Shopify's Agentic plan for retailers not on Shopify: costs, markets and setup

Direct answer: Shopify's Agentic plan lets a retailer that doesn't run on Shopify list its products in Shopify Catalog and sell them in AI channels such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode and Gemini, and Meta, without moving its store. It has no monthly fee. You import your catalogue into a Shopify admin, verify your business, publish your policies and give every product a link back to your own site. ChatGPT sends shoppers to your own checkout. Copilot, Google and Meta can take payment in a Shopify-powered checkout inside the AI channel, which you have to switch on, and which brings Shopify payment fees, orders in Shopify and refunds processed there. Every channel limits where the shopper can be, and as of 2 November 2026 none covers the UK or the EU.

This guide is for ecommerce directors, marketplace and channel managers and engineering leads at retailers on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, SAP or a custom stack. It covers what the plan is, what it costs, which channels and markets it reaches, what setup involves, what direct checkout doesn't support, the data and terms points, and what to check on your own site either way.

Last verified: 2 November 2026 against Shopify's Help Center (the Agentic plan, Agentic plan setup, channel pages for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta, Shopify Catalog and data syndication pages), the Shopify Agentic Storefronts Supplemental Terms of Service (last updated 6 October 2026), Shopify's pricing and Agentic plan pages, and Shopify's news and developer changelog. Shopify changes these pages often, so check the current versions before you commit.

What the Agentic plan is

Shopify's Help Center describes it as a plan "for merchants that don't already use Shopify as their ecommerce platform". It "lets you add your products to Shopify Catalog and sell them with Shopify agentic storefronts, without needing to have a Shopify online store or migrate from your existing commerce platform". Shopify's blog calls it a "sidecar" for brands on "SAP, custom ERP systems, or other commerce solutions".

Two Shopify terms do the work:

• Shopify Catalog is Shopify's structured store of product data. AI channels and the Shop app search it instead of a separate feed for each channel. Inclusion "doesn't guarantee that a product will appear in a specific AI answer", in Shopify's words: each channel decides what to show.
• Agentic storefronts is Shopify's name for selling in AI channels from that catalogue, either by sending the shopper to a store's checkout or through a Shopify-powered direct checkout inside the AI channel.

Shopify announced on 24 March 2026 that the plan was "now publicly available" and had "rolled out … globally". You can also build a Shopify online store on the plan, but it stays password protected until you move to a paid plan.

Our own data gives a sense of who the plan is aimed at. Of the 225 retailers scored in the Agent Commerce Index, 129 run on Shopify. The other 96 include 26 on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, 9 on Magento or Adobe Commerce and 3 on BigCommerce, with 58 we couldn't identify from public signals. Those 96 are the kind of retailer the Agentic plan is built for. We didn't check which of them have signed up, because that isn't public.

What it costs

Read the last row before you build a business case. The Help Center describes today's position, but the terms leave room for per-channel fees, and the admin is where they would appear.

Which channels and which shoppers

Shopify's setup page separates channels that send shoppers to your checkout from channels with a Shopify-powered direct checkout. On the Agentic plan, direct checkout is "deactivated by default": you opt in per channel. The channel pages set the shopper markets:

Every channel page says the store itself can be based elsewhere. What counts is where the shopper is. Shopify's Agentic plan page also lists Perplexity and the Shop app, but the Help Center has no channel page for Perplexity yet, so we can't give its requirements. A June 2026 update to Shopify's blog says purchasing is "currently available to US buyers only". The channel pages are more recent and more specific, so use them.

For a UK or European retailer this is the main question. If your AI-channel shoppers would be in the UK or the EU, the plan doesn't reach them yet. If you already ship to the US, Canada or Australia, it can.

Google is a special case. The Agentic plan doesn't replace Merchant Center: Shopify says you need a Merchant Center account that meets Google's free listings and return policy requirements, with products in it. If you already send Google a feed, the plan's job on Google is the direct checkout, not discovery. Our guide to product feeds for AI shopping covers the feeds you can send each channel yourself.

What setup involves

Shopify's setup page has four steps. The work sits mostly with your catalogue and order teams.

1. Product discovery (all channels, and the only step for ChatGPT).

• Verify the business. Add business details and registration documents, and verify your identity.
• Import products. Shopify lists three ways: CSV (no real-time sync), the GraphQL Admin API (productSet) for real-time sync, or a PIM connector app. A CSV import goes stale as soon as a price or stock level changes, so plan on the API or a connector for anything you change often.
• Add an external product URL to each product, in the external URL standard metafield, linking to that product's page on your store. Without a published Shopify store, Shopify's Catalog requirements make this mandatory.
• Publish three policies in the Shopify admin: terms of service, privacy policy, and return and refund policy.
• Verify your existing domain with a TXT record.
• Optionally manage the knowledge base, the store facts AI agents use to answer questions. Shopify says stores on the Agentic plan can only add their own facts, and that the published knowledge base is publicly available to AI channels.

2. Direct checkout settings (Copilot, Google, Meta). Set up a payment provider, shipping zones and rates (with product weights for weight-based rates), taxes and any discounts. Your checkout domain is a .myshopify.com address unless you add a custom one, and Shopify says it "might display" in some cases. All refunds for AI-channel orders "must be processed through your Shopify admin", whichever payment provider you use.

3. Orders and fulfilment. Orders from direct checkout land in the Shopify admin. You can fulfil them there, or export them to your order management system with webhooks such as orders/create and the GraphQL Admin API. If you fulfil outside Shopify, you still have to update the order status in Shopify. On enterprise Agentic plans, order confirmation emails are off by default, so decide which system emails the customer.

4. Activate channels. Opt in to each direct-checkout channel in the admin. Shopify's troubleshooting list for products that don't appear is a useful audit in itself: title, description, image, price, inventory, external URL, published policies and a verified domain.

Who's eligible, and what isn't supported

Eligibility depends on the business, the products, the shopper's location, your payment setup and the channel. Shopify's Catalog requirements include:

• Product data: a title, at least one image, a price above zero, an identifiable product URL, and a status other than unlisted.
• Excluded categories: Shopify lists products it won't syndicate, such as alcohol, tobacco and weapons, along with services and event tickets. Check the full list against your range.
• Account standing: a verified email, two-factor authentication, identity and business verification, and "a track record of genuine sales to real customers through your usual sales channels", with prompt fulfilment, low chargebacks and invoices paid on time.
• Direct to consumer only: B2B-only products aren't supported.

On ChatGPT, Shopify asks for any legal disclosures to sit in the first 6,000 characters of a product description, and OpenAI's prohibited products are excluded.

Direct checkout is narrower than your own checkout. On the Google, Copilot and Meta pages, Shopify lists:

• Products: subscription-only products, bundles, customisable products and B2B-only products aren't supported. A product sold both one-off and by subscription can be bought one-off.
• Delivery: local delivery, pickup in store and pickup points aren't supported.
• Sign-in: you can't require shoppers to sign in before checkout.
• Tracking: Google Analytics and custom pixels don't fire. Only server-to-server checkout started and completed events do.
• Checkout customisation: only some checkout blocks load on Google and Copilot, and none on Meta. Meta "might render the customer checkout differently than your online store checkout".

The plan itself also leaves out gift cards, manual orders, Shopify Messaging and Shop post-purchase offers. An enterprise version adds carrier-calculated shipping, Combined Listings, payment capture per fulfilment and higher API limits, among other things.

Data, terms and control

• You stay the seller. The Supplemental Terms say you remain the seller of record, and that channels may override your checkout branding and customisations.
• Customer data. Shopify's data page says when an order is placed in a channel with direct checkout, the channel has access to order details such as the customer's name, email address, phone number and physical address. Bring your privacy notice and data processing records into line.
• Your content. The terms grant Shopify a licence to your product materials that it can sublicense to channel operators. Each channel's own terms are incorporated too: a Google Merchant Center addendum, Microsoft's Copilot Shopify Checkout Terms and a Meta seller agreement addendum.
• Default settings. "Allow Shopify to manage for me" is on by default and adds new channels automatically. Turn it off if you want to approve each channel.
• Opting out. Turning off Catalog access for a channel doesn't remove your products from Shopify Catalog or the Shop app, and Shopify says opting out of ChatGPT can take up to seven days. Shopify treats Catalog and crawlers as separate routes: robots.txt and bot management govern crawlers that visit a site directly, not Catalog syndication. To hide a product from AI channels completely, Shopify points to the unlisted product status.

Your own site still does the selling

The Agentic plan adds a route into AI channels, but it doesn't replace your website:

• ChatGPT sends shoppers to your checkout. Shopify says "all your customizations, branding, selling strategies, and payment methods are supported" because the sale happens on your site, inside ChatGPT's in-app browser. That checkout has to work for a shopper arriving from an AI conversation, with no account and often on mobile. In the Index basket test, 96 of 116 stores let a real browser reach checkout, so most retailers pass this. The ones that don't usually fail on a challenge or a forced sign-in, which our guide to agent checkout friction covers.
• Channels still crawl you. Shopify says products can still be "displayed or referenced by the channel through other external discovery and listing methods, such as web crawling and indexing". What those crawlers read is your pages and your product structured data, not your Shopify import.
• Agents pay at your checkout too. Shopify's Fall '26 Edition (28 October 2026) said some personal AI agents offer Shop Pay for brands not on Shopify. Shopify's Shop MCP announcement (13 October 2026) describes how: the agent gets single-use card details and pays on the merchant's own checkout.
• Policies have to match. Your Shopify policies, knowledge base and site will all be read by agents. In the Index, 206 of the 225 retailers didn't state shipping cost in structured data and 189 didn't give returns terms there. If your site doesn't state them in a form agents read, the channel version is the one agents will repeat. Our guide to shipping and returns in structured data shows how to add them.
• Measurement splits. ChatGPT orders show only in your own analytics, and direct-checkout orders show only in Shopify, without your client-side tags. Our guide to measuring AI and agent traffic covers the referral side.

What to check before you sign up

1. Where your shoppers are. Match the markets in the channel table to the countries you ship to. If none overlap, the plan does nothing for you yet.
2. Fees in the admin. Once you have an account, check the channel settings for any transaction fee under §6.1 of the terms, not just the Help Center.
3. Catalogue sync. Decide how prices and stock reach Shopify in real time (API or PIM connector), and who owns the external URL field. A wrong price or a dead link in an AI answer is your problem, not the channel's.
4. Order and refund flow. If you turn on direct checkout, map how orders reach your order management system, how fulfilment status goes back to Shopify, and how refunds are processed in the Shopify admin.
5. Range and checkout fit. List the products that fall into an excluded category, subscription-only, bundle or customisable, and the delivery options (click and collect, local delivery) that direct checkout won't offer.
6. Your own checkout and pages. Test that a shopper arriving from ChatGPT can reach and complete your checkout without signing in, and that your product pages carry price, stock, delivery and returns in the HTML. In our scoring specification, LEG-08 checks that product name and price are in the HTML an agent receives, OFF-04 and OFF-06 check shipping cost and returns terms in structured data, TRX-01 checks that guest checkout is available and TRX-10 that an agent can put a product in the basket and reach checkout.

If you'd rather connect each channel yourself, see our comparison of agentic commerce protocols for the direct routes.

Sources

• Shopify Help Center, Agentic plan, Setting up agentic storefronts for stores on the Agentic plan and Shopify agentic storefronts, read 2 November 2026
• Shopify Help Center, channel pages for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta, read 2 November 2026
• Shopify Help Center, Shopify Catalog, Requirements for being included in Shopify Catalog knowledge base, data and privacy and product discovery pages, read 2 November 2026
• Shopify, Shopify Agentic Storefronts Supplemental Terms of Service, last updated 6 October 2026
• Shopify, Agentic plan and pricing pages, read 2 November 2026
• Shopify News, Millions of merchants can now sell in AI chats, 24 March 2026, and Exponential: Shopify's Fall '26 Edition, 28 October 2026
• Shopify blog, Agentic commerce on Shopify: how it works, updated 18 June 2026
• Shopify developer changelog, Add shopping and Shop Pay checkout to any agent with Shop MCP, 13 October 2026
• ConversionVector, Agent Commerce Index Q4 2026 (CC BY 4.0) and Agent Conversion Score specification v0.6