Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you're hydrated, you got a good sweat in this weekend, and you've got something cold next to you while we get into it. Today’s newsletter release to me feels like when Apple would release a new product and I couldn’t wait to get to the Apple Store to try everything.

Twice a year, Shopify does what Apple does every June. They dump a giant list of shipped product on the table and tell you which way the platform is now pointing. This drop is the loudest one in a while. 150+ updates, and underneath all of it, two words tell you everything: everywhere and catalog.

Shopify isn't trying to be the .com builder anymore. They're trying to be the commerce engine under every surface where someone buys something… Roblox, Roku, ChatGPT, your dentist's GPT, an Instagram doctor's chatbot, an LLM you've never heard of, a publisher's affiliate link in a niche newsletter. The .com is now one channel of many. The catalog is the thing. And the catalog gets served everywhere.

That's the thesis. The 150 updates are the receipts.

Quick housekeeping before we get into it. On Wednesday, June 25th, we're hosting the Ecom AI Summit at Webster Hall in NYC. A full day with the operators, founders, and brand leaders who are actually using AI to run, scale, and create at their brands… not the AI grifters selling courses.

Tickets are almost all assigned, but I have a handful of VIP tickets reserved for newsletter readers. If you're a brand operator and you want one, apply here and reply to this email so I can flag your application to the team. First come, first served. Approval still required because we're keeping it tight to operators only.

One more thing if you're coming. Come prepared. Pro subscription set up, Claude Code or Codex installed, full battery in your laptop. We're going to be doing and building all day, not just watching slides. Bring the stack.

Also… every attendee with an approved ticket gets one entry in our raffle to win $1k in AI credits from Anthropic or OpenAI (winner's pick).

But before we get into the Shopify stuff…

Vendor of the Week

Roku Ads Manager — CTV that actually shows up in your MMP next to Meta and Google.

Every app marketer I talk to runs the same playbook. Meta. Google. TikTok. Apple Search Ads. Maybe a programmatic display line. Everything funnels into AppsFlyer or Adjust or Branch, every install gets attributed, every post-install event ties back to the spend that caused it. With CTV… the room gets quiet.

The reason is the same reason it's been quiet for years... CTV felt like a different category. Awareness budget. Long feedback loops. No click, no signal, no clean attribution path back to the install. So performance marketers stayed on the channels their MMP already understood.

That's the part that's changed. Roku Ads Manager now pipes campaign data through the same MMPs you're already using. Same source of truth, same dashboards, same attribution framework you've built the rest of your media plan on. CTV stops being a side experiment and starts behaving like another row in your performance report.

The result is what app marketers actually need from a new channel. One dashboard, not five. Full-journey visibility from TV exposure to install to post-install conversion. Roku now reaches 100M+ streaming households. The measurement was the last reason to stay out. That reason is gone.

See how MMPs work with Roku Ads Manager.

Limited Supply

This past week on Limited Supply, I went through a number of listicles that have caught my attention for different reasons and I called them all out. If you’re working out, going for a drive, or ready to fix your site, listen to the episode.

Keep your laptop and/or phone out as you go through the episode to follow along on each page. The show notes have all the pages.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Shopify Editions

I'm not going to walk through every one of the 150 updates. Shopify has a whole site for that. What I want to do is tell you the five things that actually matter if you're running a brand right now, and the one thing that's going to define the next 24 months whether you act on it or not.

1. Your products are now optimized for AI by default

This is the biggest piece of the release. Everything else is supporting cast.

Shopify built a new product data structure designed for LLM consumption. They built analytics that show how your products perform on which LLMs, with sales attribution by AI surface. Think of this as Shopify's version of robots.txt for the AI era… the file every store needs to be discoverable by Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini.

Treat it like SEO in 2010. The brands that did SEO early ran the table for a decade. The brands that do AI-optimized product data this summer are going to be the ones showing up when someone says, "hey ChatGPT, find me a clean protein powder under $50." If you're not in that answer, you're not in the consideration set. And in 18 months, "the consideration set" is going to mean "what the model returned," not "what the customer Googled."

This is not a feature. It's table stakes. Action this week.

2. The publisher affiliate-via-LLM play (the sleeper)

This is the most underrated thing in the entire release, and I think very few people are going to talk about it.

Publishers… creators, media, big Facebook groups, niche communities… can now plug Shopify catalogs into their own chat experiences and earn affiliate commission automatically. Imagine "Dentist GPT," run by a real dentist with an audience and trusted content. Someone asks it, "what toothpaste do you actually recommend?" Twice Toothpaste comes back. Instant affiliate sale. No third-party platform, no Skimlinks rerouting, no "apply for our affiliate program." Shopify becomes the universal commerce protocol behind any AI shopping experience anywhere.

This is a 2027 trend you can be early on. Watch for the first creators to set up their own LLM storefronts. That's the move. The first wave of "AI-native publishers" is going to look like the first wave of YouTubers in 2008… most people will dismiss it, the early ones will own it.

3. The vibe coding partners are now official, and this changes how a brand iterates

Manus, Replit, Lovable, v0 (Vercel) are all now officially integrated with Shopify.

Before this release, if you built a landing page in Manus or v0, you hosted it on a subdomain, embedded it as a mobile webview in a Shopify Pages app, and the whole thing felt like a workaround. It was janky. Now you one-shot a landing page directly into Shopify. If you've got your design systems, your brand markdown files, and your skills built out, the marketer becomes the deployment surface.

The full workflow is now: idea for a new offer test, take your best-performing existing LP, tell Claude Code or Codex or Hermes to swap in new copy and a new angle, deploy directly into Shopify. That's the path. Offer tests in hours, not weeks. No engineering bottleneck. No "can we get this on the dev roadmap."

Same story on Hydrogen. Hydrogen has always been the answer for brands that wanted headless speed but couldn't justify the enterprise team to maintain it. Now you can manage Hydrogen pages through Codex, Manus, Claude Code, Hermes. The marketer with an idea ships the page. This is the most exciting thing in the dev section of the entire release.

4. Sidekick is now actually useful (and it's the start of the agentic ops layer)

Sidekick used to be a small Q&A helper. Now it's a full agent that runs multi-agent workflows in the background while you keep working. It has API access into all your Shopify apps. The app ecosystem is going to adopt this fast… same dynamic as the iOS App Store in 2009.

Real example. Product won't sell. You spend 40 minutes figuring out it's a shipping rules issue. Sidekick now finds and fixes it while you do something else. Or: "when a customer comes in via direct mail, add a free sample to their order." Sidekick writes and ships the logic. You go drink coffee.

Stack this with the new "store management via agents" feature, and you can run your store from a dedicated Telegram chat. Message your Shopify manager bot: "strawberry ice pops sale is live, enable STRAWBERRY15." Boom. Live. "Go through all our imagery and apply our custom alt-text format for SEO and AEO." Boom. Done.

To make this concrete… we use Hermes internally. Hermes is an open-source agent framework. It runs on a config file, you can drop in skills, you can wire it into Telegram or Slack or whatever surface you want. You teach it your conventions once, in a markdown file, and it knows them forever. Want it to know your tone of voice for product alt-text? Drop the rules in a skill. Want it to know your discount approval matrix? Drop it in a skill. Now your "store manager" actually understands your brand the way a senior EC manager would.

This is the kind of leverage that turns a 4-person ops team into a 12-person output.

5. Shop App might be the biggest play nobody is talking about

Real talk. I think Shop has way more upside as a consumer brand than people give it credit for. This release is them leaning in.

Shop is becoming platform-agnostic. It connects to Hermes, OpenClaw, other AI agents. Sign in with Shop on any AI surface and Shop becomes your shopping assistant inside your AI workflows. The pitch is basically: "hey, you're using Hermes to browse or shop? Sign in with Shop, we'll be your shopping engine."

That's a three-sided play.

Brand side: Shopify powers the catalog engine for every storefront.

Publisher side: affiliate via LLM, commission infrastructure built in.

Consumer side: Shop App as the AI-native shopping agent across every surface.

The open question is what Amazon does. They've got Alexa as their own AI surface, but they were also early to TikTok integration and still let that lane open up for others. Shop being first to "let us be your shopping engine inside your AI system" matters. Like programmatic ad inventory… whoever fills it first usually keeps filling it.

Also worth flagging on the Shop App: they're letting you create posts now (social shopping app, predicted that one before), and Shop App is becoming a mobile single sign-on / authenticator in the Sign in with Apple / Google pattern. That last one is the sleeper feature.

A few smaller wins worth knowing

A/B tests on themes natively. Full new site theme, holiday redesign, UX overhaul. Split test it in, don't tank conversion overnight.

Scheduled theme go-lives. Launch a holiday theme at 12:01 a.m. Pacific without your EC manager waking up at 3:01 a.m. Eastern.

Better online search. Bloomreach exists as a business because Shopify search has always been weak for big catalogs. Catalog-first infrastructure means search gets dramatically better natively.

Line-item price overrides on draft orders. Friends-and-family or custom orders no longer pollute your reporting with 100% discount codes. Clean-data win.

Customer accounts stay signed in for a full year. Repeat purchase friction just dropped.

Shop Pay on any platform. Massive revenue lever for any brand running off-Shopify storefronts.

Checkout intelligence. Shopify now reorders payment options based on what your specific customer is most likely to use. Apple Store-level checkout finesse, finally.

Native product compliance disclaimers. Legal language without code.

WhatsApp as a native marketing channel. Big globally, finally first-class.

Custom conversion events, easier to set up. Won't replace Converge for serious brands, but raises the floor for everyone.

A couple I'm more skeptical on

AI Sales Associate. "Answers customer questions in real time" needs deeper product knowledge and infrastructure than a default Shopify product can deliver. A $200M brand isn't going to lean on this. They'll build something more robust. To Shopify's credit, they ship it anyway because they're arming the rebels, not building for the enterprise tier. Just don't expect it to be the thing you remember from this release.

Campaign Autopilot. AI-powered marketing engine that connects channels, sets a budget, and runs. This is built for "the mom in her kitchen launching a protein powder," not for the LS reader running a real growth team. Most of you are already on Klaviyo, dedicated SMS, dedicated feed managers. Worth knowing what's available before you spend on the next tool. Don't expect it to replace what's working.

DTC doesn’t just mean .com

If you skim only one paragraph in this newsletter, skim this one.

Shopify just officially declared that the .com is no longer the center of gravity. The catalog is. The catalog gets served everywhere. On Roblox. On ChatGPT. Inside Hermes. Inside your dentist's chatbot. Inside an Instagram doctor's GPT. Inside the Shop App. They're winning the brand side by powering the engine. They're winning the publisher side with affiliate-via-LLM. They're winning the consumer side by turning Shop into the AI shopping assistant.

The brands that win the next 24 months are the ones that do four things:

Get their product data clean and AI-optimized this week. Treat it like SEO in 2010. The brands that did SEO early ran the table.

Set up an agentic ops layer. Telegram chat as Shopify manager. Hermes, Claude Code, or Codex deploying changes. Sidekick automating shipping rules and order flow logic.

Use Hydrogen plus vibe coding partners to compress test cycles. Marketer becomes the engineer. Offer tests in hours, not weeks.

Lock the catalog feed into every LLM surface. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, the Shop App. Be discoverable in every search.

The brands that ignore this will look up in 18 months and wonder where their traffic went. The answer is going to be: it went into the LLM, asked for a recommendation, and the recommendation wasn't them.

That's all for this week!

If you’re anything like me, you’ve already started figuring out how to connect Claude Code to Shopify and start launching tests. My biggest issue is going to sleep, and waking up around 4:30am with my phone in my hand, still typing to Claude!

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get 9 hours of sleep tonight. Have an amazing upcoming week. I hope to see you at Webster Hall for the AI Summit.

If not, see you at the same time, next week.

-Nik