How to sell on Shopify in 2026

The conclusions from the webinar we delivered on June 4, 2026, at the Madrid Chamber of Commerce, together with Monei as part of the TIC Negocios program, distilled into five pieces.

Imagine a customer who wants to buy matcha tea. They no longer open Google or type into your website’s search bar. They open ChatGPT and write: “recommend a premium matcha tea for daily drinking.” AI responds with three stores, photos, prices, and a link to buy. The uncomfortable question is simple:

When your customer asks an AI about what you sell, do you appear… or does your competitor?

This is the conversation we are having most often at Impulsa3 with brands that have been selling successfully through ecommerce for years and suddenly notice that discovery traffic is moving to a new place where they do not know whether they are present. It is almost never a product problem. It is that the starting point of the purchase has changed, and the store has not adapted to that change.

That is exactly what we put on the table in the webinar, through four complementary perspectives: visibility (Jorge Nevado, CEO of Impulsa3), store and development (Javier Hernández), integration and data (Miguel Martínez, CTO), and payments (Alex Saiz, CEO of Monei). Here is the full recording:

What has changed is not a tool: it is where the purchase begins

For twenty years, selling online meant appearing on Google and converting traffic on your website. That model is still alive, but it is no longer the only entry point. Today, a growing share of decisions starts in a conversation with an AI —ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Google’s Gemini— that discovers, compares, and recommends products before the user visits a single store.

The data we shared in the session shows the scale of the change:

35% of consumers already use AI to discover products, compared with 13.6% who start with a search engine (Similarweb, 2026).
Traffic arriving from AI to Shopify stores has multiplied by 7, and orders attributed to that channel by 11, since January 2025 (Shopify, 2026).
Between 12% and 18% of informational queries already go through AI in 2026; a year ago, it was less than 2%.

The operational conclusion is not “build a chatbot”. It is that the ecommerce business that wins in 2026 operates as a system of five connected pieces: visibility, conversion, integration, payment, and the whole system working together. Let us take them one by one, with practical actions you can apply.

1. Make AI find you: visibility in the GEO era

The good news is that the customer is still yours. AI acts as a discovery channel: it brings the buyer to your product page and the sale closes in your store (the utm_source=chatgpt parameter that you will already see in your analytics confirms it). The question is no longer “Do I rank first on Google?” but “How often does AI cite and recommend me?”

This is where the concept of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) comes in: while classic SEO competed for the number-one position, visibility in AI is frequency —appearing in many different answers—. And there is a detail that surprises almost everyone: around 87% of the sources cited by ChatGPT match Bing’s organic top results (Seer, 2026). The search engine many people had written off turns out to be one of the gateways through which AI recommends you.

The plumbing, without the jargon: MCP, UCP, and AP2

In the session, we explained the three acronyms you will hear all year, in plain English:

MCP (Model Context Protocol, from Anthropic): the “universal plug” that connects AI to external tools and data. Every Shopify store already comes with it installed.
UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol, from Google and Shopify, January 2026): the “common language of commerce”, so any AI and any store can understand each other without building a custom integration for every platform.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol): the “payment notary” that signs and authorizes a purchase when the user authorizes AI to buy on their behalf.

This connects with the webinar’s most repeated question, which deserves a direct answer:

Do I need to integrate via API with every AI to appear as a recommendation? No. To be cited, AIs read their own index (Bing for ChatGPT and Copilot; Google for Gemini): you only need to rank well and have clean data. To be able to buy from you, Shopify already publishes the files that AIs use to discover you, and activating your catalogue is a single switch in the admin (Agentic Storefronts), not one connection per platform. Avoiding those one-by-one integrations is precisely what the new standard solves.

Now for the honest nuance: activating your catalogue makes you eligible; it does not guarantee a recommendation. Each AI decides who gets recommended according to its own criteria. That is why what really moves the needle is still the same as ever, done well: complete product pages, genuine reviews, fast loading, and descriptive titles (not just brand names). Schema helps —it can improve visibility by up to 67%— but it is not enough on its own.

How to tell whether it is working

Check which of your URLs the LLM cites and run them through the structured data test.
Bing Webmaster Tools now has an “AI Performance” report (beta) showing the pages from your domain that AI cites.
Google Search Console launched its generative AI report in June 2026, with impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

2. Make your store convert and sell in every market

There is no point in AI bringing you the customer if the store loses them. And it loses many: more than 70% of carts are abandoned at checkout, and around 20% of those abandonments are due to the user experience (Baymard).

Shopify has brought AI into the admin itself —Sidekick executes tasks, writes campaigns, and creates segments through natural language— and added tools such as A/B testing for native themes. It helps a lot, but it is worth knowing its limits: AI can generate themes, sections, and apps, but it does not guarantee consistency, maintainability, or data integrity. The quick “do it yourself” and sustainable “do it properly” are not always the same thing, especially when apps live on third-party servers and Shopify has moved from two major releases a year to substantial changes almost every month.

A development that is especially relevant to small and medium-sized businesses: selling B2B (company profiles, custom pricing, volume discounts, payment within 30 days) and operating across several markets (catalogue, prices, language, and appearance by country, from a single store) is no longer exclusive to the Plus plan. Since 2026, it is also available on Basic, Grow, and Advanced, with their respective limits. In other words, selling to businesses and in several countries no longer requires Shopify’s most expensive plan.

3. Make sure everything is connected, migrated, and measured

Your store is not an island: the same sale lives simultaneously in stock, the ERP (the system that manages inventory, orders, and invoicing), and the CRM (the system for your customers). When these pieces do not talk to each other, overselling, outdated stock, and returns turned into an accounting mess appear.

In 2026, Shopify expanded its native ERP connectors, B2B store credit by company, and VAT ID validation (VIES) with reverse charge at checkout. Even so, real-world cases —packs, bundles, multi-warehouse operations, consolidated invoicing, and channel-specific pricing— often need a serious connector with support. That is exactly the territory of our Shopify Connector, which links Shopify to your ERP/CRM without you having to touch anything manually.

And what if you also need to migrate from another platform? The three perennial fears are neutralized with method: do not lose SEO (well-planned architecture and 301 redirects), do not lose history (an orderly transfer of orders, customers, and non-standardized fields), and do not fail during the transition (a planned and tested change window). A well-executed migration does not show up in sales: that is the test.

4. Make payment close the sale (where you win or lose)

You have made AI find you, your store convert, and everything connect. Then the moment of truth arrives: payment. In Spain, three out of four carts are abandoned before payment. And it is almost never because of the product or price: it is payment —distrust when entering card details, too many steps, or the customer’s preferred method being unavailable—.

In this section, Alex Saiz (CEO of Monei) explained why payment also changes with AI. When a customer buys inside an assistant, four actors have clearly defined roles: the AI platform (discovery and conversation), your business (catalogue and, most importantly, the merchant of record), the credential provider (Google Pay, Apple Pay…), and the PSP or payment gateway —Monei’s role— which processes and settles the charge. The reassuring idea for any merchant: UCP does not turn you into a marketplace. PCI compliance, refunds, chargebacks, and strong customer authentication (SCA / PSD2) remain your responsibility, exactly as they are today.

And a very Spanish detail: there are more than 12 million Bizum users; it charges in under five seconds and has no chargebacks. Shopify Payments does not include Bizum natively in Spain; a specific gateway is needed, and Monei was the first compatible with Bizum for Shopify. In a country where the payment method decides purchases, that is direct conversion.

5. The complete system, working together

If you take away just one idea, let it be this: the ecommerce business that wins in 2026 is not the one with the best individual piece, but the one with all five pieces connected. AI finds you, your store converts and sells in every market, everything is connected and measured, and payment closes the sale. A failure at any link shows up in the cash register.

The usual trap is solving one piece in isolation —activating the AI catalogue but having poor product pages, or having a beautiful store with mismatched stock, or a flawless checkout that AI never sends anyone to—. The value lies in looking at the whole system.

Where to start

At Impulsa3, we work on the four pieces under one roof —technology, marketing, and AI— as Shopify Partners, with consulting before execution and our own product for the integration side. If the webinar has left you wondering where your store stands, we can answer that quickly.

We offer you a free ecommerce diagnosis: we review your visibility in AI, your store’s performance and usability, and return the two or three priorities that would have the greatest impact on your sales. No commitment and with business judgment, not just technical criteria.

Request your free ecommerce diagnosis