AI is becoming a new sales channel. Here's how to make sure your products show up.

Source: Dev.to

If you’re responsible for growth, revenue, or digital performance across your online store, AI‑driven shopping is an important topic in 2026. When buying behaviour changes, the rules for visibility change with it.

1. The New Landscape

The biggest technology platforms are pushing hard to turn AI into a place where shopping happens right in their apps, not just where people go to research or “chat”.

“AI is becoming a new sales channel, just like search engines and marketplaces did before it.” – author’s note

Early adopters almost always win.

2. Agentic Commerce – AI Completing the Purchase

The idea is often called agentic commerce: AI doesn’t just “show me the options”, it compares, picks the best one, and buys it on the shopper’s behalf.

• Google, Shopify, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Amazon are all experimenting with versions of this.
• Google + Shopify recently announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) – an open standard that lets AI agents interact with your store across the entire shopping journey (discovery → checkout → post‑purchase support).

The important thing to note isn’t the exact interface your customers will use in five years; it’s that AI is becoming a new sales channel.

3. The Human Dimension: Accessibility Matters

Many disabled people already rely on AI tools daily—keyboard navigation, voice input, screen readers, or other assistive technologies. AI can:

• Explain in plain English
• Summarise complex information
• Bypass frustrating interfaces

“Why would anyone manually visit 20 different websites—many of which are slow, confusing, or inaccessible—when you can ask an AI for recommendations and buy from there?”

If AI agents become the primary shopping conduit, online shopping will become more inclusive—but only for stores that are accessible.

4. Competitive Reality: AI Agents Need Reliable Data

AI agents can only recommend and sell products from stores they can reliably understand.

• An inaccessible site becomes a commercial liability, not just a “nice‑to‑have” feature.
• Amazon’s recent “Buy For Me” experiment is a warning sign: independent merchants found their products listed and sold through Amazon’s AI‑driven experience without consent, sometimes with incorrect information or stock availability.

Financial Times reported the issue; Modern Retail highlighted merchant frustration over Amazon‑controlled relay email addresses that interfered with customer data and communication.

If a platform can’t reliably transact on a merchant’s site, it has an incentive to proxy the experience, standardise it, and pull it into its own system—stripping out nuance, brand control, and direct customer relationships.

5. What Trips Up AI Agents? (And Humans)

On product pages, the most common problem areas are:

1. Product variants that change visually but not programmatically
2. Stock messages that aren’t clearly exposed
3. Price changes that appear only after interaction
4. Add‑to‑cart actions with no clear success/failure signal
5. Errors communicated solely through colour, animation, or layout

Without a deterministic confirmation or error state, agents cannot know whether the action succeeded, whether retry logic is needed, or whether the flow should continue to checkout.

These are exactly the issues that frustrate customers who browse without a mouse, rely on keyboards, or use assistive technologies. Humans can adapt; AI agents often skip, hallucinate, or produce unreliable results.

6. The Shift in Optimisation Goals

As AI becomes a sales channel, the primary optimisation goal shifts from relevance or brand recognition to certainty.

• AI agents are optimised for clear product identity, predictable interactions, and reliable outcomes.
• If a product page introduces ambiguity, the safest option for an agent is not to recommend it.

7. Emerging Terminology

We’ll likely start hearing phrases such as:

• “Eligible listings”
• “Supported checkout”
• “Reliable integrations”
• “Agent‑compatible”

These won’t be framed as accessibility requirements but as platform quality standards. Under the hood, they map very closely to the same foundational patterns accessibility specialists have been fixing for years.

8. Accessibility = The Cheapest Path to Machine‑Readable Interfaces

When business owners hear “accessibility”, they often think about compliance and regulations—not the practical upside.

• Accessibility is the cheapest way to make complex interfaces machine‑readable at scale.
• By fixing accessibility issues (semantic HTML, ARIA roles, clear status messages, keyboard‑friendly interactions), you simultaneously make your site more reliable for AI agents.

9. Takeaways

Bottom Line

If you weren’t already convinced that an accessible site is beneficial for your customers, this is where accessibility stops being a nice‑to‑have and starts becoming commercially important.

Make your store agent‑compatible now, and you’ll secure visibility, sales, and brand control in the AI‑driven shopping future.

Accessibility — A Core Quality Signal for AI‑Driven Commerce

Accessibility, at its core, is about:

• Making sure names are explicit
• Keeping roles clear
• Exposing values and states
• Providing errors that explain what happened and what to do next

These qualities make interfaces easier for humans with access needs and easier for machines to reason about.

Why Accessibility Matters for AI Commerce

AI commerce systems will treat accessibility implicitly as a quality signal, alongside:

• Data consistency
• Fulfilment reliability
• Returns behaviour
• Customer satisfaction

It isn’t about AI caring about ethics; it’s about the fact that accessible systems are easier to automate, test, and scale.

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

You may have seen recent announcements from Google and Shopify about the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) proposal.

• Status: Not yet a formal standard, but an open proposal.
• Goal: Give AI agents a shared language for commerce—covering discovery, buying, and post‑purchase support.
• Interoperability: Designed to work across platforms and alongside other protocols such as:
  • Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A)
  • Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP)

UCP is an important signal that the ecosystem is aligning around structured, reliable commerce interactions.

Note: You don’t need to bet on UCP “winning” or on which platform will dominate AI‑driven shopping.

Accessibility = Better AI Readiness

Improving accessibility on your product pages makes your store easier to understand for any agent, on any surface, using any protocol.

If AI is becoming a new sales channel, here’s the simplest way to assess the readiness of your products—without new tools, vendors, or a six‑month project.

Can your product pages clearly answer these questions?

For someone who isn’t using a mouse, and for a system that can’t “see” your design—without guesswork.

1. What exactly is this product?
2. What options or variants can I choose?
3. What changed when I selected that option?
4. Is it in stock right now?
5. What happens when I add it to the cart?
6. Did that action succeed or fail?
7. If it failed, what do I do next?

Common Failure Points

• Key choices hidden behind mouse‑only interactions – keyboard users and AI agents are forced to guess or give up.
• Product options built assuming visual interaction – variants only appear after a click or hover.
• Reliance on visuals, animations, or browsing assumptions – both customers and AI agents struggle to extract needed information.

When answers are explicit, predictable, and exposed directly in the page markup, you eliminate a whole category of friction—for people and for machines.

Real‑World Examples

• Product options & variant selectors – frequent accessibility failures (see my review of accessible product options).
• Custom dropdowns – often break keyboard and screen‑reader navigation.
• Shopify checkout – largely solved for accessibility, but product pages remain the fragile part of the flow (see my article on checkout vs. product pages).

The Business Case

AI shopping is no longer a distant prediction; it’s the clear direction of travel.

• Winning stores won’t be the loudest or most experimental.
• They’ll be the easiest to understand—for people and for machines.

If your store works well for customers who:

• Browse without a mouse
• Use a keyboard
• Rely on assistive technologies

…then it’s far more likely to work well for AI agents deciding what to recommend and what to skip.

This isn’t a compliance argument. It’s a commercial one.

Getting Started

1. Make your product pages unambiguous – ensure all the questions above can be answered by screen readers and by reading the DOM.
2. Iterate as the AI channel matures – treat accessibility improvements as ongoing product investments.

Early adopters get the head start. Start now, and position your store for the AI‑driven future.