- Welcome to the first holiday season of the agentic era
- The Entrepreneur Effect: When more people build, everyone benefits
- The next era of commerce, built by partners
Agentic commerce will put your products everywhere. Shopify’s Director of Product for Retail on what it means for the store experience.
In the back of a children’s boutique in Lower Manhattan, there’s a bright red vintage airplane bolted to the ground. It’s a barber’s chair for kids getting their first haircut. Any parent knows a kid’s first haircut can be scary. But when you put a little one in that airplane seat, maybe they’re thinking about the scissors a little less. And so are you.
The store is called My Little Sunshine, and it’s been on that corner for almost 20 years. I recently visited and spent time with the owner, Tara. Everything in her store, from the overalls to the puzzles, is perfectly curated and delightful. Could you buy some of those brands elsewhere? Probably. But there’s something in that store that you can’t get elsewhere: Tara and her unique vision, how she pours deep care into selecting every item, and how she knows exactly what to recommend to the toddler who just got their first haircut. That’s all Tara’s creativity, her taste, and no algorithm would have had it. This is retail at its best. It’s a feeling.
The everyday mechanics of buying—finding the thing, comparing it, ordering it, paying for it—are getting even easier in the era of agentic commerce. The same commerce infrastructure that makes agentic and online commerce possible also powers Shopify POS for retail stores. This raises the ceiling on what a store can be, and how well it can know the customer. When connectivity and convenience are the baseline, a business can spend its attention on building a point of view.
A place where you stay awhile
Many stores are designed to get you in and out. You walk the loop, and then go wait in line for checkout at the counter.
Lifestyle brand Tuckernuck takes a different approach. The entire store is laid out as a house rather than as a sales floor. There’s a library. There’s a parlor. There’s a family room with a marble mantel and a mustard velvet sofa. The room at the back is modelled on one of the founders’ own dining rooms. There are only two of each item on the rack. It feels like your dream walk-in closet instead of a clothing store.
As for checkout, it happens at their marble countertop, with a stack of floral-encased iPads. It’s like a party where everyone ends up gathered around the kitchen island. But it doesn’t have to happen in this light-filled space. With mobile tap-to-pay, checkout can happen anywhere in the store, even on the living room couches.
Not every entrepreneur has the square footage or budget for a living room, and that’s not the point. The question every merchant now has to answer, and the one I ask when I enter a store, is this: what is this store for, besides paying for things? At Tuckernuck, in-store shoppers spend $100 more per transaction than online ones. That only happens if there was a reason to stay.
The associates at Tuckernuck are closer to stylists than salespeople. They know what merchandise has just come in, they remember what you bought last time, what special occasion you wore it to. But it doesn’t all have to live in their heads anymore. They can pull up a customer’s history, down to past items, sizes, and even what’s in their online abandoned cart, and use them to suggest what’s next.
That kind of familiarity used to come with a barrier: a store could treat you like a regular only after you’d actually become one. But everyone else walked in as a stranger. That’s why “could we get your email?” is one of the most-repeated sentences in retail, and nobody on either side of the counter enjoys it. The associate feels like they’re collecting a toll, while the customer is doing the math on whether a digital receipt is worth the emails that follow.
That’s the moment Shopify POS was built for. If the customer shopped at Tuckernuck before, or ever used Shop Pay to pay anywhere, Shopify POS recognizes that card tap, and they can choose a digital receipt without ever having to spell out their email address. The brand can treat everyone like a regular, with a known shopping history and product preferences.
The visit, uninterrupted
The experience that a brand can deliver has always been hindered by what their systems know and how fast those systems move. Unlock those, and you change what a retail store can achieve.
Tecovas does this with boots, through a mindset they termed “radical hospitality.” You sit down, somebody fits you, and at some point you’re handed a whiskey. Boots are a good argument for all of this, because almost nobody gets the right pair without putting them on, walking around, and changing their mind twice. You don’t need whiskey to buy boots, but you do need time. The whiskey buys that time.
But whiskey doesn’t solve everything. Their custom “bootrunner” extension in Shopify POS across 50 stores lets associates call up sizes and styles from the backroom on the spot, instead of walking away or speaking into a radio. That means fewer minutes lost hunting for a specific boot, and more face-to-face with the customer.
When the customer reaches checkout, they’re ready to go. That’s where speed matters most.
I’ve visited enough stores to know what slow checkout feels like: maybe a barcode doesn’t scan, one of the items needs to be shipped separately, or a discount code is missing. It’s not just wasting time, it’s losing the magic.
The newest version of POS is faster on a complex cart in order to protect this moment. Say you have six items, one on a discount, someone paying with two different cards, etc. We shaved more than a minute off what it takes to check out. Returns got the same treatment. An exchange used to mean an associate swiping through 10 screens while the customer stood there watching. It’s now streamlined to three.
The job of retail
Tara of My Little Sunshine opened the store because she became a mother and wanted work she could bring her children to. Her kids grew up running around the shelves. For 20 years it’s been a place where one woman raised her kids, and where other parents came as they raised theirs. Tara had a neighborhood, a vision, and a red airplane nobody else thought of.
Today more than ever, brands need a real home of their own. A retail store is exactly that. It’s a home on Main Street, or high street, where brands can fully express their point of view and deliver their magic.
Everything we make is in service of that magic. Checkout should be fast, but retail isn’t just transactional. Transactions can happen anywhere. To walk into a retail store requires effort. Real human effort to get up, go across town, and walk in. What is so special about certain stores that people will do this?
It’s the red airplane.
- Welcome to the first holiday season of the agentic era
- The Entrepreneur Effect: When more people build, everyone benefits
- The next era of commerce, built by partners
