Image: Search Engine Journal
Why it mattersAn AI shopping agent now has a money reason to pick one store's product over another. Developers must label the paid picks.
An AI shopping agent that picks a product may soon be paid for the choice. Shopify's new Promoted Placements programme pays the company behind the agent a commission on sales of promoted items. The programme opened as a Developer Preview and is set up through saved catalogs in the Shopify Developer Dashboard.
The money moves through Shopify, not directly from the store. The commission is 0.3 percent of the order on each eligible purchase. It applies when an attributed agent sends the buyer to Shop or shop.com. Stores can add more on top, through Shop Campaigns. The Shopify docs mention a 1.5 percent example rate for a campaign total. Shop Campaigns commission applies only to US purchases in USD.
How the agent sees it
An agent that calls Shopify's catalog gets back a product, a price, a rating and a review count. For a promoted product, the response also carries a placement object. Inside it, placement.type always returns "affiliate". The commission appears as a percentage in placement.commission.percentage.value. The agent can read the number and know what it will earn.
Shopify also returns a variant URL and a checkout URL that carry the attribution parameters, shcgid and shclid. Attribution is last non-direct click within a seven-day window. The agent must send buyers through those URLs unchanged. A cancellation, a refund or a changed parameter disqualifies the earning.
What the agent developer has to do
The programme is invite-led. A developer must join the waitlist and wait to be onboarded. Then they accept the terms through the "Get paid" action in the Dev Dashboard. They enable "Earn commission" on their saved catalogs. They call search_catalog with the saved catalog_id. They complete identity verification and set up a payout method.
Shopify also set labelling rules. A disclosure must say the developer may earn a commission on the promoted item. The disclosure must sit near the recommendation. It cannot be hidden inside a privacy policy or a footer. Promoted and organic placements must look different enough that the buyer sees the split.
The sale has to end on Shop or shop.com
Only Shopify stores can enrol products. The programme does not apply to third-party catalog products. The base 0.3 percent is earned only when the buyer completes the purchase in Shop. That means the Shop app or shop.com. A sale that completes on the store's own site earns the agent the base rate only.
Shopify's own site did not add a press release for this. The documentation page is the primary source and names it a Developer Preview. Fields and behaviour may change before general availability.
The story was reported by Slobodan Manic on 30 October 2026 in Search Engine Journal. Manic flagged a tension inside the design. The commission number sits inside the response. Agent developers must label the paid picks, but what the agent does with the number is up to the developer.
For a founder building an AI shopping agent, the practical choice is clear. Disclose the paid picks. Then rank by what the buyer asks for. For a store, the choice is to join the waitlist or stay out. The store also decides whether to top up through Shop Campaigns. For both sides, the paid signal is now a number the agent can read.
Source
Earn with promoted placements, Shopify Developer Documentation. The story was reported by Slobodan Manic at Search Engine Journal.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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