Commerce Unveils AI Commerce Platform Updates at Commerce Live 2026

The Nasdaq-listed commerce platform Commerce announced a broad set of product innovations at Commerce Live 2026, spanning core platform performance, B2B functionality, and emerging AI-driven shopping experiences. The company, which operates BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift, positioned the updates as infrastructure for merchants to scale across channels and adapt to agent-driven commerce.

According to the official Commerce press release, the announcements cover storefront capabilities, payments infrastructure, and what the firm calls "agentic commerce" — where AI systems participate in product discovery and transactions.

Core platform enhancements include expanded multi-language support with translation APIs, localized URLs, and native translation management tools. Merchants can now remove unique product naming requirements, a change that simplifies catalog administration (a friction point that has annoyed operations teams for years). Advanced filtering by category and inventory lets teams surface products needing attention instantly, with saved views for repeated access.

Checkout performance received a measurable upgrade: load times reduced by one full second. That single second matters when you're watching a progress bar spin while customers abandon carts. Commerce linked the reduction directly to conversion rate improvements.

Promotion management expanded with new features including promotion banners, multi-coupon stacking, bulk coupon generation, and shipping method discounts. Backorder support now enables SKU-level limits, allowing merchants to continue selling out-of-stock items while maintaining tighter control over inventory exposure.

Storefront capabilities advanced through Makeswift on Stencil, now in beta, enabling modern frontend experiences while maintaining compatibility with existing implementations. Native Hosting for Catalyst will launch in open beta this summer, providing production-ready hosting on Cloudflare through a CLI interface. The offering includes log retention and custom domain support at no additional cost.

Makeswift batch translation jobs now allow teams to localize entire sites or launch new locales at scale rather than page-by-page. Merchants retain full review and approval control before anything goes live.

B2B functionality received significant attention with AI-driven purchase order automation, event-driven webhooks, and advanced pricing logic through cascading price lists. Lance Owide, vice president of B2B product at Commerce, stated the tools help manufacturers and distributors reduce operational friction while supporting the depth and complexity their businesses require.

Commerce is also unifying its B2B and B2C platform experiences, simplifying management for merchants selling to both businesses and consumers through a single control panel and storefront API layer.

Joe Sharplin, head of ecommerce at AS Colour, cited the updates as a significant unlock for his business. Automating purchase orders and improving pricing management reduced manual work and minimized errors while delivering a more seamless buying experience for customers.

Payments infrastructure continues evolving with BigCommerce Payments built with PayPal, expanded Stripe integrations, and support for growing sets of local and alternative payment methods. All designed to reduce friction at checkout.

Feedonomics Surface, the company's self-service feed management solution, expanded channel support to Microsoft Ads, TikTok, and Pinterest alongside existing Google and Meta integrations. The platform enables merchants to automatically sync, optimize, and distribute product data across channels from a single interface.

Early adoption has resulted in millions of products synced with measurable increases in gross merchandise value. Existing BigCommerce small businesses using Surface saw approximately 24 percentage points greater year-over-year gross merchandise value growth in November 2025 compared to their peers.

Agentic commerce capabilities represent the most forward-looking component of the announcement. These include enriched, agent-ready product data through Feedonomics, distribution across AI-driven discovery surfaces including ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity, plus checkout experiences designed for agent-enabled transactions.

Merchants can add conversational search and AI-assisted shopping tools to their own storefronts. BigCommerce Companion supports day-to-day merchant operations.

Sharon Gee, senior vice president of product for AI at Commerce, noted the industry is entering a phase where the distance between discovery and transaction is shrinking rapidly. The focus remains on ensuring merchants reap benefits of agentic commerce while maintaining control of their data, customers, and operations.

Vipul Shah, chief product officer at Commerce, emphasized the infrastructure gives merchants flexibility to handle complexity and succeed in emerging commerce channels. These improvements reflect a stronger platform designed to turn innovation into measurable growth.

The rollout timing matters. Commerce Live 2026 occurred in late April 2026, with some features like Native Hosting for Catalyst arriving in open beta this summer. Not everything lands simultaneously, and merchants will need to evaluate which capabilities align with their operational maturity.

Whether merchants actually adopt agentic commerce features at scale remains the real question. The infrastructure is there, but adoption depends on whether AI agents meaningfully drive transactions or remain a novelty.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn