Vercel Shop reaches general availability as a Shopify storefront built for agents

Treating agents as shoppers

Vercel says agents already shop on the web, but they often rely on pages and tools originally built for people and search engines. Its answer is to treat agents as first-class shoppers, giving them product information they can read directly and tools designed for shopping.

Vercel Shop is built on Shopify's Hydrogen SDK. According to the source, the SDK gives teams access to a store's product catalog, cart and order management, payments and checkout so they can build custom storefronts. Earlier this year, Vercel and Shopify announced plans to rebuild Hydrogen to work across JavaScript frameworks. Vercel now says the rebuilt SDK is generally available.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch discussed the future of agent commerce at Vercel Ship SF. On checkout, Lütke said: "Checkouts are ridiculously hard to get right." He added that Shopify invites people to remix pieces of its checkout.

Machine-readable products and agent tools

Vercel Shop makes product pages available as machine-readable content, including price, availability and options. The same product URL can serve a visual page to a person or product information that an agent can read without interpreting the page layout. The template also embeds structured data in pages and sitemaps to help search and answer engines discover and understand products.

Shopify co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). It gives agents a standard way to search a store's catalog, read product details, check availability, build a cart and get a checkout link. Vercel Shop makes these capabilities discoverable at the merchant's own domain, so agents can use MCP to search products and build carts without navigating the site.

One codebase for storefront and assistant

The template combines the store's catalog, cart and checkout with a Next.js storefront, product information and shopping tools for agents, and a shopping assistant powered by eve. The storefront and assistant share a codebase, so teams can customize both the store's design and how the assistant helps shoppers.

• Shoppers can browse product pages or ask the assistant to find products and add them to their cart.
• Both experiences share the same cart, so items are kept when shoppers switch between them.
• Skills included in the template guide coding agents through setup, customization and template updates.

Rauch said: "You can build a highly custom, well-designed, agent-ready experience with Vercel Shop."

Live examples and getting started

Vercel launched its merch store at vercel.store, built on Vercel Shop, with limited-edition drops. The store's shopping agent helps shoppers find products, add them to the cart and continue to checkout.

Vercel also notes that Shopify, Next.js and Vercel already power storefronts for brands including AG1, Bombas and PAIGE. When PAIGE re-architected its ecommerce platform, it saw a 22% increase in revenue and a 76% increase in conversion over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with no downtime, according to the source.

Teams can create a storefront with the command pnpm create next-app@latest my-store --example https://github.com/vercel/shop. The documentation explains how to connect a Shopify store and configure the storefront.

What it means for merchants

For Shopify merchants, the release offers a ready-made starting point for serving both human visitors and agents from the same product URLs and domain. Because the template is open source and the storefront and assistant sit in one codebase, teams can adapt both to their own brand and checkout flow.