Today

Shopify’s checkout switchover happened this morning — and nothing will look broken

Every remaining Basic, Grow and Advanced store auto-upgraded to checkout extensibility today. checkout.liquid, Additional Scripts, Shopify Scripts and any Google Tag Manager container living in checkout have stopped running, replaced by Checkout UI Extensions, Web Pixels and Functions.

Here is the part worth knowing: your storefront will not visibly break. The first symptom is your ad platforms, affiliate tracking and post-purchase apps quietly under-reporting conversions. It presents as a performance dip rather than an outage — which means the natural reaction is to go and adjust bids against numbers that are simply wrong.

Do this week: reconcile the conversions Meta and Google Ads report against Shopify’s own order count for the next few days. If they diverge, it is a measurement failure, not a demand problem. We covered the wider picture in our recent piece on checkout constraints.

The agent layer arrives

Google put a buy button inside AI Mode and Gemini

Sundar Pichai introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF, built with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart and endorsed by twenty-plus others. Shoppers will buy from eligible retailers without leaving Google’s chat — Google Pay first, PayPal later — and the retailer stays merchant of record. Read that alongside OpenAI retiring in-chat checkout earlier this year and a pattern emerges: the agents want discovery, and they are handing the transaction back to you. Google

One in five holiday visits, from an agent

Salesforce forecasts roughly 20% of 2026 holiday ecommerce traffic will come from AI chat agents, and that one in three ecommerce sites will run its own site-specific shopper agent by Cyber Week. Treat the number with the scepticism a forecast from an agent-software vendor deserves — but the direction is corroborated elsewhere: Adobe measured AI-driven traffic to US retail up 693% year-on-year across the 2025 holidays. Salesforce

What just got more expensive

The de minimis escape hatch has closed

The headline is old news — the US suspended its $800 exemption for all countries back in August 2025 — but two things changed quietly since. CBP made the suspension indefinite by regulation in June, and the temporary flat-rate postal option of $80–$200 per parcel ended on 1 March. Duty is now strictly ad valorem. In the EU the €150 exemption is gone, replaced by a flat €3 per tariff heading, with a further handling fee of roughly €2 expected around November. If your landed-cost model still has a flat per-parcel fee in it, it is five months out of date. Avalara

Meta’s ad prices rose another 12%

Average price per ad was up 12% year-on-year in Q2, with ad revenue up 27% to $59.36bn on 14% more impressions. Worth noting the other half of that release: Meta’s own earnings per share fell 13.4% as infrastructure and legal costs bit. You are paying more per impression to a platform whose own margins are compressing — not a combination that historically resolves in the advertiser’s favour. Meta Q2

Where the value is going

Private label set a record, and Target is spending a windfall on price

US store brands hit $282.8bn in 2025, up $9bn, growing 3.3% against 1.2% for national brands — and taking dollar share from 19.1% to 21.3% over five years. In the same fortnight Target booked a $994m pretax tariff refund, worth $1.65 of its $4.11 earnings per share, and said it will keep “investing in price” having already cut more than 10,000 items since early 2025. One of those is a slow structural shift; the other is a giant resetting what a fair price looks like in every category it touches. PLMA, Target

One to action this week

Amazon now wants AI people declared

Any listing image or video containing a photorealistic AI-generated person must now carry a contains-synthetic-performer tag. It follows New York’s synthetic performer law, live since 9 June, which carries penalties of $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for each one after. Fictional characters and AI-retouched real people are out of scope; background figures in lifestyle shots are in. If you have used generative fill on lifestyle imagery, that is where to look first. Forbes

Have you outgrown Shopify?

Outgrowing a platform is a success symptom, not a failure. But the signals are easy to misread — and most “time to replatform” advice is written by people who profit from the answer.

We’ve published a diagnostic instead of a pitch: seven specific signals, each with an honest fix you can apply where you are, and the exact threshold where workarounds stop paying for themselves. Calculated pricing. Product models that don’t fit. Checkout as a constraint. App-stack sprawl. Fulfilment routing. Integration ceilings. Control over your AI agent surface.

There’s a printable scorecard at the end. Score each signal 0–2. Under 5, stay put and go fix something that moves revenue this quarter. Over 10, the workarounds have become the system.

Every capability claim is checked against current platform documentation — and we corrected two of our own previously published positions along the way.

Five things worth your attention

1. AI traffic isn’t just growing. It’s converting better than the rest.

AI referral traffic to US retail rose 393% year-on-year in Q1, measured by Adobe across more than a trillion visits. The more useful number: by March, AI-referred traffic converted 42% better than non-AI traffic, having converted 38% worse a year earlier — an 80-point swing in twelve months — with revenue per visit running 37% higher. Meanwhile OpenAI shelved ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout in March after five months and roughly a dozen live Shopify merchants. ChatGPT now surfaces products and sends shoppers to your checkout: you keep the transaction, it keeps the discovery. Adobe via TechCrunch, CNBC

2. The agent protocol stack is settling — and it’s layers, not a war.

Five standards get quoted as rivals, but most of them stack rather than compete. AP2 handles authorisation — Google donated it to the FIDO Alliance in April. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard’s Agent Pay sit on the payment rails. The one genuine contest is checkout: ACP (OpenAI and Stripe) versus UCP (Shopify and Google, launched at NRF in January with twenty-plus partners including Walmart, Target, Etsy, Visa, Mastercard and Amex) — and momentum currently sits with UCP. Structure your product data well and stay portable.

3. Two platform deadlines land this month.

Shopify script tags on the Thank you and Order status pages stop working for non-Plus stores on 26 August — if anything post-purchase still relies on them, it breaks. And Magento 2.4.5 and 2.4.6 leave support on 11 August.

4. The EU’s €150 duty exemption is already gone.

It ended on 1 July. Parcels under €150 now carry a flat €3 customs duty per tariff heading, with items sharing a classification grouped onto a single line. A separate EU-wide handling fee of roughly €2 per consignment is expected from around November, and standard tariffs replace the interim €3 later. If you ship direct to EU consumers this is a live cost today, not a Q4 planning item. Avalara

5. Value-seeking shoppers spend more, not less.

Deloitte surveyed 1,207 US parents in late May: 71% will switch brands if their preferred one is too expensive, and 31% are running four or more cost-saving behaviours — yet those value-seekers plan to spend 14% more than everyone else. The number worth pinning up is the discovery gap: average planned basket was $381 for parents using no digital tools, against $737 for those using search, social and gen AI together. Prime Day told a similar story — a record $8.3bn in the first 24 hours, up 5.3%, on smaller orders. Deloitte