something immediately usable: add products and you have inventory, set up payments and you can accept money. On the Agentic Plan it works differently, because every task is a precondition. You can't go live on any AI channel until a specific set of requirements is met.

That created a clear design question. Shopify already had a place in the admin where merchants manage their AI channel connections. Do we surface it immediately when merchants land so they can see what they're working toward, or do we keep them focused on setup and find another way to communicate what they're building?

Where merchants manage their connections to each AI channel.

The Agentic Storefronts page, where merchants manage which AI channels they sell on, is essentially inactive until core setup requirements are met. My instinct early on was to send merchants there anyway and use that page to communicate what was still missing. Doing a better job there felt like the right solution, but we didn't have ownership of that page, so additional messaging wasn't an option for launch.

An early concept for surfacing requirements on the channel management page.

Instead, I proposed reframing onboarding around a single goal: getting to a point where you can manage your AI channels. To make that legible from the start, we introduced a hero section at the top of the onboarding bento that communicated what merchants were working toward. We also made it dynamic, so that as merchants completed core requirements, the messaging updated and new affordances appeared that gave them direct access to their AI channel management for the first time.

We explored versions that went further, like surfacing which specific AI channels were available or showing per-channel requirements upfront, but it added complexity that merchants didn't need yet. Before meeting the basic requirements to sell on any channel, that information wasn't useful.

The simpler approach kept merchants focused on setup and saved the detail for when they were actually ready for it. That became the guiding principle across the whole onboarding experience: introduce complexity only when merchants have the context to act on it.

The onboarding bento with a dynamic hero that unlocks channel management over time.

Some of the harder problems were in the details of individual tasks. Merchants on the Agentic Plan don't have a traditional online store, but they still need a checkout domain as a fallback for when native in-chat checkout isn't available. We also introduced net new tasks that don't exist on any other Shopify plan, like adding store policies and building a knowledge base so that customers asking questions in AI chats get accurate, verifiable information about products.

Two of the net-new setup requirements unique to agentic selling.

The work was figuring out how to explain each requirement clearly enough that it felt like a natural part of setup rather than an unexpected detour.

The Agentic Plan is now live and available to any merchant who wants to sell in AI conversations without a traditional online store. When they land, the hero communicates what they're working toward. As they complete setup, the experience adapts and once core requirements are met, they get access to Agentic Storefronts to start connecting to AI channels.

From there, their products can surface in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and others. Customers can browse, ask questions, and check out without ever leaving the chat.

Thousands of merchants have already signed up for the Agentic Plan, and we're continuing to refine the experience as the data comes in.

But the significance of the project goes beyond early numbers. This is Shopify's first commerce offering built entirely around AI channels. It recognizes that the way customers discover and buy products is changing, and gives merchants a concrete way to be part of that. For Shopify, it's a stake in the ground: a signal that the platform is building for where commerce is going.

There was no existing playbook for this, no prior Shopify experience to borrow from. What exists now is a foundation that will matter more as these channels grow.