Vercel releases a Shopify storefront built for people and shopping agents

A Shopify storefront no longer has to present the same page to every visitor. On October 16, Vercel made Vercel Shop generally available: an open-source Next.js template that pairs a visual store for people with product information and shopping tools for agents. It also includes an assistant that shares the shopper’s cart.

From a framework rebuild to a working storefront

Vercel’s starting argument is that shopping agents already use the web, but often through pages and tools designed for people and search engines. Its response is to give agents information they can read directly and tools they can use to shop, rather than asking them to work through a human-facing page.

The infrastructure work began earlier this year, when Vercel and Shopify announced plans to rebuild Hydrogen to work across JavaScript frameworks. The rebuilt Hydrogen SDK—a software kit for developers—is now generally available alongside the template. Vercel Shop uses that kit to connect its Next.js storefront to Shopify’s commerce services.

Hydrogen provides access to the product catalog, cart and order management, payments, and checkout. Teams can therefore build a custom storefront around Shopify’s existing commerce infrastructure. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke emphasized the work behind that checkout layer in remarks included with the announcement.

One product address, two ways to read it

Vercel Shop can serve a visual product page to a person and machine-readable product information to an agent from the same URL. That information includes price, availability, and product options. The agent can read those details without interpreting the visual layout, while the human shopper still gets a conventional storefront.

Discovery gets a separate layer. The template embeds structured product data in pages and includes sitemaps to help search and answer engines find products and understand what the store sells.

For shopping actions, the announcement points to the Universal Commerce Protocol, co-developed by Shopify. It provides a standard way for agents to search a catalog, read product details, check availability, build a cart, and obtain a checkout link. The described sequence ends with a link to checkout, rather than a claim that the agent has completed a purchase.

Vercel Shop makes those capabilities discoverable at the merchant’s own domain. Agents can use MCP, a protocol for connecting agents to tools, to search products and build carts without navigating the site. This supplies an action route alongside the machine-readable product pages.

The store’s assistant keeps the same cart

The template also includes a shopping assistant powered by eve. It lives in the same codebase as the storefront, putting both experiences within the team’s customization work. Teams can change both the store’s design and how its assistant helps shoppers.

A shopper can browse product pages or ask the assistant to find products and add them to the cart. Both use the same cart, so switching between browsing and conversation preserves the items already added. The template also includes skills that guide coding agents through setup, customization, and future template updates.

Vercel launched its own implementation at vercel.store, selling limited-edition merchandise. Its shopping agent helps customers find products, add them to a cart, and continue to checkout. Developers can start their own storefront with the command below, then connect a Shopify store and configure the template using the documentation.

pnpm create next-app@latest my-store --example https://github.com/vercel/shop