Welcome to September's Commerce Jam.
This month Shopify turned on AI checkout for eligible stores, and now Google, Meta and Microsoft can sell your products right inside their AI assistants. Shopify also changed how it counts sessions, so your conversion rate might be different from September 21 forward.
The featured article is our own data from 96 million sessions across 73 client stores. AI traffic didn't grow at all in 12 months, but the orders it brought in went up 2.74 times.
This edition also adds four new sections: Store of the Month, AI Prompt of the Month, Commerce Myth, and a Shopify App Review.
What 96 million sessions show about AI referral traffic
Over the past year, AI assistants sent the online stores we manage the same number of visits. Orders from those visits went up 2.74 times.
That is the short version of a study we just published. We went through the GA4 data of 73 online stores on Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and WooCommerce: 96 million sessions and 977,000 orders between September 2025 and September 2026.
Here are the findings:
- ChatGPT sent 88% of all AI visits. The rest came from Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude and a long tail of smaller assistants.
- Half of all AI visits start on a product page. Stores where at least half of AI visits land on a product page convert that traffic at 1.62%, against 1.06% for the rest.
- On 41 of the 61 stores with enough AI traffic, the AI visitor converted better than the Google organic visitor. On the median store it converted 25% better and was worth 23% more per visit, even with 15% smaller orders.
- 45 of the 54 stores with an AI order recorded more AI orders this year
The monthly AI conversion rate across the 73 stores. The first step came in November, the second in August.
If you open GA4, see a small AI traffic number and decide it's not worth your time, you're looking at the wrong number. The article has every chart, what we think changed YoY, and the exact GA4 channel setup we use, so you can see the same data for your own store.
Shopify Platform Updates
These updates came from the Shopify Changelog, the developer changelog, and our own team. Everything here is from the last 30 days.
Three AI assistants can now sell your products
Microsoft Copilot, Meta and Google can all sell your products inside their own assistants now, and for eligible Shopify stores all three are on by default.
Meta was added as an AI channel in the Shopify admin on September 8. Your products are shared with Meta through Shopify Catalog, and Meta's direct checkout is on by default for buyers in the US, Canada and Mexico. The same day Meta launched Muse, its personal AI agent. On September 21 Tobi Lütke announced Shop Pay agentic checkout inside Muse for all Shopify stores.
Google followed on September 22. Merchants got an email from Merchant Center saying their Shopify store was matched and native checkout is now on in Google AI Mode and Gemini, without merchants opting in. Copilot checkout was already on by default for eligible US stores.
Three AI assistants can now sell your products without a visit to your store.
Amazon went a different direction. It blocked Muse from buying on Amazon the same week Shopify opened every store to it.
Custom pixels and product bundles don't work in these checkouts, so GA4 won't record those orders the way it records a normal purchase, and your post-purchase upsell never shows. Look at each channel before BFCM. The settings are in the Shopify admin under Sales channels > Agentic.
Shopify changed how it counts sessions
Since September 21, Shopify Analytics counts sessions differently. Bot traffic is filtered out by default, and visitor buying user journeys without a normal pageview, like a cart link that goes straight to checkout, now count.
Sessions, conversion rate, add-to-cart rate, bounce rate and five other session metrics will look different. Orders, sales and customer counts don't change.
Shopify's own words: treat September 21 as a new baseline for session metrics.
If your conversion rate is up 20% this BFCM compared to last year, part of that is the new counting. Compare orders and revenue, and only compare conversion rate from September 21 onward.
Browser agents can now finish checkout
On September 28 Shopify added WebMCP tools for checkout. An AI agent in the browser can read the checkout, update it, and complete the purchase after the buyer confirms. The buyer still handles 3D Secure and any checkout extension that needs them.
This release adds to the WebMCP cart tools from August. There is nothing to set up and no new API.
A variant can now have 20 barcodes
Variants support up to 20 barcodes now: UPC, EAN, ISBN, GTIN, ASIN or a custom code. The first barcode stays the default for sales channels.
The old ProductVariant.barcode field is being replaced. In API 2026-10 it only returns the first barcode. Any ERP, PIM, POS or marketplace sync that reads that field will miss the rest without any error. Ask your dev team or agency to move to the new field before October 1.
Return shipping fees get taxed from October 23
Shopify Tax will charge tax on return shipping fees automatically from October 23, the same way it taxes normal shipping.
If you added tax to return fees manually, remove that before the 23rd or your customers pay it twice. Returns season is weeks away, so put it on this week's list.
WhatsApp opt-in at checkout
You can now collect WhatsApp marketing consent at checkout, on every Shopify plan. Turn it on in Checkout settings.
Last month I wrote about selling on WhatsApp and said to start collecting opt-ins now, because the list is the one part you can't set up quickly. Checkout is the best place to collect it, because that is the moment someone trusts you enough to give you their number. Check the consent wording against the privacy rules in the countries you sell to first.
Shopify bought Tailwind Labs
Shopify acquired Tailwind Labs, the company behind Tailwind CSS, on September 9. Tailwind stays free and MIT licensed, and it gets over 110 million installs a week. The paid products are now closed for new sign-ups.
The founder was open about why: commercial revenue fell about 80%, and he blamed AI tools that write the same templates for free. Tailwind is a big part of how custom and headless storefronts get built, so this is Shopify putting money behind the developers who build them.
The Shopify admin got a new look
The admin has a new design since September 15: new layout, type and icons, a navigation that collapses, and Sidekick as a floating chat on every page.
Update your team's SOPs and training screenshots now, before peak season. Rollouts also got a redesign on September 22. You pick a launch, an event or a test, and one rollout can combine theme, checkout and customer account changes. This is a good fit for staging your BFCM launch without an app.
Smaller updates worth a minute
Shop Pay Installments works on every business entity now in the US, Canada and the UK. Multi-currency payouts came to Australia and France on Advanced and Plus, and the payouts page shows paid and pending payouts in one view. Profit reports now include duties and other shipping costs, so margins on cross-border orders may look different. Mobile POS keeps the cart in view while staff browse products.
Some deadlines for your calendar
September 29, 2026: The Discounts Allocator Function API preview ends and deploys start failing. Move to the Discount Function API.
October 1, 2026: Apps can no longer create or update script tags on any API version. Every UI extension also has to be on API 2026-01 or later to deploy.
October 6 to 7, 2026: Prime Big Deal Days. Target and Walmart have their own events the same week.
October 23, 2026: Shopify Tax starts taxing US return shipping fees.
November 1, 2026: The EU handling fee on small parcels from outside the EU starts. The amount isn't set yet.
January 31, 2027: Google Merchant Center raises the minimum product image size to 500 x 500 pixels. Products with a smaller main image get disapproved.
March 1, 2027: Script tags stop running on storefronts.
AI, SEO & Agentic Commerce
Anthropic open-sourced a shopping agent
Anthropic released Claude Commerce Agents on September 2, a free, open-source blueprint for two agents. One helps shoppers search, compare and fill a cart, then sends them to your own checkout. The other helps the merchant with sales analysis and drafts that a person approves. Shopify published example code the same day.
Anthropic says carts are up to 35% larger and shoppers are 60% more likely to buy. Those are their numbers, so test before you believe them. Our team spent two days debating this internally. It fits a brand that already has developers building chat in-house. It does not replace a support app like Gorgias or Richpanel yet, and you pay for every API call.
Amazon also opened its seller tools to outside AI agents in the same month, starting with Claude. So Amazon lets AI agents help its sellers, and blocks AI agents that shop for its customers.
AI answers keep taking the clicks
Comscore puts AI Overviews on 39.4% of US desktop searches. Advanced Web Ranking measured position 1 CTR at 20.02% overall and 9.69% when an AI Overview shows. AlsoAsked found that 97% of People Also Ask answers were AI Overviews in early September, up from 86% in August.
If a page lost clicks this month but kept its ranking, check whether an AI Overview (aka Zero-Click Search) started showing for that query. Look at it page by page in Search Console.
AI answers change daily, but the same brands keep showing up
Detailed tested over 1,300 shopping prompts every day for 28 days, more than 70,000 answers. The exact same list of brands showed up on two random days less than 3% of the time. The leading brands still appeared on 82% of days in ChatGPT and 89% in AI Overviews.
This lines up with the SparkToro research in our featured article and our AI citations research from July. Paying for a daily AI rank position tells you very little. Whether you show up across a month tells you a lot more.
Your product feed is now your product page
Profound tracked 97,725 ChatGPT shopping prompts and found that results from product feeds jumped from 8.26% to 61.54% on July 10 and was around 65% by September 3.
Google is going the same way. Its holiday shopping update made AI performance insights in Merchant Center generally available, so you can now see your share of voice in AI Mode and AI Overviews for free. It also added new feed fields for conversational attributes and loyalty.
Price, stock, variants and product attributes in your feed now decide what the AI recommends. If your feed is out of date, fix that before you write another blog post.
ChatGPT has its own search index
For two years the SEO world assumed ChatGPT only pulls results from Bing and Google. Tomek Rudzki at Peec AI showed ChatGPT has its own index, called Labrador internally. It is a family of indexes: web, PDF, YouTube, news, local, shopping, images and more. Between May 21 and July 21 a field in ChatGPT's own events showed where each result came from, and Labrador was one of four sources next to three scraping providers.
ChatGPT also keeps copies of pages instead of fetching them live every time. If ChatGPT's crawler can't read your page, the copy it keeps might be old or missing.
Amazon now sells ads inside ChatGPT
Amazon Ads announced a partnership with OpenAI on September 10. Advertisers can extend their Amazon DSP campaigns into ChatGPT, and a pilot with select US advertisers is already live. OpenAI also started testing Sponsored Agents, where clicking an ad opens a chat with the brand's own agent instead of sending you to a website.
ChatGPT now has two ways to buy ads: OpenAI's own Ads Manager and Amazon DSP. If you already spend with Amazon DSP, ask your rep about the pilot. If not, start with the Shopify app in the App Review below.
Google Preferred Sources
Google lets people pick their preferred sources, and those sites get more visibility in Top Stories, AI Mode and AI Overviews for that person. It works at the domain level, and Google gives you a button or a deeplink to add to your site.
This only helps with people who already know you, so treat it as a loyalty tool. Put the button on your blog and in your newsletter. If you read this newsletter every month, you can add sherocommerce.com as a preferred source in one click.
Google's September spam update
Google started its September 2026 spam update on September 24, and it can take up to two weeks. There were also unconfirmed ranking swings earlier in the month. If rankings drop in early October, check the rollout dates before you blame the season.
AI Prompt of the Month
Our data showed AI traffic converts best when the visit starts on a product page. This prompt checks whether your product page gives an AI assistant what it needs to recommend and sell the product.
Paste your product page text and your return policy under it, then use it in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini:
I sell this product on Shopify. Act as a shopping assistant in Google AI Mode that has to recommend and sell this product with no help from a person. List every fact you would need: price, variants, sizes, materials, compatibility, shipping time, returns and anything a buyer would ask. Mark each one as present, missing or unclear. For every missing or unclear fact, write the exact sentence I should add to the page.
[paste product page text]
[paste return policy]
Try it on your five best sellers first. The missing facts it finds are the same questions your customer support answers every day.
Commerce Myth
Myth: a good LTV to CAC ratio is 3:1.
Ask anyone online and you get 3:1. That number was written for software companies around 2010, and it fits retail loosely at best.
The right ratio for your store depends on your margin and your overhead. At a 38% margin and 20% overhead, the minimum is about 2.1:1. The second mistake is using revenue for LTV instead of profit, which is the main reason brands think they are at 3:1 when they are closer to 1:1.
Our new article shows how to work out your own ratio from your store data in about twenty minutes, with the same inputs giving answers anywhere from 0.8:1 to 8.1:1.
eCommerce News & Industry Trends
Magento had a zero-day during peak prep
Sansec disclosed StyleSmuggler on September 5, a flaw that let attackers take over Magento and Adobe Commerce stores without logging in, including stores on the latest version. Adobe released the patch on September 7, and CISA added it to its known exploited list a day later. BleepingComputer counted over 160,000 exposed sites.
Adobe patched it in two days, and our Magento team had client stores patched within two days of the release too. If you are on Magento and haven't applied the patch yet, stop reading and do it now. Conflicts with third-party modules have been reported, so test the patch on staging first.
The EU made a new notice mandatory at checkout
Since September 27, every store selling physical goods to EU consumers has to show the EU legal guarantee notice before purchase. It is a fixed design with fixed wording in 24 languages. If a producer offers its own durability guarantee, you also need the GARAN label. It applies wherever your business is based, and law firms recommend adding it to the order confirmation too.
The EU also gave final approval to its customs reform on September 3. From November 1 a handling fee applies to small parcels from outside the EU, and platforms outside the EU become the importer of record.
If you ship to Europe, it is a theme and email template change for this week.
Google removed free product listings in Europe
Since September 18, free product listings are gone across the EEA, including the popular products carousel, as part of Google's DMA compliance. Free listing visibility dropped between 90% and 100% in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands.
If you sell into Europe, a free channel disappeared right before Q4. The way to solve this is paid Shopping or a comparison shopping service partner.
Holiday forecasts are in
Adobe expects $275.1B in US online sales from November 1 to December 31, up 6.7%, with Cyber Monday at $15.1B. Adobe also expects AI traffic to retail sites to grow 130%. In its survey, 69% of shoppers who used AI said they were less likely to return what they bought.
Deloitte forecasts holiday eCommerce at $316.1B to $318.9B, up 7.5% to 8.4%. Part of that growth is higher prices, so track your order count next to revenue.
Costco's best traffic now comes from AI
Costco said AI search traffic grew triple digits for the second quarter in a row and now has the highest conversion rate of any traffic source. At the same time NIQ found that 51% of US consumers used an AI shopping tool in the past month, the first time it passed half.
Costco and our 73-store data point agree. There are fewer AI visitors than search visitors, and they buy more often.
Shopify App Review
ChatGPT Ads, by OpenAI
ChatGPT Ads connects your Shopify catalog to ChatGPT's ad platform. Shopify's president Harley Finkelstein called Shopify OpenAI's first commerce partner. Our Paid Media team has been experimenting with it on a few clients. To test it out myself, I installed it on one of our dev stores to see what a merchant actually gets.
The install screen asks for a lot. The app wants customer data, including device and activity data, staff data, and read and write access to customers, products, marketing and analytics. Read that screen before you click Install.
Connecting takes an OpenAI account. The app creates an ad account named after your store and then asks you to pick a pixel. On our brand new account the pixel list came up empty the first time. OpenAI says the app sets up a Shopify server pixel on its own, which is good news for tracking once you get past that step.
The catalog synced without any work from us, with every product and its price. A product without an image shows up as a gray box with a letter, so clean up your product images before you advertise. Before any ad can run, you also have to add a business logo and billing.
The Overview screen after connecting: the setup banner that blocks ads until billing is added, and a product with no image.
In the campaign builder you pick a budget of $25, $100 or $200 a day, with $100 marked as recommended. Spend can change day to day but stays under seven times your daily budget over a week. You optimize for purchases and target one country, and there is one ad type that works: All products. Single product and Webpage are grayed out, so you can't choose which products lead the ad. On our store it led with a $10 gift card.
The campaign builder. The ad preview leads with the gift card, and you can't pick the products.
Price: free to install. You pay OpenAI for the ads, and for a limited time eligible advertisers who spend their first $500 get $500 in ad credits.
Reviews: 2.4 from 17 at the time of writing, and 12 of the 17 are one star. The complaints are products not syncing, connection errors and US-only targeting.
From my perspective, this is the fastest way to get a Shopify catalog into ChatGPT ads, and the catalog sync saves real setup time. It also launched on September 3, and it still has rough edges. I would start on the $25 a day budget, fix product images first, and check which products the preview leads with before you pay for it. Aimerce found that 81.8% of ChatGPT traffic to Shopify stores shows up as direct in analytics, so put your own UTMs on the ads and compare against a holdout before you judge the results.
Shero News
Four launches in September, Simucube the biggest
We launched four new sites in September. The most notable one is the new simucube.com, which went live last week. Simucube is a Finnish company that makes high-end sim racing wheelbases, steering wheels and pedals, and even Shopify's CEO, Tobi Lütke, is a customer and a fan.
We moved them from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus with three markets, the EU, the UK and the US, each with its own pricing and fulfillment. The part I like most is Build Your Rig, a configurator that takes the buyer through seven steps from the wheelbase to the accessories, with a running total and one checkout.
The new simucube.com on Shopify Plus.
This was a joint project between our US, Albania and Finland teams, with the client from day one.
Shero in London
On September 23 we hosted Commerce AI: The Honest Breakdown at Sunborn London with Shopify and Bloomreach, a small session for UK retail leaders on AI readiness before peak, during eCommerce Expo week. It was our first event like this in London.
Shero at Shoptalk
Beth and Richmond are in Nashville this week for Shoptalk Fall, September 29 to October 1 at Music City Center. The next Shero Live comes from there on September 30, with Beth talking to eCommerce leaders on the show floor about what they're seeing going into Q4.
From the blog
How to optimize eCommerce returns shows how to work out what each return really costs you, which is a good read before the return shipping tax starts.
Store of the Month
Absolute Collagen
absolutecollagen.com calls itself the UK's number one collagen brand. Three things on the site are worth stealing.
- Proof before products. The clinical trial result, the 100,000+ customers and the press logos are above the fold, before a single product.
- Subscription perks in the cart. The subscription discount, free delivery and loyalty points show in the bag, where the buyer decides.
- Shop by problem. Next to the product menu you can shop by concern, like fine lines, hair thinning, dry skin or menopause, and there is a quiz for people who don't know where to start.
Behind the scenes, this site is headless Shopify with an Astro front end, Sanity as the CMS and checkout on Shopify. For a brand with this much content and this many markets, headless can be worth it.
Sites Worth Seeing
murmursbyunmute.com Wearable wraps and blankets, on Shopify. You shop by where you'll use it, on the sofa, working from home or on the commute, and the photography shows exactly that.
icebug.com Swedish footwear, on Centra with a Next.js front end. One product photo and one headline carry the whole first screen. Our non-Shopify pick this month.
Tools Worth Knowing
Microsoft Clarity bot classification. Clarity now groups bot traffic by page type, so you can see which pages bots hit and how much. Free, and it works on Shopify.
Lighthouse Agentic Resource Discovery. A new Lighthouse audit that checks how AI agents find the tools on your site. It's coming to Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights, so it costs nothing to try.
Aleyda Solis's AI search checklist. Aleyda updated her 12-step AI search optimization checklist on September 28. Free and practical.
Optmyzr's BFCM guide for Google Ads. Built on data from over 4,200 accounts: breakeven ROAS targets, budget rules during the sale, and promo pricing in the feed.
Meridian GeoX. Google's free, open-source geo incrementality testing is now generally available. When attribution can't see AI traffic, testing by region is one of the few honest ways to measure what a channel does.
Final Thoughts
This month I spent four days hiking in Acadia National Park with a good friend. We hiked about 15 miles a day. I'm not young anymore, but at 45 I kept up pretty well and got to detach from technology for a few days.
This whole edition is about AI: AI sending traffic to your store, checking out your customers, and selling ads inside its answers. I use it all day, and so does our team. I also have AI fatigue. Every inbox, feed and search result is filled up with AI slop, and after a while it gets hard to tell what a real person actually thinks. Reading a book is how I reset.
People tell me all the time they want to read more but can't get into it. This summer I bought my teenage daughter five short books to get her interested in reading, and all of them are under 150 pages:
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Pearl by John Steinbeck
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
If you've been meaning to start, pick one of these. You can finish any of them in a weekend.
Until next time,
Warm regards,
Gentian
