The Agent-Native Commerce Race: Shopify and commercetools Are the Horses to Bet On
In the age of agents, argues Orium CEO and MACH Executive Board Member Jason Cottrell, platforms become infrastructure.
Commerce is entering a new phase defined not just by channels or customers, but by intelligent agents acting on their behalf. These software agents are rewriting the dynamics of digital business, from automated purchasing decisions (agent-as-shopper) to continuous internal optimization (agent-as-employee).
In this emerging landscape, two commerce platforms are pulling ahead: Shopify and commercetools. They’re not merely adapting; they are structurally suited to thrive. Think of them not as rivals locked in a zero-sum game, but as elite racehorses. They’ve been bred for different tracks, and they’re each capable of being piloted by increasingly intelligent jockeys— autonomous agents tuned for speed, precision, and scale.
The outcome isn’t binary. Both are likely to dominate, but for distinct reasons. Their trajectories help us see not just where commerce is going, but what kinds of infrastructure will be required to support it.
Shopify: The Thoroughbred for Homogeneous B2C Velocity
Strengths: Network Effects, Simplicity, and Conversion Infrastructure
Shopify excels where speed, standardization, and seamlessness matter most. In the world of high-frequency, low-friction consumer purchases—apparel, accessories, beauty, wellness—the winning strategy is about surfacing the right product, trusted checkout, and rapid fulfillment. Shopify’s ecosystem delivers on all three:
- The Shop App aggregates hundreds of thousands of merchant catalogs into a single agent-accessible index, dramatically simplifying discovery. Agents can query this network to find product availability, pricing, shipping timelines, and seller trust signals without hitting dead ends.
- Shop Pay, with its wide adoption across merchants, gives agents a universal checkout endpoint—enabling instant, trusted, cross-brand transactions that mirror the expectations of human consumers but move at machine speed.
- Hydrogen + Shopify Functions provide a composable, AI-extendable storefront layer. Developers can integrate agent logic directly into customer workflows, optimizing for conversion or engagement without breaking the cohesive Shopify ecosystem.
And now, Shopify is formalizing its agent-native ambitions. The Summer ’25 Edition, codenamed Horizons, introduces a suite of features built specifically for agent enablement and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. Notable among them:
- Storefront MCP and a global product catalog API, giving agents real-time access to millions of product listings and fulfillment conditions.
- A soon-to-launch Global Cart, allowing cross-store checkouts in a single transaction—simplifying multi-merchant agent experiences.
- AI-powered chat UIs and customizable FAQ knowledge bases to empower embedded shopping agents with contextual intelligence.
Where today’s customer might ask Siri or Google Assistant for a gift idea or product recommendation, tomorrow’s agents will execute entire buying flows—from research to reorder—without ever surfacing the interface. Shopify becomes a clearing layer for those agent-led transactions, making it critical infrastructure for the agentive future of B2C commerce.
The next generation of commerce won’t be built around channels, it will be built around intelligence: surfacing the right product at the right moment, and executing seamlessly.
commercetools: The Draft Horse Built for Complexity and Control
Strengths: Modular Architecture, Enterprise-Grade Orchestration, and B2X Mastery
Where Shopify dominates with velocity, commercetools wins with control. It thrives in the messy, multi-actor domains that characterize modern enterprise: B2B, B2B2C, multi-brand, and multinational ecosystems where buyers aren’t always humans and transactions rarely follow a straight path. This is where agents become business operators. The use cases go well beyond checkout:
- Auto-negotiating procurement contracts, based on predefined tolerances and inventory needs
- Orchestrating dynamic pricing, reacting to supply and demand signals across markets
- Managing fulfillment and logistics, factoring availability, lead times, and cost optimizations
While some of this sounds futuristic, early prototypes are emerging. In the B2B space, pilot projects are already exploring agents that monitor contract compliance, recommend order consolidation, or trigger RFPs. The direction is clear: agents that handle the messy middle of enterprise commerce.
commercetools’ headless, microservice-first architecture is ready for it. Its modular design and event-driven extensibility allow agents to plug into discrete systems—product, pricing, promotion, inventory—without heavy integration overhead.
At Elevate 2025, commercetools went further by introducing Commerce MCP and an AI Hub built for this exact future.
- Commerce MCP provides an extensibility layer so agents can interact with backend services like product catalogs, orders, and pricing in a stateless, composable format.
- The AI Hub enables intelligent orchestration across APIs, workflows, and systems without re-architecting legacy processes.
- It already supports agent development frameworks like OpenAI’s Agent SDK and Langchain, accelerating enterprise adoption of AI-native commerce.
The result is a platform built not just to support agent orchestration, but to accelerate it across complex domains. In short, if Shopify aggregates volume, commercetools aggregates capability. It’s designed for environments where agents don’t just buy, they negotiate, reconcile, govern, and iterate.
Scale, Redefined: Ecosystem vs. Execution
Both platforms can claim scale, but it’s scale of differing natures.
Shopify scales consumer reach through network effects. Its aggregated product catalog, embedded checkout, and branded front-ends make it a natural fit for agent-to-market transactions at speed and volume.
By contrast, commercetools scales enterprise capability through modularity. Its infrastructure supports granular workflows across teams, divisions, and brands, giving agents the building blocks for high-value orchestration.
It’s executional scale vs. compositional scale. And agents will need both.
The Broader Field: Why Others Trail (Or Could Surprise)
While Shopify and commercetools are clearly ahead, others remain in the race:
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud brings CRM integration and an installed base of enterprise customers, but its monolithic legacy and slower innovation cadence make agent-native extensibility difficult.
- VTEX has strong Latin American traction and native marketplace features, but its platform architecture still leans toward integrated suites, limiting agent-level modularity.
- Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Elastic Path, and others may yet surprise. Each has made composability moves. But none, at present, pair the maturity of ecosystem or modularity of architecture required to operate as an agent-native commerce substrate.
- Medusa and Saleor offer open source alternatives and small, focused teams which may spot and seize nascent opportunities in this fast-moving space.
These players are still in the race. But going back to our horse race analogy, they’re running a few lengths behind. As agent-based commerce use cases mature—and they will—the platforms ready to plug into those patterns will break away.
The Race Is On: Different Tracks, Same Stakes
Shopify and commercetools aren’t trying to win the same customers, but they are trying to win the same future.
That future isn’t omnichannel. It’s agent-native. And the stakes are high: platform dominance, market orchestration, and the very infrastructure of digital commerce.
In this world, the platforms that power agents—consumer-facing and enterprise-operational alike—will become the invisible operating systems of modern trade. They won’t just run websites. They’ll run decisions.
That’s the race. And right now, with Shopify’s agent-ready frontend and commercetools’ backend extensibility, these are the horses to bet on.
Jason Cottrell
Founder and CEO, Orium
Jason Cottrell is the CEO & Founder of Orium, the leading composable commerce consultancy and system integrator in the Americas. He works closely with clients and partners to ensure business goals and customer needs are being met, leading the Orium team through ambitious transformation programs at the intersection of commerce, composability, and customer data.