Field Notes from the Build
Building a Marketing System That Improves Itself
Gabriel RichardsWe're building a self-improving marketing system. The hard part was not finding one AI smart enough to run marketing. It was designing an organization of humans, AIs, and software that learn together without losing accountability.
From Floor Conversations to Customers: Guided Selling, Showroom Apps, and Rapora
Gabriel RichardsHow Endertech’s custom showroom systems for large retailers shaped Rapora, a Shopify-native product for smaller multi-location chains that need guided selling, CRM, and Shopify POS. Live at rapora.shop; App Store listing pending.
How to Get Into Shopify Catalog (and Rise)
Gabriel RichardsShopify's Fall '26 Edition gave merchants three levers for AI shopping: a Catalog eligibility view, a knowledge base for the store facts agents read, and Shop Promise badges that can rank higher in Shop and Catalog. Here's how to use each one.
Who Can Build a Governed AI Workflow? Approvals, Audit Trails, Bounded Permissions
Gabriel RichardsAI agent governance needs enforced controls, not just prompts. Choose a builder who can prove approvals, bounded permissions, audit trails, and safe recovery.
Shopify's Catalog Now Includes Brands That Don't Sell on Shopify
Gabriel RichardsShopify's Catalog API beta can now return products from brands that don't sell on Shopify, alongside Shopify merchants, with checkout on the brand's own site. Here's how it works, how Promoted Placements and Shop Campaigns fit in, an open question about why Shopify is doing it, and what merchants can do now.
Managing AI Agents Like a Team: Job Descriptions, Ledgers, and Reviews
Gabriel RichardsAgents need management. Here is how we run ours like new hires: an Operating Manual as the job description, a decision Ledger as memory, goals with dates, and regular reviews.
Who Pays for Fraud When an AI Agent Places the Order?
Gabriel RichardsWhen an AI agent buys for a shopper, the merchant still carries most fraud risk and loses the device and behavior signals fraud tools rely on. Here's who is liable, how detection has to change, and how card networks, Stripe, Google and Shopify are rebuilding fraud controls for agent orders.
Measuring AI Channel Sales: Shopify's Agentic Reports vs GA4
Gabriel RichardsShopify's Agentic reports and GA4's AI Assistant channel answer different questions. Here are five places the numbers diverge and how to reconcile them by order ID.
Is Your Hydrogen Product Page Readable by an AI Agent?
Gabriel RichardsAI agents and crawlers read the first server response, not the finished page. Here are the three ways product pages hide content from them, how to check your own, and what we found on a production Hydrogen store.
Shopify Category Metafields: The Fields AI Agents Can Rely On
Gabriel RichardsProduct data can start in an ERP, a PIM, a platform migration or a spreadsheet. What matters is landing it in Shopify's standard category metafields, and what to expect when you write to them from outside Shopify.
What Structured Data Actually Does for SEO and AI Search
Gabriel RichardsStructured data has a proven payoff in classic search: rich results and more clicks. For AI answers, Google, Microsoft and independent tests point somewhere else. Here's the evidence, and how we structured endertech.com around it.
Which AI Checkouts Skip Your Shopify Checkout Customizations
Gabriel RichardsShopify's Fall '26 Edition put agent tools on every store's own checkout, where your rules still run. Hosted direct checkout in Copilot and Google still skips upsells, add-ons, shipping rules and UI validations. Here's how to tell the paths apart and what to audit.