In reporting quarterly earnings Tuesday (Nov. 3), management at the Canadian eCommerce company said artificial intelligence (AI)-driven traffic surged 2.6-fold year over year, with catalog-powered searches converting at twice the rate of general AI queries.
Instead of depending on broad search terms, shoppers are turning to AI for hyper-specific needs, accelerating growth in niche merchant categories, Shopify executives said.
To facilitate these transactions, the company recently integrated its Shop Pay wallet into third-party AI interfaces, allowing algorithms to carry out purchases without accessing raw credit card details directly.
“Shopify is uncommonly good at operating in two realities at the same time,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said during an earnings call, describing the balance between building an “agentic future” and servicing current merchant needs.
Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lütke echoed that product-centric focus in a recent note quoted on the call: “The early answer to how we make commerce common turned out to be simple. Just build great products for them.”
That technology shift is happening across both digital storefronts and legacy physical enterprises. The company cited the example of Omaha Steaks, a 109-year-old retailer that had been using a custom tech stack built by its own CEO before migrating to Shopify.
Meanwhile, merchants using new AI tools like Canvas are launching customized storefronts to sell items ranging from handmade pottery to pet treats and vintage comic books 20% faster.
“Anyone selling anything from anywhere gets thrown a beautiful, functional home on the internet,” Finkelstein said.
Shopify’s tech initiatives come as the company reported a 32% year-over-year increase in revenue to $3.7 billion, while gross merchandise volume rose 29.5% to $119 billion.
Recent PYMNTS Intelligence research indicated that 40% of U.S. consumers who use autonomous AI assistants for purchases would prefer to do so from a larger retailer.
Among consumers who reported their most recent AI-assisted purchase, nearly 60% completed it on Amazon, while 57.9% of consumers who use AI to shop said they usually still purchase from Amazon even when artificial intelligence helps them find the product, giving incumbents an advantage an AI agent can’t easily erase.
“Recommendation is the easy part. Certainty and trust is the product,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote a September column.
