I’ve built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud since 2014. Over a decade of implementations, migrations, and architecture decisions across enterprise brands.
I’ve publicly questioned whether Shopify could compete at enterprise scale. Complex catalogs. Multi-brand architecture. B2B workflows that require flexibility most platforms can’t handle.
And on that specific question, I might still be right.
But it doesn’t matter anymore.
Because in the last 60 days, Shopify did something most companies don’t have the discipline to do. They recognized they were fighting the wrong war. And they pivoted to the one that hadn’t started yet.
They Tried to Win Enterprise
This isn’t a story about a company that was always playing a different game. Shopify tried. Hard.
Shopify Plus was a real push into enterprise. They invested heavily in commerce innovation. They pulled brands from Magento, Commercetools, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Daniel Wellington migrated from Commercetools and cut their licensing costs by over 50%, saving half a million euros annually. Steve Madden and Perry Ellis moved over early and became case studies. 2023 saw a wave of enterprise migrations that made the industry pay attention.
But the enterprise war was a knife fight. Catalog complexity. Multi-brand architecture. B2B workflows with custom pricing logic. Regional fulfillment rules that change by country. The incumbents had decades of head start building for exactly these problems.
Shopify Plus holds a fraction of the global ecommerce platform market. Not because the product is bad. Because enterprise commerce is a problem that rewards depth over speed, and the platforms that have been solving it for 15 years have a compounding advantage that’s very hard to overcome.
Most companies would have kept grinding. More enterprise features. More migration case studies. More sales engineering resources dedicated to pulling logos from Salesforce and Adobe.
Shopify did something harder. They looked at the scoreboard and realized the game they were winning wasn’t the game that mattered next.
60 Days That Changed the Scoreboard
Starting in late 2025, Shopify made a series of moves that only make sense if you understand them as a coordinated strategy. Individually, each one is a product launch. Together, they’re a platform repositioning.
December 2025: Agentic Storefronts ship. Winter ’26 Edition launches. Shopify merchants can now sell natively inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Not through links that redirect to a storefront. Native checkout inside the conversation. The customer never leaves the AI interface. Google AI Mode and Gemini integration rolling out.
This is the moment Shopify stopped being a storefront platform and started being a commerce infrastructure layer. The storefront is optional. The checkout is the product.
January 11, 2026: Universal Commerce Protocol launches at NRF. Google developed UCP in collaboration with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. Backed by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Best Buy, Home Depot, Macy’s, and 20+ others before launch day.
UCP establishes a common language for AI agents to discover products, negotiate capabilities, handle payments, and complete transactions across any merchant. Shopify’s own engineering blog draws the comparison to TCP/IP, and it’s not a stretch. The architecture is layered and extensible, separating core transaction primitives from fulfillment, payments, and custom capabilities. Merchants declare what they support. Agents discover and negotiate. The protocol handles everything between.
Shopify was a key collaborator in the specification. They brought two decades of checkout complexity across millions of merchants to the design process. That’s the kind of real-world commerce knowledge that makes a protocol practical instead of theoretical.
January 2026: The Agentic Plan. This is the move nobody’s talking about enough. Shopify opened their catalog infrastructure to non-Shopify merchants. Any brand, on any platform, can use Shopify’s infrastructure to sell across AI channels.
Read that again. They’re not just serving Shopify merchants anymore. They’re becoming the commerce layer underneath everyone. Regardless of what platform you’re on, Shopify wants to be the pipes that connect your catalog to every AI surface.
That’s not an enterprise play. That’s an infrastructure play. And infrastructure plays compound in ways that enterprise feature wars don’t.
February 2026: Claude Opus 4.6 early access. Anthropic launches its most advanced AI model. Shopify is one of a handful of companies that got early access to test it before release. Their Staff Engineers are quoted in the launch blog. Ben Lafferty described Opus 4.6 as “the first model from Anthropic that feels like a true collaborator in my day-to-day work.” Paulo Arruda described a moment where the model anticipated his next request before he made it.
This is more than a customer testimonial. Shopify was stress-testing and providing feedback on a pre-release AI model, helping shape the version that ultimately shipped. They’re not waiting for AI tools to mature and then integrating. They’re in the room while the tools are being refined, ensuring commerce use cases get real attention in the next generation of AI.
The Strategy Behind the Moves
Each of these announcements individually is a product launch. Together, they reveal a strategy that most of the commerce industry hasn’t fully processed yet.
Shopify is positioning itself as the default commerce layer for AI. Not the best storefront. Not the most feature-rich enterprise platform. The infrastructure that every AI agent already knows how to talk to.
The enterprise war was about winning the merchant. Convince brands to migrate to your platform. Win on features, support, and total cost of ownership. The competitive advantage was depth of capability.
The next war is about winning the agent. When an AI agent needs to find a product, check inventory, calculate pricing, and complete a transaction, which commerce layer does it reach for? The competitive advantage is ubiquity and protocol fluency.
These are fundamentally different competitive dynamics. The enterprise war rewards complexity. The agent war rewards simplicity and reach. Shopify’s strengths, millions of merchants, standardized data structures, checkout infrastructure that processes billions in transactions, are perfectly suited for the second war in ways they never were for the first.
They didn’t get better at the enterprise game. They changed which game matters.
What This Means for Salesforce Commerce Cloud
I’ve spent over a decade building on SFCC. I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t create an uncomfortable question for the platform.
To their credit, Salesforce hasn’t been standing still. They’ve built Agentforce Commerce with its own agentic capabilities. They announced native integration to ChatGPT under the Agentic Commerce Protocol. They partnered with Google on the Agent Payments Protocol. And when Google launched UCP on Sunday, January 11, Salesforce announced native UCP support by Wednesday, January 14. Three days. The actual integration details and rollout timeline are still being developed with Google, but the speed of the announcement signals intent.
And SFCC has genuine advantages that don’t disappear because Shopify made a strategic pivot. Enterprise catalog complexity. Multi-brand architecture. The Salesforce ecosystem with Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud creating a unified customer view that no standalone commerce platform can match. The brands running on SFCC chose it for reasons that still hold.
But here’s what I’d say to every engineering leader building on Commerce Cloud right now.
The competitive landscape just shifted underneath you. Shopify isn’t trying to take your enterprise merchants anymore. They’re trying to make the enterprise feature war irrelevant by owning the layer between merchants and AI agents. If they succeed, it doesn’t matter which platform you’re on. Your commerce data flows through Shopify’s infrastructure to reach the customer.
The Agentic Plan is the move that should get your attention. Shopify is explicitly inviting non-Shopify merchants to use their catalog infrastructure for AI channels. That means SFCC merchants could end up using Shopify as a distribution layer. That’s a dependency most enterprise architects haven’t evaluated yet.
SFCC’s response needs to go beyond protocol announcements. UCP support is necessary but not sufficient. The question is whether Commerce Cloud can become agent-fluent at the infrastructure level, not just at the protocol level. Can your product data be queried by machines as easily as it’s browsed by humans? Can your checkout handle programmatic transactions from autonomous agents at machine speed? Can your catalog metadata support the kind of structured, semantic queries that AI agents need to make purchase decisions?
For most SFCC implementations I’ve seen, the honest answer is not yet. Not because the platform can’t do it. Because the implementations weren’t built for it. Product data tagged for human browsing, not machine queries. Inventory feeds that update hourly, not in real time. Checkout flows that assume a human is filling out forms.
The platform question is important. But the implementation question is urgent.
The Lesson That Applies Beyond Commerce
Strip away the commerce specifics and there’s a leadership lesson here that applies to any technology organization.
Most companies fight the war in front of them. They see the competitive landscape, identify the gap, and invest in closing it. Enterprise features. Migration tools. Customer success teams. The playbook is well-understood and most organizations run it competently.
Very few companies have the discipline to look at a war they’re fighting and decide it’s the wrong one. To accept that closing the gap on the current battlefield won’t matter if the next battlefield is somewhere else entirely.
Shopify had every reason to keep grinding on enterprise. The market was enormous. They were making progress. The case studies were real. Walking away from that fight requires a level of strategic clarity that most leadership teams can’t achieve because the pressure to compete on the current scoreboard is overwhelming.
They didn’t walk away because enterprise didn’t matter. They walked away because they saw something that mattered more. And they had the discipline to redirect their resources before the window closed.
That’s the hardest strategic decision any technology leader makes. Not which features to build. Which war to stop fighting.
Where This Goes
I don’t know if Shopify’s bet pays off. Agentic commerce is early. The protocols are competing. OpenAI and Stripe shipped the Agentic Commerce Protocol with ChatGPT Instant Checkout months before UCP launched. Amazon is building its own closed system. Consumer behavior hasn’t shifted at the scale the predictions suggest. There are legitimate questions about whether AI agents will drive enough transaction volume to justify the infrastructure investment.
But I do know this. Every major AI surface now has Shopify’s commerce infrastructure plugged in. Every major protocol has Shopify involved in the conversation. Every non-Shopify merchant now has the option to use Shopify’s catalog as their AI distribution layer.
Whether agentic commerce becomes 5% of transactions or 50%, Shopify is positioned at the center of it. And they got there by making a decision that most companies wouldn’t have the courage to make.
They stopped fighting the war everyone was watching. And started building the infrastructure for the one nobody saw coming.
That’s not a product strategy. That’s a lesson in what happens when a company is honest about what it can and can’t win, and redirects accordingly.
I’ve spent over a decade questioning whether Shopify could compete at enterprise scale. I was asking the right question at the wrong time. The question that matters now is different.
It’s not “who wins the merchant?” It’s “who wins the agent?”
And right now, Shopify has shipped more answers to that question than anyone else in the industry.