From the early days to agentic commerce: an interview with Shopify

Deann Evans, Managing Director, EMEA at Shopify, discusses agentic commerce – from the vision behind it and the barriers to adoption, to how Shopify is approaching the risk landscape.

It’s fair to say that Shopify revolutionised ecommerce, making it easier for businesses of all sizes to sell online. What was the vision that Shopify had in those early days?

I love the story of how Shopify came to be. Our founder, Tobi Lütke, was trying to sell snowboards online and found the existing tools clunky, expensive, or restrictive. Launching a business online was genuinely hard, so he built his own platform. 

That’s where our vision of democratising commerce crystallised. At Shopify, we want to make it easy for anyone – not just large enterprises – to start and run a business online. By removing the technical barriers, we let entrepreneurs focus on their products and their brands rather than the infrastructure, thus making entrepreneurship accessible. 

Twenty years on, that vision has scaled with us. Shopify is now the unified commerce infrastructure behind a huge range of brands – from an entrepreneur selling their first products online to large global multinationals. We power the full commerce stack: online retail, B2B, cross-border transactions, and now agentic commerce, all from one platform. 

What were the biggest challenges that Shopify faced in the early days?

Going back to what Tobi found when he was building the business: the existing tools just didn't work well together. It was a broken ecosystem – hosting, payments, storefront design, all of these things had to be solved from scratch. That was part of that founding insight. Shopify effectively had to invent what it is now: a fully unified commerce platform. 

At the same time, a handful of dominant players controlled the different parts of online commerce, and it was hard for a new entrant to gain traction. As a result, we positioned ourselves differently, as a platform for independence. That’s now one of our core themes: Shopify arms the rebels – and that positioning for independent merchants has defined our identity ever since. Product market fit was a constant process. The team was continually refining the platform and evolving with the needs of merchants, and that’s still true today.

In a real sense, we were inventing what SaaS for ecommerce meant, and we were doing it outside of Silicon Valley. Shopify was built in Ottawa, Canada, far from the Valley's capital and talent, which forced us to build our own talent ecosystem and proved that this global commerce leader could be built anywhere. We even have a philosophy, ‘digital by design’, which shapes where people are based and how Shopify operates as a company. 

Those early challenges turned into something powerful: making commerce better for everyone, and doing it from Ottawa. The scale of the platform today speaks for itself – USD 1.7 trillion in global commerce powered since the founding days. In Europe specifically, our GMV in the first quarter of 2026 is up 48%, and cross-border now accounts for around 16% of our total GMV.

Do you see agentic commerce as the future of online shopping?

Yes – and it's already happening. If you think about the consumers and the journey that they go on, transactions no longer just begin and end on a single website. They're happening across conversations, across platforms, and increasingly through automated workflows.

We're starting to see the shift towards agentic commerce, where customers discover and buy products directly inside AI conversations, and it's evolving at pace. In our Q1 2026 earnings we shared some of the numbers: orders from AI searches are up nearly 13 times year-over-year (YoY), and AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores is up eight times YoY. Consumer behaviour is starting to shift. 

That is why we’re focused on building the foundation for agentic commerce. There's the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for agentic commerce that we co-developed with Google. A lot of other businesses have joined since: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, Stripe – so the industry is coming together around one standard. 

The shift in human behaviour is happening, and AI and autonomous agents are going to accelerate commerce. Our focus is on the infrastructure around it, and on making sure it happens securely and with confidence on both sides of the transaction – for both the merchant and the customer.

What is UCP? Several answers in this interview reference the Universal Commerce Protocol. Here's the short version of what it means. Shopify and Google describe UCP as an open standard, co-developed by the two companies, for AI agents to connect and transact with any merchant. It covers cart creation, checkout, payment, and post-purchase, and is built to work across any platform and any payment processor. The aim is to remove the need for a separate custom integration each time a new AI surface launches – when a platform adopts UCP, a merchant's existing checkout rules, discounts, and terms carry over.  UCP is one of several standards in the market, backed by a range of retailers, platforms, and card networks. According to Shopify, UCP is designed to be able to extend beyond retail to other verticals over time.

What do you see as the barriers facing agentic commerce adoption, both in terms of merchants and customers?

The question isn't whether agentic commerce is going to happen, the numbers already point to that, it's what needs to be in place for it to scale. There are a few key unlocks on both the customer side and the merchant side, and they aren’t really about the agents themselves – that's what happens underneath – the real questions are about trust, identity, execution, and attribution. 

On the customer side, the buyer needs confidence and trust to hand over some of the autonomy and know the agent is going to act within the parameters that they've set. That’s a real behavioural shift, but it’s going to be gradual. Identity across services is part of it:  the agents are going to need to know who they're buying for and there needs to be confidence that the transaction will execute. Agents are very good at discovery – we can see that in the numbers – but the harder part is going to be payments, fraud, tax, and returns.

On the merchant side, there's another set of unlocks. Do merchants keep the customer relationship? Do they lose attribution and data when the buyer transacts inside an AI service? Merchants need to know they stay the Merchant of Record, that they keep their customer data, that they understand the attribution and where the orders are coming from. We’ve also noticed that merchants don’t want to integrate separately with every AI platform – which is one of the reasons why we developed UCP with Google. It’s an open standard, it isn’t our standard, it’s the industry standard. 

Trust, identity, attribution, execution – these are all things that Shopify perspective has spent 20 years building across commerce, and we want to make sure they carry forward as commerce evolves. Our president, Harley Finkelstein, said it really well: agents don't bypass Shopify, they route into Shopify. We’re the infrastructure layer underneath, making sure both merchants and buyers can scale with confidence. 

Agentic commerce and the disintermediation question Disintermediation is the structural question under agentic commerce. When an AI agent sits between shopper and merchant, it controls discovery and ranking — which products surface, and in what order. The fear merchants name is the OTA pattern in travel: you keep the sale, but compete on price and availability while the intermediary owns the customer. Protocols answer part of this. Shopify and Google position the Universal Commerce Protocol as a way to keep the merchant in place on the transaction – under UCP, as they describe it, the merchant stays the Merchant of Record, payments run through the merchant's own gateway, and the order and customer data land in the merchant's Shopify admin.

How does Shopify view the risk landscape around agentic commerce? What are the biggest concerns?

I think it's a bit less about the risks and more about the opportunity to do this right from the start. We're still early days – agentic commerce is emergent – but we have a chance to build authentication and trust from day one, rather than bolting it on later, the way traditional ecommerce did. 

A good way to think about it is subscriptions. They’re very common in ecommerce now, and as a consumer, you’re giving a budget to a company based on trust, assuming they’ll deliver what you want. Autonomous AI shopping is going to work in a similar way: you give the agent parameters, and the agent acts within them. 

The shift in human behaviour is happening – people are getting more comfortable handing access to agents. So we want to make sure authentication and trusted payment credentials are built into the flow. Orders shouldn’t just appear from nowhere. Merchants should get signals they can trust, and buyers should see a clear link between what their agent has done and their own intent and authorisation. That’s where the UCP comes in again – it’s a standard designed to make sure those security and authentication pieces are there by default. 

How is Shopify planning to mitigate that risk landscape?

Every major platform shift over the last 20 years – mobile, social commerce, cloud – felt destabilising at first. Agentic commerce is just the next evolution. And security has always adapted alongside of all these shifts. Payments, identity verification, fraud – each one forced us to mature, and we’re taking a similar approach here.

The way we think about it is that security has to be designed from the start, not bolted on later. Authentication, trust, traceability are built into the UCP protocol itself. UCP is an open standard for AI agents to transact with merchants, and within it, merchants know who they are transacting with, and buyers get a clear link between the agent and what they authorised. We’re starting from the beginning to make sure this is set up the right way from a risk perspective. 

Agentic commerce is an innovation, it’s not the enemy. Our job isn’t to slow commerce down, it’s to make sure it scales safely. The future of commerce is more autonomous, and we see that as an exciting thing. The way we think about it is that the brands are in the front, and we’re operating behind the scenes, giving them the infrastructure. The trust buyers place in those brands depends on us getting this right. That’s what drives our work: making sure that everything is there from the beginning. 

About the author

Deann oversees the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) commercial operation for Shopify, the leading global commerce company that provides essential internet infrastructure for millions of modern, high-growth brands including Gymshark, Nobody's Child, Lounge Underwear, and Jaded London. 

She leads Shopify’s strategy to help EMEA merchants sell on every surface and drive retail innovation hand in hand with Europe’s most exciting businesses. In her role, she is responsible for regional growth by supporting and developing merchants and entrepreneurs, growing the partner ecosystem, and leading the team culture within Shopify’s EMEA markets. 

About Shopify

Shopify provides essential internet infrastructure for commerce. Shopify’s all-in-one platform makes it easier to start, run, and grow a business, powering sales online, in store, and everywhere in between. Millions of businesses in 175+ countries use Shopify – from entrepreneurs to brands like Aldo, Carrier, Dermalogica, Gymshark, Represent, Westwing, and World of Books. For more information, visit https://www.shopify.com/