Shopify's Campaign Autopilot: AI Ad Agent?

Shopify's Campaign Autopilot: AI Ad Agent?

"It's an in-house, ready-to-go agency. Which is free for all merchants." That's how Sachin Malhotra, Shopify's Director of Product for Merchant Marketing, describes Campaign Autopilot, the new AI marketing tool Shopify just announced as part of Editions. It sets up your ad accounts, syncs your catalog, and runs Meta Advantage+ checkout campaigns inside the guardrails you set. You teach it your boundaries, it does the heavy lifting, and you keep oversight the whole way. Sachin walks Kurt through how the "ask me first" controls work, why the tool optimizes across Meta, Microsoft Ads, ChatGPT, and Snap instead of fixating on one channel, and how it stacks with Shop Campaigns and its pay-only-when-you-get-an-order billing. If online advertising has ever felt like yelling into the void, start here. LINKS * Campaign Autopilot: shopify.com/blog/introducing-campaign-autopilot [https://www.shopify.com/blog/introducing-campaign-autopilot] * Shopify Editions [https://www.shopify.com/editions/spring2026] SPONSORS Swym - Wishlists, Back in Stock alerts, & more getswym.com/kurt Cleverific - Smart order editing for Shopify cleverific.com Zipify - Build high-converting sales funnels zipify.com/KURT WORK WITH KURT Apply for Shopify Help ethercycle.com/apply See Our Results ethercycle.com/work Free Newsletter kurtelster.com The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Agentic Storefronts: You're Already on ChatGPT

"Being on Shopify means you get access to agentic automatically, out of the box." Your store is already selling inside ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Shop, whether you've noticed or not. Aaron Glazer, Director of Product at Shopify, joins Kurt to explain Agentic Storefronts, the new Admin experience that finally makes that presence visible and controllable. The buyer behavior has already shifted. Shoppers now have long conversations with an AI about a whole use case, a camping trip, a problem, a gift, and arrive at your store already sold. Agentic Storefronts shows you the traffic, sales, and conversions from each AI channel, plus the real queries surfacing your products, so you can see where you rank and where you don't. Aaron and Kurt get into why this is the new SEO, why complete product data is the whole game, how Shopify Catalog structures your catalog for agents, what native checkout in an AI channel actually means, and why you stay the merchant of record with the customer relationship intact. Plus a bonus on Rollouts and SimGem heading into BFCM. SPONSORS Swym - Wishlists, Back in Stock alerts, & more getswym.com/kurt Cleverific - Smart order editing for Shopify cleverific.com Zipify - Build high-converting sales funnels zipify.com/KURT LINKS * Agentic Storefronts: Shopify Admin > Agentic Storefronts (left nav) * Shopify Catalog (for developers): build on the product discovery API * Rollouts and SimGem: in Shopify Admin WORK WITH KURT Apply for Shopify Help ethercycle.com/apply See Our Results ethercycle.com/work Free Newsletter kurtelster.com The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

How Shopify POS Got a Minute Faster Per Sale

"I hear store associates asking people in person for their email all the time, and it always is a little bit awkward." Helen Mou runs product for retail at Shopify, and she just helped rebuild the thing every store runs on. This spring edition is the fastest POS Shopify has shipped. The rebuilt core selling flow saves over a minute on complex transactions, the kind with multiple items, stacked discounts, split shipping, and a customer attached for loyalty. Helen breaks down what actually changed on a busy floor: automatic email capture through the Shop network's 200 million-plus buyers, scannable discount codes that kill the keyboard-smash, multi-select line items, per-line staff attribution, the new POS Hub, and the new Verifone Victa Mobile device for selling shoulder to shoulder instead of stuck behind the counter. SPONSORS Swym - Wishlists, Back in Stock alerts, & more getswym.com/kurt Cleverific - Smart order editing for Shopify cleverific.com Zipify - Build high-converting sales funnels zipify.com/KURT LINKS * Shopify POS: shopify.com/pos * Shopify hardware store (Verifone Victa Mobile pre-orders): shopify.com/hardware * Get started: Shopify Admin > POS sales channel WORK WITH KURT Apply for Shopify Help ethercycle.com/apply See Our Results ethercycle.com/work Free Newsletter kurtelster.com The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Shop: The Sales Channel You Shouldn't Ignore

Also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bgrJVYiDQKc "If I don't see that purple button at checkout, bye-bye." That's what Shop's buyers tell Kenny Cohen, and it's a clue to why Shop has quietly become one of the most valuable channels a Shopify merchant has. Kenny runs product for Shop, and in this spring edition he walks Kurt through three updates. Agentic Shop Search now understands a buyer's taste from their real purchase history, not generic web guesses. Posts let you auto cross-post your Instagram reels into a feed where people actually came to shop. And a new retail integration lets buyers check local inventory and start a return in the app to finish it in store. The throughline: Shop already has hundreds of millions of buyers interacting with your brand for free, mostly through order tracking. The merchants who win are the ones who show up with Posts and a dialed-in storefront instead of leaving that attention on the table. SPONSORS Swym — Wishlists, back-in-stock alerts, and moregetswym.com/kurt Zipify — Build high-converting sales funnelszipify.com/KURT LINKS * Shop: shop.app * Set up Posts: Shopify Admin > Shop sales channel > Posts tab * Check your search placement: Shopify Admin > Agentic sales channel * Sign in with Shop on the Catalog API (for developers) WORK WITH KURT Apply for Shopify Help ethercycle.com/apply See Our Results ethercycle.com/work Free Newsletter kurtelster.com The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Inside Shopify's "Everywhere" Edition | Spring 2026

VP of Product Vanessa Lee joins Kurt to break down the 2026 "Everywhere" edition and the years of quiet groundwork behind it: taxonomy, attributes, clustering, and a universal product identifier that now power a search catalog of billions of products. The payoff for merchants is strange and good. You're already enrolled in agentic commerce by default. One real store is doing $60K a month through it. Inside this episode: why the catalog plus UCP makes every Shopify store callable by any AI app, how to use Agentic Storefronts to see exactly where you rank and what data to fix, and why Vanessa says not to sleep on Shopify retail in 2026. SPONSORS Swym — Wishlists, back-in-stock alerts, and more getswym.com/kurt [https://getswym.com/kurt] Ecommerce Alley — The Meta Ads System 400+ Brands Use to Scale Special offer: ecommercealley.com/kurt [https://ecommercealley.com/kurt] Zipify — Build high-converting sales funnels zipify.com/KURT [https://zipify.com/KURT] LINKS * Shopify Spring 2026 "Everywhere" Edition: shopify.com/editions/spring2026 * What is Shopify Catalog (merchant explainer): shopify.com/blog/what-is-shopify-catalog * Shopify Engineering blog, product taxonomy at scale: shopify.engineering/product-taxonomy-at-scale * Shopify Engineering blog, catalog clustering: shopify.engineering/catalog-clustering * Shopify Catalog API + dev dashboard: shopify.dev * Agentic Storefronts: in your Shopify admin sales channels * Vanessa Lee on X: x.com/vlaurenlee WORK WITH KURT Apply for Shopify Help ethercycle.com/apply See Our Results ethercycle.com/work Free Newsletter kurtelster.com The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.