Every January at NRF, retail leaders come ready to reimagine what’s possible. But for years, that ambition hit the same ceiling: reaching customers everywhere meant building everywhere. New channel? New integration. New platform? New checkout. Your brand fractured across every surface.

At NRF 2026, one thing became clear: that’s over. The AI era of commerce isn’t about building for every channel. It’s about being present wherever your customers are—with your brand intact, your business logic preserved, and your customer relationships yours to own.

All week, in sessions and at our booth, we heard the same thing: retailers are tired of choosing between reach and control. Here’s how that’s changing.

Your customers aren’t just searching. They’re asking.

For twenty years, the internet search bar was the front door to commerce. That door is closing. Today, people don’t just search; they ask. They have conversations. And they expect to buy right there in the chat.

This isn’t speculation about the future—it’s happening now. Since January 2025, AI-driven traffic to Shopify sites is up 6x, and orders attributed to AI searches are up 11x. Your customers are already shopping this way. The question is whether your brand will be there when they ask.

Show up in every AI conversation

During NRF, we announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard co-developed with Google to bring your brand to AI agents at scale, without losing what makes your business unique.

UCP preserves your business logic across AI conversations. Bundles, discounts, taxes, subscriptions—they all work natively, no matter which AI platform your customers use. You’re not adapting your brand to fit the channel. The channel adapts to your brand.

“The Universal Commerce Protocol provides that framework,” says Ashish Gupta, VP/GM of Merchant Shopping at Google. “Through our collaboration with partners like Shopify we’re ensuring the protocol is interoperable and ready to meet the evolving demands of retailers and their customers.”

Native shopping on Google surfaces is rolling out soon, which means Shopify merchants can sell directly in AI Mode in Google Search and the Gemini app. We’re also releasing an update to our Microsoft Copilot integration with a new embedded checkout experience. These new integrations, in addition to ChatGPT, are managed centrally from the Shopify Admin through Agentic Storefronts.

Keep your brand and business logic intact

Agentic Storefronts help brands on Shopify instantly and accurately get discovered on AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, with others coming soon. One quick setup in your admin and your brand is present wherever AI conversations happen.

And you stay in control. You decide where and how your brand shows up from discovery to post-purchase. Track your policies, FAQs, and brand voice via the Knowledge Base App, so agents have the right answers about your brand in every conversation. You own your customer relationships. You control your brand presence.

This works because Shopify Catalog structures billions of products so AI can understand them—inferring categories, extracting attributes, and clustering identical items. The result? Your products show up accurately, and your prices and inventory stay current across every agent.

“At Monos, we’re excited about agentic shopping because it enables us to meet customers where they already are,” said Victor Tam, CEO and Co-Founder of Monos. “It’s a new way for our story and product details to show up at the exact moment someone is asking real questions with real intent, in a format that feels helpful, not intrusive.”

Move at the speed customers demand

On the show floor, one thing came up in nearly every conversation: Sidekick. Retailers wanted to see what it could do, and more importantly, how it could help them show up faster.

Sidekick is Shopify’s AI commerce assistant and has powered nearly 100 million merchant conversations since January 2025. That volume, in part, is why we’re ranked #1 for the AI-enabled Commerce Use Case in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities Report—merchants are using it to move at the speed their customers expect.

What can it do? Sidekick generates custom reports and data visualizations, creates email campaigns and customer segments, builds custom apps, makes theme edits, and creates interactive to-do lists, all while being prompted by natural language. It’s like having a team on call—except it’s available instantly, anytime you need it.

The excitement at NRF was about what this means in practice: less time building infrastructure, more time building your brand presence.

AI meets IRL 

If you visited our booth, you might have tried the Magic Mirror—an activation that showed how AI agents work in physical retail. Stand in front of the mirror. Thumbs up for a “toast” on your outfit. Thumbs down for a “roast.” Peace sign for blush match.

The mirror used AI to evaluate your style or complexion in real-time, then printed a discount code connected directly to POS. Scan the QR code at the register, claim your swag.

The whole loop—AI evaluation, code generation, POS connection—happened in seconds. AI that understands context, systems that connect instantly, experiences that work the same whether someone’s on their phone or in your store. That’s infrastructure for unified commerce in practice.

Make buying fast, familiar, and frictionless

In our “Inside the World’s Best Converting Checkout” session, we broke down what makes checkout convert. Shopify Checkout delivers 15% higher average conversion because buyers recognize and trust it.

When shoppers see Shopify Checkout, they know what to expect. They’ve used it before at other stores. The experience is consistent, fast, and secure. That familiarity removes friction at the moment that matters most.

What makes that consistency possible? Infrastructure that processes 489M requests per minute and $5.1M in sales globally every minute. That scale means your checkout experience works the same way whether you’re processing 10 orders or 10,000.

And we’re making that infrastructure more accessible. At NRF, we announced our partnership with Verifone to bring more payment device options to Shopify POS. Two new Verifone Victa devices—Victa Mobile countertop and Victa Lane—give retailers more polished, performant hardware for checkout.

Shop Pay takes that trust even further. When shoppers have their information saved, they convert 50% more than guest checkout—because they can complete purchases in seconds across any Shopify store. During BFCM 2025 alone, 32% of orders were placed using Shop Pay.

Build once, sell everywhere

Your checkout isn’t stuck on your website. You build your brand experience once and it’s ready to work everywhere your customers are: mobile apps (via Checkout Kit), AI platforms, partner sites. Your business logic stays preserved. Your brand stays consistent.

This matters because your customers are everywhere. 62% of ecommerce is expected to be mobile by 2027, representing $3.4T in total sales. Gen Z and social commerce are driving this shift. Your brand experience needs to work wherever customers shop, not just where you built it.

People don’t shop channels. They shop brands.

The brands winning in 2026 won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets or the longest roadmaps. They’ll be the ones who show up where customers are, with their brand intact and their experience consistent. They’ll be the ones who move at the speed their customers expect.

At Shopify, we’re building the foundation that makes that possible. Because your brand shouldn’t fracture across channels. It should expand across them.