Published: October 1, 2026 · Last updated: October 1, 2026
TL;DR: Shopify expanded its WebMCP protocol to let AI shopping agents inspect, modify, and complete checkout, including Shop Pay, for any eligible merchant, taking the opposite approach from Amazon and Adidas, which restrict agents from buying anything.
Amazon and Adidas have spent the last year building walls to keep AI shopping agents out of their checkout flows. Shopify just tore its wall down.
The company expanded WebMCP, short for Web Model Context Protocol, to cover checkout as of late September, adding on to support that previously only covered browsing products and managing a cart. WebMCP gives AI agents operating inside a buyer’s browser structured APIs to work with, rather than forcing them to scrape a page or interpret screenshots the way earlier shopping bots had to. The checkout expansion adds three specific tools: get_checkout, which lets an agent inspect the checkout screen; update_checkout, which lets it modify details like shipping address or delivery options; and complete_checkout, which lets it submit the order once the buyer has actually authorized the purchase.
Shop Pay support is included, and the rollout covers all eligible Shopify merchants rather than a pilot group.
“If your agent is operating in the buyer’s browser, use WebMCP tools provided on storefront and checkout to efficiently complete order placement,” said Gil Greenberg, Shopify’s staff product manager for agentic commerce.
The bet Shopify is making is that agentic shopping is coming whether merchants are ready or not, and the platforms that build clean, structured access for agents now will end up handling more of that traffic than the ones that force agents to scrape and guess. A standardized protocol, in theory, gives agents accurate product facts, required disclosures, and clear handoff requirements, all the stuff that goes wrong when an agent is just reading a page the way a human would and occasionally misreading a price or a size chart.
Amazon’s position is closer to defensive. It restricts third-party agents from completing purchases on its platform, protecting both its own first-party shopping assistant and its enormous database of purchase behavior from being intermediated by someone else’s AI. Adidas has taken a similar stance. Neither company wants an outside agent sitting between it and the customer relationship, collecting the data and the trust that used to belong entirely to the retailer.
There’s a real safety question buried in Shopify’s approach too: is it actually fine to let an AI agent complete a financial transaction on someone’s behalf with less friction than before? Shopify’s answer is that the buyer authorization step is still required before complete_checkout can fire, which keeps a human in the loop at the final moment even if everything leading up to it was automated. Whether that’s enough friction to prevent costly mistakes, accidental duplicate orders, wrong sizes, agents misreading intent, is something that’ll only get answered once enough real transactions have gone through this way.
Related: ElevenLabs Just Doubled Its Valuation to $22 Billion Without Raising a Fresh Round and Google’s AI Mode Will Now Watch the Web for You, Whether You Pay for It or Not.
Bottom Line: Shopify is betting on openness where Amazon is betting on control, and both bets make sense for the company making them. Merchants who want agent traffic now have a reason to pick Shopify over a platform still treating AI agents as a threat to manage rather than a channel to serve.
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