Shopify puts checkout tool Shop Pay inside AI Agents

Shopify last week announced that AI agents including Claude Duet, Grok Bot, Instinct, and Muse can use Shop Pay to checkout and buy items people are searching for on these AI platforms. Merchants don’t have to have Shopify powered stores, and retailers have one more agentic integration to keep track of ahead of the holiday season.

It means shoppers can discover and search for items on Muse or Instinct and then complete that transaction on Shop Pay—Shopify’s digital wallet that lets people save their payment details and is used by 400 million users globally, according to the company—regardless of whether that brand has a Shopify storefront or not.

“How do we enable buyers to use Shop Pay to buy anywhere on the Internet using these agents, irrespective of whether that end merchant is a Shopify merchant or not a Shopify merchant?” Rohit Mishra, VP of product, payments, tax and cross-border at Shopify, told Retail Brew.

Previously, Shop Pay only worked with Shopify merchants, but now Shopify will give AI agents credentials they can use on websites that don’t work with Shopify, Mishra added.

“We would say the transaction is being done by the AI agent for you, but using Shop Pay where the agent never sees your credit card,” Mishra added. “The agent only knows that Shop Pay is doing this payment work for me.”

Mishra explained that behind the scenes, Shopify takes credit card information and turns it into an agentic token that looks like a credit card, but with a different 16-digit number, expiry date, and CVV. Shop Pay stays secure with these tokens created in partnership with Mastercard, Visa, and Discover for agent purchases taking place on merchants off Shopify.

Mark William Lewis, founder of e-commerce agency Netalico, which helps brands set up on Shopify, said the agentic update is “nice to have” and builds on the work Shopify has been doing with Google on UCP, in addition to testing checkout within OpenAI’s ChatGPT with agentic storefronts.

“It’ll probably still be pretty low key for the next year still,” Lewis said. “It’s still a new concept for people to truly buy directly from agents.”

People are still using AI agents primarily for product discovery and research, Lewis added. “Most people still want to go to the website and see what the website says first.”