If you are a small luxury brand in fashion, jewelry, beauty or in a similar niche, there are big changes coming to the way that you are doing business and particularly how you are selling online with Shopify and on other ecommerce platforms. So far, you have primarily been considering human buyers on their shopping journey. You have optimized your pages for the human eye and the trends and aesthetics that would convince a human to buy your product. You have optimized the way product discovery and checkout works for this kind of buyer. Your customers are discovering you on Instagram, an online lifestyle website or find you on Google. You convinced them to sign up for your newsletter and tell them regularly about your new collections and offers. When they are buying on your website, your PDP is designed with IA/UI/UX best practices resulting in the best possible shopping and checkout experience. You are upselling them in your cart, convincing them to pair the dress with the earrings.
Artificial Intelligence is a decade defining technology for our society and will also change how you do business. As your customers start to use their AI engines like ChatGPT or Gemini to assist them in finding the best products for their specific needs, you are faced with a new type of shopper, the AI agent. While in the end a human buyer still makes the decision of whether to buy or not to buy, it has a huge impact on the way a buyer finds and interacts with your website. In some cases, the shopper will never even visit the ecommerce website of your brand, they will not sign up for your newsletter, they will never see your brand’s epic video in the hero section or the lookbook of your new fashion collection. You will now have to show your beauty and luxury through facts and data that are machine-readable instead of just appealing to a human sense of beauty and belonging to a feeling of luxury and value.
This isn't a future scenario. In April 2026, Ulta Beauty and Google announced that Ulta's product catalog is shoppable inside Google AI Mode and the Gemini app, powered by UCP. This makes Ulta the first major US retailer outside Google's original launch partners to go live on the protocol. If a national beauty retailer is already restructuring its product data for AI agents, the shift isn't optional for smaller brands either. It's just a matter of when.
Data first, photoshoot second: meet the Universal Commerce Protocol
Like we mentioned already, when someone uses AI to discover new products and shop for them, they might not even visit your website. They can now do this inside their AI assistant of choice, for example inside ChatGPT or Gemini. Therefore, as AI traffic to your store rises, and more and more people shop inside their AI chats, your website will give some of its importance away to the AI assistant. This is already possible today and Shopify and Google have even developed a new open standard to make this AI shopping experience seamless. It is called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). UCP is an open standard that defines how AI agents transact with merchants, covering cart creation, checkout, payment, and post-purchase, across any platform and any payment processor. It is a vast open standard and backed by a large alliance of companies such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart, plus 20+ endorsing partners like Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Adyen, American Express and others.
Creating this kind of open standard is important, because AI assistants rely on machine-readable data in well-organized standardized schemas to provide a good shopping experience. Otherwise, it might be hard for the AI to find the right data or it might even be outdated. There are two ways AI can get your data: the less reliable way is to scrape data from your website. Outdated information would not be ideal, because your website was built for humans and not for machines. What the AI learns about you and your brand this way, might be incomplete or outdated. The other and much preferred way, is to provide the AI with a source of data that is machine-readable and follows a standardized schema that is consistent and continuously updated. For example, this schema contains information on your products and their availability i.e. whether they are currently in stock or not. This is exactly what UCP does.
This might all sound very complicated, but Shopify has already implemented UCP and it is activated by default. You might not know this, but beneath your website, so to speak, there is a data layer for the AI which is called Shopify Catalog, it gets filled with data about your store and your products automatically and is the data source for the AI assistants of your customers. When someone makes a purchase, you will still see it in the orders dashboard in Shopify, but you might never see the traffic in Google Analytics, because the purchase was completed within an AI assistant.
Is your store already eligible?
If your Shopify store is eligible for Agentic Storefronts it will be activated by default, but it is not available for everyone yet. You should also check whether your store fulfils the following requirements . They are rather basic in our opinion, but it is worth checking.
- Your store must comply with Shopify's Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.
- Your store must be on the Starter plan or higher, and your store can't be in private mode. However, if you're on the Agentic plan and haven't yet published your online store to a paid plan, then your products can still be included in Shopify Catalog
- through agentic storefronts.
- Your products must have a title and at least 1 product image.
- Your products must have a price greater than zero. Free products aren't included in Shopify Catalog.
- Your products must be published to your online store, Hydrogen, or Headless channels.
- If you're using Hydrogen or Headless channels, then you must use the correct format for routes to be included in Shopify Catalog.
- If you're using the Shopify Agentic plan and haven't published a Shopify online store, then your products must include the external product URL.
- Your products must be published with an identifiable product URL.
- Your products can't have Unlisted status or be hidden from search engines.
- Your products can't contain sensitive content, such as mature content.
Furthermore, at this moment, if you hope to sell your products via ChatGPT your store must be available in the United States. It is the same for Gemini ,because your store needs to be based in the United States and sell to customers in the United States. Other markets will follow gradually, and it might take a while until all of your products are shoppable via all popular AI assistants, but you should already understand and optimize your store for this new reality.
How an AI agent actually buys from your store
Your product data flows to the AI agents which they access via Shopify Catalog. Through this structured data layer, your product information such as titles, descriptions, images, pricing inventory and shipping is structured and syndicated and available to every connected AI platform in real time. The information always needs to be updated and available to the AI platforms so that brand and products are accurately represented when your customer has a conversation with their AI assistant. This is a lot better than relying on outdated scrapped data from a human readable website. In summary, data is for AI and websites are for humans, but how does the shopping experience now work in the age of AI?
- Your product data is available to AI assistants via Shopify Catalog and kept updated automatically.
- When a shopper asks the AI to recommend a specific product, the AI will search all of the relevant data and present the prospective buyer with the relevant options. It will take into consideration a lot of factors and rank accordingly such as data quality, relevance, availability, pricing, and engagement signals.
- If there is a product that is suitable for our human shopper, they will still use Shopify Checkout to complete the transaction. The exact experience will depend on the AI platform that is used. For example, there might be an in-app browser (ChatGPT) or there might be an embedded checkout (Microsoft Copilot)
- The order flows into your Shopify dashboard and you are still the merchant of record. Your dashboard will also show you which AI channel is responsible for the sale.
The experience will be different for each one of your customers, because every AI agent is different, but through Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) the integration with your store is seamless. This also means that when there is a new AI agent gaining popularity, your store will already be ready and integrated with this new sales channel. You can switch AI channels on and off in your admin dashboard. It is all very easy, or at least, it is easy to be part of this new world, but being able to survive and strive in it, is a different story.
Being listed isn't the same as being chosen
UCP makes it easy to make your ecommerce store shoppable through AI channels, but that does not mean that AI will already recommend your product and make it easy to discover products to your customer. In a way, it is a matter of perspective, for the customer it is very easy to find exactly what they are looking for, for example, their AI assistant will search millions of clothing items for the one sustainable black woolen top that most people bought for its durability and which is available for free same day shipping on the U.S. East coast today. It won’t be enough to make this claim, the AI will also check whether your store has a history of punctual shipping, if that is what the user prefers. Therefore, if you are exactly what the customer is looking for and the AI thinks so too then you are in luck, because you are visible and you will make a sale. This is why, on one hand it is a new opportunity for small luxury brands, but on the other hand, you might not be discovered for a lot of your store’s other products where the fit is good, but not perfect enough to be among the few products that the AI recommends in this specific case. Suddenly, the black dress in your store is compared with every other store and every other black dress available in the United States, why would the AI pick you over another merchant's store?
You will need to give the AI as much information and data as possible so that it can make an informed decision on behalf of your customer and include you in its consideration.
How to get your store agent-ready
You want to take several actions to make sure your store is ready for agentic shoppers who can already now access your store and find what they are looking for.
- Check your agentic store front settings in your Shopify admin to make sure the relevant channels are activated. Ensure your products are visible and your store policies accurate.
- Shopify by default only generates a very basic schema, but misses a lot of fields. For example, GTIN/EAN identifiers, aggregate ratings and reviews, return policies, shipping details, and FAQ schema. You will need to use third party tools to improve the quality of your data schema and add the needed fields to your schema.
- Optimize your Google Merchant Center and make sure the information is updated. Based on guidelines from NRF 2026, Google recommends titles with 30 or more characters, descriptions of 500 or more characters, Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) should always be populated, and a minimum of 3 additional product images need to be added.
- Fill the Knowledge Base App with information about your policies, FAQs, and brand voice so AI agents give accurate, on-brand responses when customers ask questions about your products.
- Make sure to rewrite product descriptions for AI readability. A buyer's AI assistant will compare factual specifications, not marketing copy. You should provide materials, dimensions, weights, compatibility information, and use cases. You don’t need to turn your website into a boring spec sheet, but all these technical details need to be present in the structured data and description body alongside your brand storytelling.
This is only a small portion of what it takes to succeed in this new world of non-human shoppers. Most importantly, it is a warning to keep on learning and stay up to date on the newest trends when it comes to AI and agentic storefronts. The field is rapidly emerging, but without a doubt it will have a big impact on your business. Mata can help you get your website and your data layers ready for this new world.
About The Author
Bastian Lauer is one of the founders of Mata Services. Mata is a company helping brands of all sizes build and maintain their ecommerce websites. We've worked with over 20 ecommerce brands, mostly in fashion, luxury, cosmetics, jewelry, and skincare. We helped our clients build and maintain websites which accumulate 10M visits, over $70M in total sales and half a million orders during a usual year.
