Shopify has reportedly introduced rules governing merchants’ use of agentic artificial intelligence (AI).
As Modern Retail reported Monday (July 14), the eCommerce platform has begun including a warning in the code powering merchant storefronts, establishing what these autonomous bots can and cannot do.
“Automated scraping, ‘buy-for-me’ agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final review step is not permitted,” the code said.
The report said the change was noticed in the last few days and appears on Shopify storefronts, including Alo Yoga, Allbirds and Brooklinen.
The change “doesn’t add or remove any rules for bots or agents,” Ilya Grigorik, Shopify’s distinguished engineer and technical advisor to the company CEO, said in a post on X.
“All we added is a comment for curious humans with a pointer to http://shopify.com/checkout-kit for native integration that delivers a full-featured checkout experience,” he added.
As the Modern Retail report notes, this change is happening at a time when retail giants such as Walmart and Amazon are embracing agentic AI, a technology in which bots perform tasks like recommending products or purchasing them on the shopper’s behalf.
While Spotify has engaged in a number of AI efforts — including a recent partnership with OpenAI — the Modern Retail report argues this updated language signals that it wants more control over how AI agents are deployed inside its operations.
“It’s really a note for developers who will be poking around,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent eCommerce analyst. “Shopify is trying to be upfront, saying, ‘We think you’re going to be doing this, trying to build automated checkout on top of our merchants, but we don’t want you to do this.’”
PYMNTS examined the promise of agentic AI in eCommerce earlier this year, arguing the technology was forcing merchants to rethink how and where they meet customers.
“If an AI agent can compress browsing, selection and checkout into the same dialogue, retailers that sit outside the conversation risk ceding both visibility and sales,” that report said.
Behind the scenes of that are the software agents empowered not merely to capture information but to carry out actions on the customer’s behalf. The technology combines an LLM’s ability to understand natural-language requests with hooks into merchant catalogs and payment rails.
“What consumers really want is for commerce to happen immediately,” Scott Hendrickson, chief revenue officer of agentic AI merchant network firmly, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “People’s time has never been more valuable, and they expect things to be frictionless.”