Shopify Is Building for AI Agents 🤖

Agentic commerce is quickly becoming the new buzzword in ecommerce 🔮, but not everyone’s racing to the finish line.

Hi there, and welcome to another issue of The Ecom Press 🗞️!

Shopify is building fast for an AI-powered shopping future, while Pinterest is taking a thoughtful approach, spotlighting the need for user trust before AI takes the wheel. And of course, Elon Musk is finding a way to monetize Grok with AI-powered ads 🧠💸

Let’s dive in, shall we👇?

In a rush? Here's the juice🤭:

🤖 Shopify is building the rails for AI agents.

🧭 Pinterest thinks agentic commerce era is years ahead.

🧠 X plans to monetize Grok with AI-powered ads.

🚀 Ecom strategies: Prepping smart for Q4 with BFCM in sight

⚡️Worthy Mentions

🤖 Shopify is building the rails for AI agents.

Shopify is rolling out a suite of tools that lets AI agents, like Copilot, offer full shopping experiences, from product search to checkout, without users ever leaving the chat. It's a move that positions Shopify as the behind-the-scenes engine of agentic commerce, streamlining both discovery and transactions.

The core components are ⬇️:

🧠 Shopify Catalog: Enables AI agents to search across hundreds of millions of products with real-time inventory, localized pricing, and reduced duplicate listings. It includes web components (MCP-UI) for rendering results within chat interfaces, adaptable to various use cases like bundles, subscriptions, and product variants.

🛒 Universal Cart: A shared cart that spans multiple merchants and lets AI agents manage ongoing shopping journeys. It helps users keep track of items added during different conversations and facilitates checkout at their convenience.

💳 Checkout Kit: Embeds Shopify’s high-converting checkout (including Shop Pay) directly within the AI interface. It supports merchant-specific customizations and branding, while removing the compliance burden for developers by handling payment processing and regulations like PCI DSS and GDPR.

🤝 Already in Use: Microsoft’s Copilot is already integrating Shopify’s Checkout Kit, showing how quickly the tools are being adopted into consumer-facing AI.

Why it matters 🤷‍♂️

With this Shopify has moved from just powering online stores to becoming the infrastructure for how people shop inside AI tools. For ecommerce brands, that’s a direct line to users without needing a traditional storefront. 

Instead of fighting for consumer attention, Shopify is embedding itself into the tools that consumers already trust. This could give it lasting influence over how, where, and who gets to sell in the age of AI.

🧭 Pinterest thinks agentic commerce era is years ahead.

Pinterest isn’t rushing into the agent-led shopping future. On its Q2 earnings call, CEO Bill Ready made it clear that fully autonomous AI shopping agents—ones that research, decide, and buy on your behalf—are still a long way off.

Here are the deets ⬇️:

🛑 Agentic AI is not ready yet: Bill Ready called the idea of AI agents making complex purchases without user input “a very, very long cycle” and said consumers aren’t ready to hand over that kind of control—at least not outside simple, utility-driven cases.

🛍️ Pinterest as a quiet AI assistant: He noted that Pinterest is already functioning like an AI-powered shopping assistant, even if it’s not marketed that way. Features like personalized recommendations give users the feeling that “Pinterest just gets me.”

🧠 AI tools behind the scenes: Pinterest has invested in AI tools such as visual search, conversational search, auto-collages for product ads, and multimodal models that merge text and images to enhance user discovery.

⚠️ Addressing AI content overload: After user pushback over AI-generated spam, Pinterest added labels and filters for AI content, plus moderation improvements following a wave of mistaken bans attributed to automation errors.

📉 Earnings and demographics: Pinterest reported $998M in Q2 revenue, missing EPS estimates slightly. Over half of its monthly users are Gen Z, and its male audience jumped 95% year-over-year.

Why it matters 🤨

While Shopify is doubling down on agentic commerce, Pinterest is taking a more tempered view. It’s not against AI, but it sees fully autonomous shopping as a long game and is instead leaning into AI that enhances, not replaces, user intent. The contrast highlights two paths emerging: build for AI agents, or build with AI assist. Both may end up coexisting, depending on how much control shoppers are willing to give up.

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🧠 X plans to monetize Grok with AI-powered ads.

X is taking a bold step toward AI-native advertising. Elon Musk confirmed that ads will soon be inserted directly into Grok’s chatbot responses, enabling brands to reach users at the very moment they’re asking for help. 

The goal is to make Grok a high-intent ad channel and help cover the steep GPU costs behind Musk’s AI ambitions. The move also reflects a deeper integration between X and xAI, Musk’s AI company, which acquired X for $45B earlier this year.

Here’s the scoop 🍨:

🔎 Ads at the Moment of Need: Advertisers will soon be able to pay for placements inside Grok’s suggestions, meaning when a user asks a question like “How do I build muscle fast?” they may see a promoted protein powder or workout plan in the AI’s reply.

💬 Musk's Monetization Pitch: “If a user’s trying to solve a problem, then advertising the specific solution would be ideal at that point,” Musk said in a livestream with advertisers.

🧠 xAI-Powered Targeting: Musk plans to use xAI's tech to improve ad targeting across the platform. Grok's recommendations will likely get smarter and more relevant with time.

💸 GPU Costs Drive the Shift: With GPU expenses mounting, Musk said the monetization push is essential now that Grok is “good enough” in terms of accuracy and usability.

🧰 Ad Tools Coming Soon: Musk also teased AI tools that automate ad setup — “upload an ad and do nothing else,” he claimed — suggesting more automation for marketers is on the horizon.

Why it matters 🤔

Ads inside Grok could mark a major shift toward AI-native, high-intent advertising, where product suggestions are part of the solution, not an interruption. With many brands already active on X, Grok has the potential to pull from rich, first-party data to deliver smarter, more relevant product placements. 

For ecommerce marketers, this opens a new way to reach engaged users right at the moment they’re looking for answers.

🛎️ The Ecom Press Insider

Ecom Trend: Retailers are preparing for a possible “Google Zero” future, where AI tools, not traditional search engines, drive discovery. Brands like Kendra Scott and Batteries Plus are already adapting by optimizing for generative AI, tracking citations, and reshaping content to surface in AI answers, even as SEO and GEO strategies increasingly merge (Source: DigitalCommerce360).

💡 Takeaway: It’s wise to build for a future where Google is just one of many paths to discovery. Think of it less like the death of traffic, and more like traffic learning a new route.

🚀 Ecom strategies: Prepping smart for Q4 with BFCM in sight

Q4 success doesn’t start in November—it starts now. Brands that crush Black Friday/Cyber Monday don’t just flip a switch the week of—they plan 90 to 120 days out. With BFCM only weeks away, it’s time to trade guesswork for real prep. Let’s make those next few months count. 👇

📬 1. Turn Visitors into Leads: A good amount of your traffic won’t buy but are already browsing for their BFCM wish list. Use tools like Instant to capture email/SMS with smart pop-ups and behavior-triggered flows. That early opt-in is your future conversion.

🧠 2. Nurture Before You Sell: Don’t just build your list; build anticipation. Share value-packed content, tease promos, and warm up subscribers with social proof and relevant stories tied to what they browsed. By November, they’re primed.

🛒 3. Segment for Impact, Not Just Opens: Create power segments like VIPs, high-AOV customers, and recent browsers. These segments should get tailored BFCM offers and early access. Not everyone should see the same deal at the same time.

🧰 4. Lock In Offers Backed by Data: Skip the guesswork. Pull historical promo data to see which offers actually moved product. Flash sales? Bundles? Free shipping? Let performance drive decisions, and prep your assets now, not later.

📦 5. Don’t Let Ops Be the Bottleneck: Strong promos fall flat if stock runs out. Get POs in early, align with your 3PL on volume surges, and make sure support is ready to handle order influxes and returns. No surprises this year.

Great BFCM numbers aren’t a fluke but a function of systems. You’ve got the time to prep, segment, stock, and strategize 🚀.

⚡️Worthy Mentions

• AI shopping tools threaten traditional affiliate marketing by cutting affiliates out of the journey.

• Google Ads rolls out AI Max experiments to auto-optimize Search campaigns in real time.

• Amazon moves Handmade products into standard categories to improve visibility.

• IKEA opens a digital storefront on JD.com to grow its ecommerce footprint in China.

• OpenAI releases GPT-5, its most powerful model, now accessible to all ChatGPT users.

Wrapping up…

Shopify’s betting big on agentic commerce. Pinterest? Still skeptical, and maybe rightly so—trust doesn’t come easy when you’re handing your wallet to a bot 🤖.

But whether we sprint or stroll into this new era, one thing’s clear: ecommerce is evolving fast. Stay plugged in for what’s next, and don’t forget to share and subscribe if you haven’t already. 

See you next week! ✌️📬