Join me and Shahbaz Khokar, e-commerce growth expert, for a webinar where we'll discuss how to produce, test, and launch more high-performing ad creatives in time for BFCM.

📅 Thursday, October 22 | 2 PM ET

💻 Online | Free to Attend

This is the first Black Friday where AI agents are already live inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Google, buying on your customers' behalf without them ever landing on your site.

Over the last few months I've written about pieces of this separately about UCP, Shopify's agentic storefronts, Google's checkout layer, the new AI connector apps.

This everything in one place to get ready this BFCM.

We measured AI-assistant traffic and orders across 1,000+ Shopify stores running Aimerce. It's still small, but it's growing fast.

ChatGPT shoppers also spend more. The median ChatGPT order was $75.46 in August, against $60.25 for orders with no AI referral, about 25% higher.

Your analytics probably can't see most of it. ChatGPT strips the referrer on most clicks, so 81.8% of its traffic shows up as "direct." It adds utm_source=chatgpt.com instead. If you only look at the referrer, you undercount ChatGPT by about 5x, and you'll think it's flat while it's actually doubling.

Before BFCM, in your analytics, count a visit as ChatGPT if the referrer or the utm_source says ChatGPT.

And remember, these numbers only cover shoppers who clicked through to your site. Purchases made inside an AI chat never touch your domain at all. More on that below.

Read the full AI Commerce Report →

Shopify's Catalog feature does the heavy lifting by syncing and organizing your products automatically. AI agents can pull details like pricing and variants without you managing feeds. If you use custom fields or metaobjects, Shopify Catalog Mapping keeps your data consistent across AI channels.

If your store is eligible, agentic storefronts are already on by default, so you've been opted in automatically.

Not all AI is created equal:

Direct checkout doesn't support subscriptions, bundles, custom configurations, or local pickup all the stuff you’re likely leaning on for BFCM. Those products still show up in AI search, but customers get sent to your normal checkout to finish.

Here's where I'd start:

→ Confirm your store policies (Terms, Privacy, Return & Refund) are fully filled out under Settings > Policies.

→ Move any holiday-specific legal language into the first 6,000 characters of your product description.

→ Audit your SKUs if you run wholesale pricing through a third-party app or custom theme logic instead of Shopify B2B natively.

→ AI agents (and product feeds) work better when titles include what the product is + key attributes make sure you do a full attribute. However if you don’t want to do it by hand, Catalog AI Enrichment is now available in your Aimerce dashboard.

Here’s a quick recap of what it does:

To get started:

Step 1. Install Aimerce (https://apps.shopify.com/aimerce) on Shopify and find the feature here.

Step 2. Aimerce fetches your top 5 products or you can search for specific ones by product URL or variant ID.

Step 3. We generate related prompts and test how your products rank against your competitors inside UCP. You see exactly where you stand.

Step 4. We make specific recommendations to your product titles, descriptions, and tags. You review them, edit if you want, approve, and sync directly to Shopify.

A few things I'd handle first:

→ Your Shopify orders are the source of truth here, not Merchant Center.

→ Plan a separate re-engagement path for agentic buyers. Klaviyo's server-side sync handles orders and customers fine. But the onsite events (Viewed Product, Added to Cart, Started Checkout) never run for an agentic sale, so your abandoned cart flow has nothing to trigger on. Route tagged buyers into post-purchase flows built for them.

→ Tag UCP and agentic orders in Shopify, so they sync into Klaviyo as a segmentable property and you don’t count the same sale twice across Google, Meta, and Klaviyo.

→ Get a server-to-server event pipeline running.

You have more control here than most people realize:

→ ChatGPT and Copilot access can be turned off entirely at the Shopify Catalog level, under Sales channels > Agentic.

→ Direct checkout for Google, Meta, and Copilot can be turned off per channel. Customers are sent to your normal checkout instead.

→ If there's BFCM inventory you don't want an AI agent recommending then mark it Unlisted. Disabling Catalog access on its own won't do it.

→ Review who has access to your Shopify ChatGPT and Claude connectors:

If you're on Aimerce, this is what we handle for you going into BFCM:

This playbook is part of our BFCM Klaviyo & Meta Academy, a free series for DTC brands running through mid-December. New sessions drop every week.

Join here: https://www.aimerce.ai/bfcm2026

✌️ Here to help you win,

Yiqi

📅 Next in the BFCM Academy