The Shopify stores winning inside Microsoft's AI checkout
Merchants saw 90% more visibility in Microsoft Copilot Shopping this spring.
Top Shopify merchants saw nearly 90 percent more visibility in Copilot Shopping this spring, according to Microsoft. Most never opted in.
Shopify enrolled them automatically the moment they became eligible.
How merchants got here
Copilot Checkout launched in January (at NRF), and Shopify was one of the partners named at launch alongside PayPal, Stripe and Etsy.
But the Shopify part worked differently.
Every eligible Shopify store selling to US buyers got enrolled - direct checkout switched on by default, no application and no integration required.
The number shared by Microsoft (i.e. 90% more visibility) comes from the biggest Shopify sellers specifically - top 100,000 stores in the US and Canada by revenue, checked over about a month against that same real-time feed from Shopify Catalog.
The skeptics at launch
Shopify's stock dropped more than 2% the day Microsoft made the announcement, investors pricing in adoption risk before a single order had shipped.
Automatic enrollment raised its own question too.
Several outlets compared it directly to Amazon's Buy for Me rollout, in which brands objected to being included without being asked. None of that has surfaced as complaints so far for Microsoft, and the likely reason is that Shopify runs the opt-out itself instead of leaving merchants to deal with Microsoft directly.
In April, Checkout's catalog reach had passed 500,000 merchants, extended into Copilot's mobile apps, and picked up its first loyalty integration with Target.
Brand Agents, the separate on-site assistant, grew from Shopify to WooCommerce too, and Microsoft says it's seeing an average 2x conversion lift internally.
Where this leaves the rest
Recently, I shared how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google are handling agentic checkout and how Walmart pivoted towards Sparky - check it out here →
OpenAI is the useful contrast.
In the same window, Microsoft was expanding into mobile and loyalty programs - OpenAI pulled Instant Checkout back out of the chat entirely and moved it into a separate Apps experience, saying the original version didn't give merchants enough flexibility.
Perplexity and Google both kept building. Microsoft is doing the same. And for both Google and Microsoft, it's the Shopify catalog doing the heavy lifting underneath.
One thing you control
Enrollment already happened, whether you've looked at your Shopify admin or not.
What's still open is what Copilot actually finds once it's reading your catalog.
A few weeks back, I used Sephora's product page as the benchmark for what a fully structured page looks like, and mapped each field onto its Shopify Catalog equivalent - for a query like "fragrance free mauve cream blush under $30".
That query runs against these fields: category as a taxonomy node, title, rating and count as aggregateRating, price, and shades and stock as the variant. Copilot reads that same Shopify Catalog. A question is either answerable from those fields or it isn't.
That's the same catalog work that decides whether you show up in ChatGPT or Google AI Mode. It holds no matter which AI a shopper happens to be using.
It reads your Shopify Catalog the same fields Copilot pulls from and shows exactly which ones are empty. Catalog enrichment is the fix - it fills in what's missing so the same catalog holds up wherever the next agent reads it.
- Ankit
If this was useful, the next one will be too.
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