The Maze: Shopify now gives AI shopping assistants a way to spot merchant markdowns. Its October 9 Catalog update adds a higher comparison price alongside a product’s current selling price, when the merchant shares it and the buyer’s regional settings allow it. Catalog is Shopify’s product-data service; agents use it to find and evaluate items. The extra value lets an assistant recognize a sale rather than see only today’s price. Shopify is changing the data available to the assistant. It leaves the actual price, and how the deal appears, alone.
Source: Shopify Help Center. Shopify’s public instructions for sharing comparison prices with shopping agents; this is documentation, not a live merchant screen.
The sale signal travels with each product version. Shopify’s new price field carries the merchant’s comparison price for a variant: a particular size, color or other purchasable version. An app can compare it with the current price to identify a markdown and its size. Both values carry a currency and an amount. Product-level ranges also show the lowest and highest comparison values across variants. That adds promotional context to the catalog feed; it does not create a discount or prove that every version has the same saving. Developers still decide what to show in a response or interface.
Merchants keep a switch over that context. Sharing starts on for most stores, but Shopify starts it off where comparison prices represent a manufacturer’s suggested retail price or another reference. The merchant control sits in Shopify admin under Sales channels > Agentic > Sources > Shopify Catalog > Review product data mapping > Compare-at. A seller can turn sharing on or off, then save. Turning it off leaves agents with the current selling price. A change in how the store uses comparison prices does not automatically change this setting, so a storefront sale and its catalog signal need separate checks.
Buyer context sets the boundary. The higher price is supplied only when it exceeds the current price for that buyer and the store displays comparison prices in that region. A merchant hiding them from European Economic Area buyers also withholds them from those buyers’ catalog results. This is a regional visibility condition, not a blanket European exclusion or a new legal deadline. A missing comparison value means none is available for that buyer and configuration; it does not prove the item is never discounted. The announcement says no action is required for the data update itself.
A feed can advertise a deal without controlling the assistant. Shopify’s Global Catalog lets agents search across merchants, then retrieve product details and prices for a selected version. Giving that process sale context could make promotions easier to explain during discovery. The merchant preview can show a struck-through reference price and a discount badge, but Shopify warns it is not an exact prediction of an external AI channel’s display. Mapping changes can also take time to process. The release supports markdown recognition; it supplies no evidence of better ranking, more orders or a conversion lift.
Why it matters: A promotion needs to survive the trip from store to shopping assistant. Shopify is adding the reference value that helps an agent explain the saving, while preserving merchant and regional controls. For sellers, that makes catalog settings part of promotional visibility: check what the reference price means and what the buyer can actually see. For developers, a missing value needs a careful answer. The commercial opportunity is clearer sale messaging, not a promise that the biggest crossed-out number wins.
Images: 1 MarketMaze screenshot · Cover AI-generated
