Building a UCP-style WhatsApp/SMS shopping assistant on Shopify — looking for feedback

Agentic Commerce
1

Hi everyone,

We’ve been building a UCP-style conversational shopping flow on top of Shopify, where shoppers can use WhatsApp or SMS to search products, compare options, get checkout links, and set price-drop alerts.

The main thing we’re exploring is how a conversational layer can reduce friction compared with the usual store-by-store browsing flow.

Would love feedback from other builders here on a few things:

  1. How would you think about cross-store discovery UX without overwhelming the shopper?

  2. What patterns make sense for merchant attribution and checkout handoff when discovery starts in conversation?

  3. How are others thinking about catalog freshness / availability / pricing for conversational shopping experiences?

  4. What would make price alerts genuinely useful without becoming noisy?

Curious if others here are working on similar UCP / agentic commerce patterns on Shopify.

If useful, here’s a short example of the flow we’ve been testing:
WhatsApp UCP Agent Link

2

Hey @sunny_kaiwar

This is really cool! Thanks for sharing this here - which APIs are you using here? What was your experience like building this so far? Anything missing from the dev experience that you’d like us to support?

3

Hi Liam,

We have operational AI-powered storefront agents on individual Shopify stores today across SMS, WhatsApp, and web chat. These agents support the end-to-end customer journey within an integrated storefront, including product discovery and comparison, cart building, WTP capture, price alerts, cart abandonment alerts, draft order creation, secure checkout via Shopify’s web checkout layer, order tracking, and support ticket creation.

At the cross-store level, we currently support discovery, comparison, WTP intent capture, and conditional alerting across multiple merchants. However, this is not yet a universal cart or checkout experience through UCP. The current limitation is that Shopify’s UCP / Catalog APIs do not yet support key transactional capabilities such as shared multi-merchant cart, checkout, or payment execution.

That leaves us with two questions:

  1. What is the timeline for Checkout MCP and AP2 becoming production-ready for true cross-merchant agentic checkout without store-specific integrations?

  2. Is Shopify planning to support intent-based agentic commerce, where an AI agent can hold a customer’s buy intent across merchants, monitor conditions, and eventually initiate or execute the transaction once platform support is available?

regards,

Sunny