The average shipping app onboarding flow looks the same regardless of which one a merchant picks: connect Shopify, pick a default carrier, set a fallback box size, guess at handling time, save, repeat when it turns out to be wrong. It's a form, not a setup — nobody involved in filling it out actually knows the right answer to most of the questions yet.

Platform V2's onboarding is built around a different premise: the merchant knows what they want ("cheaper rates," "fewer delivery issues," "less manual work") long before they know the correct settings to get there. So the agent asks about the outcome and works backward to the configuration, instead of asking for configuration and hoping the outcome follows.

What the onboarding agent actually does

Rather than stepping through a form, a new merchant talks to an onboarding agent that asks what they care about most — cheaper rates, faster fulfilment, fewer delivery problems, less manual admin, or more sustainable packaging — and recommends a setup from that: Pack Network, MyPost, bring-your-own carriers, or a mix.

It's built to understand freight language specifically, which matters more than it sounds. A merchant who mentions pallets, bulky cartons, or "TNT-style" freight in passing gets routed toward the freight path automatically instead of being funnelled into a parcel-only setup that will misquote their first oversized order. That distinction — parcel vs freight — is the same one covered in more depth in our guide to volumetric weight and cubic pricing, because getting it wrong at onboarding is where a lot of freight billing surprises start.

While the conversation is happening, the platform starts a background catalogue crawl: product titles, descriptions, categories, variants and weights are pulled from Shopify and run through Product AI, so that by the time onboarding finishes, a meaningful share of the catalogue already has estimated packed dimensions rather than none of it. The merchant can also just tell the agent to pick carriers for them — "use AI to pick" is an actual, functioning option rather than a marketing line, and it hands off directly into the multi-carrier network setup.

Why "talk to it" beats "fill in the form"

This isn't onboarding theatre. It solves a specific, well-documented failure mode: merchants configure shipping software once, badly, under time pressure, and then live with the consequences for months because reconfiguring feels like starting over. An agent that asks plain-language questions about priorities — rather than requiring the merchant to already know what a "tailgate fee" or "cubic conversion factor" is — collects the same information without requiring the merchant to become a freight analyst first.

It also reflects where the market actually is. Gartner's most recent supply chain leadership survey (509 leaders, July–October 2025) found that the single most influential factor reshaping supply chain strategy over the next two years is "changes in ways of working driven by advancements in AI and agentic AI" — not cost-cutting, not headcount, but a genuine change in how the work itself gets done (Gartner, February 2026). Onboarding is the first place a merchant meets that shift, because it's the first interaction with the product at all.

The demand side of the market backs this too: Australia Post's 2026 eCommerce Report found 62% of Australian shoppers already use AI tools somewhere in their shopping journey, and businesses are moving faster than shoppers on agentic commerce specifically — 44% of businesses are already positioning for agentic commerce, against 16% of shoppers who say the same (Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026). Merchants adopting agent-run setup tools are, in that sense, ahead of their own customers rather than behind them.

What this replaces in practice

Compare the two flows directly:

Traditional shipping app setup	Agentic onboarding
Merchant manually enables carriers one at a time	Agent recommends a carrier mix from stated priorities, or picks automatically
Dimensions entered per-product, if ever	Background catalogue crawl starts immediately via Product AI
Freight vs parcel decided per-order, later, the hard way	Freight language in conversation routes the setup upfront
Settings buried across multiple admin pages	One conversation, reviewed against carrier management settings
Stuck merchant opens a support ticket manually	Agent opens the ticket itself when it can't answer

That last point carries into the merchant's day-to-day experience after setup too — the same agent model shows up on the AI shipping overview (agentic dashboard), where it's watching live fulfilment data rather than answering setup questions. For the conversation itself, see Agentic Onboarding in the help centre. For connecting and managing carriers once onboarding is done, see the Managing Carriers help doc and the installation guide.

Where this fits in the bigger picture

Agentic onboarding is the front door to everything else Platform V2 does. It's the reason dimension estimation can start on day one instead of after weeks of manual data entry, and the reason a merchant ends up on the right carrier network from their very first shipment rather than discovering the mismatch on their fiftieth. For the full picture of how onboarding connects to checkout, booking, and fees, see the pillar guide to Platform V2 as an AI shipping operating system.