Agentic Commerce: Shopping Without the Storefront

The story of shopping has always been a story of interfaces. First came the physical store: shelves stacked, mannequins posed, clerks ready to guide you through aisles of possibility. Then came the website: a store flattened into pixels, navigated by clicks and scrolls. Mobile made the mall fit into your pocket, turning idle moments into micro-malls. Each interface changed not just where we buy, but how we think about buying.

Now another shift is underway.

Last week, Shopify announced a partnership with OpenAI that brings its one-million-plus merchants into ChatGPT’s chat window. Powered by Stripe’s new Agentic Commerce Protocol, a shopper can simply ask: “best gifts for coffee lovers under fifty bucks?” and see products, reviews, and a one-tap checkout. All without leaving the dialogue. No redirects, no carts, no tabs.

With Shopify and OpenAI bringing commerce into ChatGPT, discovery, decision, and purchase collapse into a single exchange of words.

This is called agentic commerce. But really, it’s the next chapter in the long cultural drama of consumerism.

In this piece, we’ll trace how shopping has evolved from shelves to feeds to chats, unpack why this moment matters, and explore both opportunities and risks of a future where every dialogue could be a transaction.

From shelves to feeds to chats

E-commerce was the first great disruption: the catalog migrated online, giving us infinite aisles and the ability to shop from anywhere. Then mobile commerce transformed that freedom into habit. By the mid-2010s, checkout was so ever so smooth: one tap on Apple Pay, Shop Pay, or Klarna, and buying became ambient. Social feeds blurred into storefronts, and discovery itself became entertainment.

Conversational commerce is different. It doesn’t just put the mall in your pocket. It turns the mall into a friend you can text. The search phase and the purchase phase fuse.

You don’t scroll, you ask. The system responds swiftly—not with a list of links, but with recommendations tailored to your request.

It’s the fantasy of a personal shopper, scaled to billions.

Why now?

Three forces are converging:

1. The infrastructure: Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol quietly builds the rails for AI to transact safely on our behalf.

2. The audience: ChatGPT claims around 700 million weekly users, rivaling the biggest platforms of the last decade.

3. The appetite: Consumers are hungry for smoother shopping. IBM's 2024 global survey found that six in ten already want AI assistance when buying. They’re tired of juggling tabs, parsing reviews, and comparing specs.

When friction falls, behavior shifts. One-click made us buy more. “Buy now, pay later” normalized splitting payments and fueled entire discovery ecosystems. Agentic commerce may normalize shopping by asking, with all the cultural ripple effects that implies.

Promises and perils

The promise for consumers is obvious: relief from choice paralysis. For merchants, a new surface of discovery not monopolized by Amazon or Google. It feels, for now at least, like a leveling of the playing field.

A small brand with the right metadata might surface next to Nike or SKIMS when someone asks for running shoes under $100.

The peril is just as obvious though. Who controls the ranking? Today, OpenAI insists results are relevance-based, not ads. But history suggests monetization will creep in. If the AI becomes a gatekeeper, brands will optimize for its favor the way they once optimized for Google. Entire marketing budgets may shift from SEO to AIO (Agent Intelligence Optimization).

There’s also the credibility risk. A single bad recommendation, delivered with AI’s trademark confidence, can corrode trust. Chat by its nature feels personal, so the very intimacy of the interface makes the stakes higher.

What this means for brands

How do you show up in a world where shopping begins in conversation?

For merchants and brand builders, the challenge is cultural as much as technical.

1. The tactical: Get conversation-ready

Before brands dream of AI-fueled cultural relevance, they need to be legible to the machines. This means structured product data: prices, sizes, reviews, shipping, sustainability claims and so forth. All clean, up-to-date, and machine-readable. It means product copy needs to be not just poetic, but infused with clarity about who it’s for and who it’s not for. Trust signals such as clear return policies, guarantees, and service commitments also become more explicit.

Think of this as the SEO of the agent era. If your catalog is messy, you won’t even show up in the conversation.

2. The strategic: Build a brand worth summoning

If tactics make you findable, strategy makes you unforgettable. The real opportunity lies in ensuring your brand is one that the right people (and their AI assistants) recall instantly.

This begins with a distinctive identity. If shoppers speak in signals rather than names i.e. “Find me a jacket with Patagonia vibes”, will the AI know to include your brand in the relevant shortlist? This extends to cultural resonance: attaching your brand to movements, aesthetics, and communities that make it memorable beyond product specs. And it hinges on depth of engagement.

In an agent-driven world, mass reach becomes less relevant than clarity of meaning.

Brands must stand for something precise enough to be translated into a recommendation. Agents won’t only parse SKUs; they parse signals like values, aesthetics, archetypes. Brands that invest in narrative, community, and symbolic capital are the ones who will be recommended when a shopper asks, “show me something like…”

The cultural shift

Let's say you're planning a trip. You ask ChatGPT:

“I need a raincoat for Copenhagen. Keep it under €200, minimalist design, ships fast.”

The assistant shows three options, each with photos, reviews, and an option to buy now. You choose one. Two days later, a package arrives at your door.

The entire shopping journey is compressed into a few sentences. That’s not e-commerce, it's experience commerce.

Agentic commerce is a blend of service, personalization, and immediacy that feels almost like magic.

When an AI assistant remembers your constraints, anticipates your needs, and makes the process effortless, it recreates the feeling of a great in-store associate.

Now imagine this, but scaled to billions of conversations.

This is the subtle but seismic shift: shopping stops being about searching, and becomes about being served.

It points back to retail’s most human instinct: people don’t just want to transact, they want to feel guided and understood.

But with magic comes responsibility. If brands let AI become nothing more than a persuasive ad engine, trust will vanish.

Brands who win will be those who are able to harness the power of agentic commerce and use it to build new kinds of loyalty.

The first step is meeting customers where they really are—in the middle of their messy, conversational lives.

The human angle

If you run commerce, this isn’t about chasing a shiny integration. It’s about returning to retail’s oldest promise: a knowledgeable person who knows your constraints and helps you decide. Except it’s not a real person, it’s AI.

The companies that win won’t be those who shout loudest in a chat. They’ll be the ones whose products and data are honestly legible to an assistant acting on a customer’s behalf.

For digital experience design, this reframes the job: it’s no longer just about building a beautiful storefront, but about making sure your brand is interpretable by an algorithm and memorable to a human.

The conversation is the store

The Shopify + OpenAI announcement is more than a feature rollout. It’s a signal flare. The storefront is dissolving. Out with the shelf, the feed, the grid… from now on, the dialogue takes the front stage.

The future of shopping won’t ask us to search harder, or click faster. It will invite us to talk.

The question for brands is simple: when the conversation is the store, will your brand have something worth saying?