Ready for Muse—and whatever’s next.

Your next customer may find, choose, and buy your product without ever visiting your site—and the list of places they can do that is growing faster than most roadmaps can absorb. A new wave of personal AI agents don't just recommend products, but can also buy them on a shopper's behalf: Muse from Meta, Claude Duet from Anthropic, Instinct, and any agent a shopper connects to Shop through shop.md.

Each new surface is another opportunity to reach high-intent buyers at the moment they decide. Each one also raises the same questions for commerce leaders: How fast can we be there? And what will it take from our team? 

The answers depend less on the channel and more on what sits underneath it. If you’re on Shopify, you can be there today, the work stays off your roadmap, and you stay in control of where and how you sell. Shop Pay comes along into checkout too, so buyers see a way to pay they already know. 

What Muse is, and what it means for your brand

Muse is Meta's personal AI agent, launched in September. Shoppers can ask it to find products, compare options, and build a cart, then approve the purchase without leaving the conversation. Nothing is bought without the shopper's sign-off.

For brands on Shopify, your products can be discovered in Muse through Shopify Catalog, and purchases can be completed through Shopify-powered checkout, with Shop Pay as an option where available. 

(Not to be confused with Muse for Small Business, Meta's set of business tools and connectors, including one for managing your Shopify store. This article is about Muse as a place where shoppers buy.)

AI channels should be opportunities, not integration burdens

Most brands we talk to know they need to be in agentic channels because shoppers are there (in Muse's first weeks, 84% of its requests to websites were shopping-related¹). Where they get stuck is what it takes. And there's a tempting shortcut in that conversation: AI platforms are adopting an open standard, the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), so shouldn't selling in AI channels come down to one integration? 

Not quite. UCP gives AI agents and stores a shared language for checkout, payments, and orders. That's essential, but it's only one of three jobs a brand takes on when it builds directly:

• Speak the language. Publish a UCP profile and the endpoints agents call, secure them, and keep up as the standard evolves.
• Run the store behind it. UCP defines the questions; you still have to answer every one correctly, in real time: accurate prices, inventory, and product data; cart, discounts, shipping, and taxes; payments, including whatever each platform requires, plus fraud checks; and orders, refunds, returns, and support, with someone on call when it breaks.
• Get let in. Every AI platform runs its own catalog intake, eligibility rules, and approval process, and decides when and where your products appear.

In other words, UCP is the passport, but every platform still issues its own visa. With 72% of IT spending already going to maintenance and upkeep², few teams have room to repeat that for every new channel. 

Brands we’ve talked to who’ve tried building this themselves describe the same arc: it took longer than planned, cost more than expected, and didn’t work the way they’d hoped. 

Maybe that sounds familiar. If you're on a custom or legacy platform, building your own integrations has always been part of the job, so it made sense to approach agentic selling the same way. But this one is a different beast: it's not one integration, it's multiple ongoing jobs, repeated for every platform and every market, on standards that are still changing. 

So what should you build, and what should you buy? 

So here’s how we recommend thinking about it: Build what differentiates you. Buy what's standard.

That's the real build vs. buy question. Your product storytelling, your customer experience, the things that make shoppers choose you over a competitor: those are worth building and owning. Connecting to every new AI channel, keeping checkout correct in every market, and maintaining a protocol implementation are the same for every brand. Building them yourself doesn't make you different. It just makes you busier.

On Shopify, the platform carries the standard work.

Shopify co-developed UCP with Google, and for eligible brands, the heavy lifting behind it is already handled:

• Catalog handles syndication. Shopify Catalog surfaces your products in AI channels using real-time product, price, size, and availability data, so shoppers aren't sent to something that's out of stock or mispriced, without custom integrations or one-off feeds.
• One core runs it all. Our unified data model, the hub-and-spoke architecture, connects products, orders, customers, inventory, and transactions. New channels aren't new systems to integrate; they're surfaces that build a cart from the hub.
• Checkout comes with you. Checkout runs through the same core with your critical checkout logic and fulfillment rules intact, and Shop Pay comes along as a wallet buyers already know.

That's all out of the box. There's nothing to build before you can start selling in Muse and other personal AI agents. So when a channel like Muse appears, you launch in clicks, not months.

When a channel like Muse appears, you launch in clicks, not months.

What’s left for your team

So what's left for your team? The work that helps you pull ahead. Being in the channel gets you into the conversation, but each platform decides what to surface, and no one can guarantee an agent will recommend you or that a shopper will buy. What you can shape is what agents know about you:

• Your product data. Agents can only recommend what they understand, so clear titles, structured attributes (materials, sizing, compatibility, who it's for), complete variants, and reviews matter more than ever. See Agentic-Ready Product Datafor more on how you can do that with Shopify Catalog. 
• Your brand facts. Shopify's Knowledge base drafts answers about your store, like return policies, shipping, and how to reach you, from your own storefront pages. Once you review and publish them, AI agents can use them instead of guessing.

This is important, so it bears repeating: none of this is required to get started, and you don't repeat it for each channel. You do it once, in Shopify, and every channel benefits.

Buying instead of building doesn’t mean you’re giving up control either. Once you’re live, you still:

• Decide where you show up. Choose which AI channels can access your catalog data, and whether shoppers check out inside the agent or on your site. With direct checkout off, shoppers can still discover your products and are sent to your store to buy.
• Keep your checkout rules. Every order runs through Shopify Checkout with critical checkout logic and fulfillment rules preserved, and the same economics as any online store order. 
• Own the sale. You remain the merchant of record and keep ownership of the customer relationship and post-purchase experience. Orders from Meta surfaces like Muse show up in Shopify Admin attributed to Meta, like any other sales channel, and you can track Meta's performance in your agentic settings. Your team handles fulfillment, returns, and customer service as usual.

Make the purchase feel familiar

Showing up in a new channel is only half of it. A shopper who's comfortable asking an AI for recommendations may still hesitate when it's time to pay, and that moment is where you win or lose the sale.

That's where Shop Pay helps. It's already trusted by hundreds of millions of shoppers, so when it appears inside Muse, buyers see a checkout they know, with details they've already saved. Every purchase still needs the shopper's approval, and full card details aren't shared with Muse. Shop Pay is an option, not a requirement: you don't need to turn it on specifically for Muse, and shoppers can pay with other supported methods.

That's the difference between showing up in a new channel and converting in it.

How to get started

For eligible brands, this isn't an implementation project. You don't need to do anything for your products to be discovered by Meta through Shopify Catalog, and Muse shoppers can pay with Shop Pay where available, with no setup on your end.

Here's how to check your setup:

1. Confirm you're eligible. Check the Help page for current eligibility requirements. 
2. Review your Meta settings. In Shopify admin, go to Sales channels > Agentic. With Allow Shopify to manage for me turned on, Catalog access and direct checkout for Meta are on by default. To change either, turn that setting off, select Meta, and adjust.
3. Track results in Shopify. Orders from Meta surfaces like Muse appear in Shopify Admin attributed to Meta AI and Muse, and you can see Meta's performance in the agentic section in the admin.
4. Give it time to build. Muse only launched in September, so expect order volume to grow gradually rather than all at once.

Not on Shopify yet? Ask us about the Agentic plan, which lets you sell in AI channels while keeping your existing online store.

Keep complexity off the roadmap

Muse is one of the latest AI shopping channels, but it won't be the last. Does your commerce foundation turn each new channel into an implementation project, or let you show up while the channel is still taking shape?

Nobody knows yet exactly what each AI channel will be worth for every brand. The way to find out is to be there and see. When showing up is a settings change instead of a project, testing costs almost nothing. You learn from your own orders, not from forecasts, and you can scale up, adjust, or switch off without betting the roadmap on it. That's the payoff of building what differentiates you and buying what's standard: not guessing which channel wins, but being able to say yes to all of them and let the results decide. 

Shopify ships 300+ features a year³, and new AI channels are a big part of that. So when the next channel is announced, there's a good chance you'll already be there.

We dig into all of this and more in our live session, Build vs. Buy: Agentic selling on Muse and beyond.

1. Detailed early data on Muse adoption, Retailgentic
2. From Tactical to Strategic: How to Succeed as a Technologist-Turned-CIO, Gartner
3. Shopify launches 300+ features and updates every year with Shopify Editions. Shopify launched 700+ new features in the last 24 months as of December 2025 Edition.