Shopify Debuts AI-Powered Store Builder for Merchants

Shopify has introduced a tool that lets merchants create online stores by entering descriptive keywords.

The Canadian eCommerce platform’s “AI Store Builder” was announced Wednesday (May 21) along with a series of other new features.

This offering uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate store layouts with text and images using merchant-provided keywords, helping them cut back on the time and resources it takes to design their store website.

“Merchants can now translate a vision they have for their online store into something real much faster and without needing to code,” Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s vice president of product, said in a news release.  “As with everything we do here, we want to make the complicated easy so entrepreneurs can focus on what truly matters: growing their business and connecting with their customers.”

The company has also redesigned its POS (point of sale) app to include smoother navigation and a smarter search feature, as well as a feature called “ship and carry out.”

This offering “lets customers leave with what’s in stock, the rest is shipped — no awkward juggling,” the company said.

Last month, CEO Tobias Lütke issued a memo to employees saying the company now considers AI use among its workers a “baseline expectation.”

He argued the technology is critical at a time when merchants and entrepreneurs are leveraging it, and that Shopify must make its software the best platform on which those sellers can develop their businesses,

“We do this by keeping everyone cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear so our merchants can be more successful than they themselves used to imagine,” he said. “For that we need to be absolutely ahead.”

Lütke added that he is using AI all the time and that he invited employees to experiment with the technology last summer, but that his statement then was “too much of a suggestion.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the potential of agentic AI in eCommerce, allowing retailers to compress browsing, selection and checkout into the same dialogue.

That shift is being driven, the report added, by software agents that can both fetch information and take actions on a shopper’s behalf, like adding items to carts to making payments.

“What consumers really want is for commerce to happen immediately,” Scott Hendrickson, chief revenue officer of the agentic AI merchant network firmly, said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “People’s time has never been more valuable, and they expect things to be frictionless.”