Commerce is changing. What merchants expect? Podcast w/Shopify.

Speaker A: Hi everybody. Uh, I'm Matteo Gamba. Uh, we are here at mp and uh, today we're going to be recording one more, uh, session of the voice of mp and uh, with us we have Fabian Musik from Shopify, uh, the head of uh, solution engineering, uh, for uh, the EMEA market.

Speaker B: That's right. Happy to be here. Hi Matteo.

Speaker A: Welcome. Uh, so yesterday we had you on stage, um, both at the panel and at the keynote. That was great to have you. And uh, I'm sure today you're going to tell us a little bit more about something that everybody is talking about. Uh, Agent E Commerce. Um, Shopify is really leading, uh, the race. There, uh, is a leading player. And uh, we know that Shopify powers millions, um, of merchants out there, like in 175 plus countries. So I'm curious to know a little bit more about your keynote yesterday and also why, uh, Shopify is present at the payments conference.

Speaker B: Right. So as you said, we power millions of merchants and we do that across something we call the Commerce operating system. So we build that operating system over the past two decades. And it's not just online and online checkouts. It spans across brick and mortar with point of sale. It spans across B2B. Um, it is social channels, it's pop up stores, and now it's also agentic commerce. And we run merchants, local merchants from Europe like Huell, Gymshark, West Wing, Jagermeister, uh, global brands like Mattel Supreme Glossier. And they use this operating system to bridge the gaps between all different channels. And that puts us in a unique position, that gives us a unique radar. We are at the intersection of merchant, buyer and bank. And that means we see the signal before the transaction even happens. And we don't just see payments volume, but we see the entire journey and we see actual behavior change.

Speaker A: So not just small merchants, also bigger ones are using Shopify.

Speaker B: All sizes, from entrepreneurs to global brands.

Speaker A: Nice. Um, so everyone at mp, but not only at mp, uh, lately is talking about this agentic economy. Agentic commerce. What, um, actually happens when an AI agent, uh, tries to complete a purchase on behalf of a customer? Like, is there anything that breaks the day? Is that a smooth experience? How can you tell us a little bit about this journey?

Speaker B: The infrastructure we built, the industry built over the past, uh, where the Internet, uh, was starting with, uh, the search bar, ah, that was the front door to commerce. And if an agent uses that type of infrastructure, tries to make a purchase, it will fail. There's so many traps there where we cannot solve commerce logic at the payments layer. So imagine we have things like cross border logic, uh, taxes, difficult discounts. All these things need to be solved before we hit the payment. Because the payment layer doesn't. The last layer, it treats uh, a loyal five year VIP customer the same as it does uh, for a new customer. And the cure here is, is to provide context. So what we need to do for agentic commerce is rethink the way we build the infrastructure. Rethink the approach. The infrastructure we have in most cases is built to detect bot traffic and block it.

Speaker A: The bad ones.

Speaker B: The bad ones. And for the first time we also have good ones. We have bots that are high net worth customers, high intent, that want to spend money with you. So our mission at Shopify is to build a green lane and to build a way, um, for our merchants to participate from that opportunity.

Speaker A: Nice. So a hyper contextualized and aware experience, uh, where the customer understands uh, more. Also thanks to the technology that brings that in front of them.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: And uh, in connection to this, uh, Shopify introduced something new called ucp, like the Universal Commerce Protocol, together with Google and other key partners at the end of last year. Um, for someone that is hearing this for the first time, what problem does this new framework solve and how?

Speaker B: The problem I just described, where bots are scraping an Internet that isn't built for them, but that is built for humans. There's something missing there. What's missing is a translation layer. A standardized language that lets you. AI agents.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Talk to merchants in a, uh, deterministically, mathematically correct way, understand what these merchants offer. And that's the ucp. The UCP is as you said, an open standard, A language that we released that allows merchants and AI agents to communicate in a standardized format and solve all these problems and therefore make sure that we have high authorization rates, that we have successful transactions on this new channel.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that agent end up buying the right stuff.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: That's always a concern. It's like what if my agent buys something else? But if you have the right context, if you have the right information, the right pricing, obviously that's much clearer for an agent. What to buy.

Speaker B: Exactly. In the past, agents were guessing, they were scraping the site, they were sometimes maybe making things up. And that guessing is replaced with negotiation. Um, in the UCP there's this negotiation that happens in milliseconds where agents declare their intent, merchants declare their rules. Could be something like uh, an agent saying I have a wallet, I have a shipping address. Trying to find a store where they can successfully complete that order and the merchant declares their rules. I have this loyalty program. I need age verification. And when that negotiation is successful, the entire transaction can be settled in milliseconds.

Speaker A: And you have context also about the customer itself. Uh, like if you know, if they're a loyal customer, uh, when they purchased the last time, their transaction history, you can bring some of that context in front of the agent, making the experience more live and uh, real time as well.

Speaker B: That's, that's so important because many protocols out there, they focus purely on the payment token. And we know, because we see the entire picture. We know commerce is complex and we need to abstract that complexity and make it easy for our merchants. And that's why UCP spends not just across payments, but across checkout experience and the shopping experience. Right.

Speaker A: Makes a lot of sense. So besides ucp, uh, also Shopify, you built Agentix, uh, storefronts and uh, opened up your catalog infrastructure. Uh, that's really an interesting move. Uh, does a merchant need to be on Shopify to participate in agent E commerce and what do they keep control of?

Speaker B: That's the big shift that we are opening up our catalog to merchants who are not on Shopify. But maybe to take a step back to explain what this is concept actually is, ucp, which we talked about, is sort of the infrastructure layer, the protocol behind it. Agentix storefronts are storefronts that are invisible to humans. They are optimized for these AI agents to interact with. So merchants have a standardized way where they can define their product data, certain rules like shipping rules and so on, and that is accessible for AI agents in a standardized way. And the catalog which you just mentioned, that's the catalog where merchants publish their products so they can be discovered in any AI channel. The beauty is they do it once and it can be discovered and sold on Google, gemini, Microsoft, Copilot, ChatGPT. So that's the catalog. And what we are doing now, which you just mentioned, is we are opening up that catalog to any brand, not just Shopify merchants. So if you are not on Shopify today with the Agentic plan, you will be able to publish your products into the Shopify catalog and sell to all these AI channels. And we do that because we think if commerce flows freely, everyone wins and so everyone can participate.

Speaker A: So you build infrastructure layer that allows to orchestrate across all the multitude potentially of uh, agents that are going to be out there. So I don't have to worry about that. That's great. Uh, you reduce the effort and give Me more sales channels? Why should I ask more? Um, but if we fast forward a couple of years, um, maybe 1 5. Um, AI moves very quickly so that ah, time frame could be, uh, different. Uh, but a human takes minutes to browse and fil and checkout. An AI agent does that in a few milliseconds. What should the payment executives and the people that are listening to the show, um, understand and think about to prepare for this change?

Speaker B: It's important to understand that this change is happening right now. It's not a future vision. It's something that is impacting businesses right now. We see if we look at our Shopify stores globally, millions of stores, and we look at the data, we see an uh, uptick of orders that originated in AI, uh, from January 2025 to 26 of 15 times, 15 times more order that originated in AI. So it's not something that is far away. It's happening already and it's just the beginning. No one has the crystal ball to know exactly what it's going to look like. But agentic commerce will be shaking the ground. And so the recommendation for payment executives, merchants out there is to act now and to start building the foundation for agentic commerce. And the key piece we just spoke about, the catalog, is making sure the product data is right. Because AI is only as good as the data it works with. So that's a key part, making sure that you have structured product data with the right meta fields, with right inventory levels, so AI is able to facilitate the purchase.

Speaker A: Perfect. So thanks for being here. Uh, I think we got an understanding that agent E commerce might not be visible one, uh, hundred percent today, but it's not something that we can pass on. Uh, we need to keep an eye on that and it might come faster than we expect. Uh, and, well, it's good to see that Shopify is building solutions that are not just for Shopify Merchant, but also for anybody else, uh, to really give space to the industry to embrace this, uh, new trend. So thanks for being here and good luck with the rest of the conference.

Speaker B: Thank you. Matteo.