Shopify Updates Platform to Allow Browser-Based AI Agents to Complete Purchases on Merchant Sites

On Monday, e-commerce platform Shopify announced that browser-based artificial intelligence agents can now complete purchases on Shopify merchants’ sites. While certain retailers are blocking AI agents from making purchases, Shopify has expanded agent capabilities beyond searching and adding items to carts. The update introduces WebMCP support for checkout, including Shop Pay, enabling agents to read and update the checkout screen and submit transactions with buyer authorization without relying on screenshots or webpage scraping.

The feature introduces three new tools: get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout. According to Gil Greenberg, a staff product manager working on agentic commerce at Shopify, the feature is rolling out to all eligible Shopify merchants. Shopify already offers a hosted Model Context Protocol server for server-to-server agent work, while the proposed standard WebMCP is designed for agents operating inside the buyer’s browser.

Both systems leverage Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol. Top AI agents such as Muse and Instinct already maintain direct partnerships with Shopify for agentic commerce, with the Instinct partnership announced alongside the update.