Marketplace Briefing: How Shopify is positioning itself as essential infrastructure in the agentic AI era
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Shopify continues to buck various tariff-related headwinds, reporting during its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday that revenue grew 31% year over year.
But Shopify also used the earnings call to talk itself up to Wall Street analysts, touting how it has consistently been “ahead of the curve” when it comes to “anticipating where consumers will be showing up next and building accordingly.” And right now, Shopify appears to be extremely focused on building for agentic AI.
As Modern Retail previously reported, Shopify in July quietly set boundaries for AI agents on merchant sites. Then on Tuesday, before the earnings call, Shopify released three new tools that it says are designed to more easily power commerce through these AI agents. This includes Shopify Catalog, which, according to president Harley Finkelstein, “simplifies the process for apps and AI agents to search and pull product data so the results are clear, accurate and up to date.” A Universal Cart feature, which can hold items from multiple Shopify stores in one cart, has also launched to some via early access. The idea with all these features is to position Shopify as an essential piece of infrastructure for the agentic AI era.
Agentic AI has become the latest retail buzzword in recent months. It refers to AI systems that can autonomously complete tasks on their own, relying on minimal inputs. Retail giants like Amazon and Walmart are betting that agentic AI bots will eventually become commonplace in e-commerce, buying people’s items on their behalf and completely changing the way people shop online. Amazon, for example, is piloting a ‘buy-for-me’ agentic AI feature.
Shopify has also been keen to strike deals with generative AI engines, in anticipation of the fact that engines like OpenAI and Perplexity will become an even bigger part of the shopping journey going forward. OpenAI has added Shopify as a search partner, and it was also reported in July that Shopify was one of the partners that had been presenting early versions of a potential ChatGPT checkout system to brands. Shopify also integrates with Perplexity’s AI-powered shopping assistant.
Shopify is positioning these moves as ones that are befitting of a forward-thinking company, ensuring that it builds tools to adapt to the next wave of commerce. And, for new AI startups, it is positioning itself as a friendly partner to developers, with CEO Tobi Lütke touting on X that, with these new features, there’s “no need to build a complex new checkout, or deal with regulator marketplace rules.”
But it’s also a way to ensure that the small businesses that rely on Shopify don’t get left behind. For Shopify, the bigger risk is that the merchants that rely on its systems don’t get properly recommended by generative AI agents, or that their websites aren’t properly set up to accommodate agentic AI agents.
“[Shopify] is not able to predict the future better than anyone else, but what they’re trying to do is sort of keep up with what these huge [AI] companies are doing,” said Rick Watson, an e-commerce strategy consultant and the CEO of RMW Commerce.
“If the merchants succeed, Shopify succeeds, and that’s always been their philosophy of just: [Find ways] to make our merchants more money,” said Mark William Lewis, founder of the development agency Netalico Commerce.
William Lewis said he started taking more notice of Shopify’s moves in agentic AI back in July, when news leaked that Shopify had added a line to the code that powers its merchants’ websites stating that “automated scraping, ‘buy-for-me’ agents or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final review step is not permitted.” The message also directed developers to Shopify’s checkout kit.
As one of Shopify’s top engineers said in a statement at the time, the move wasn’t meant to discourage agentic AI entirely, but rather, to say that it needs to happen within Shopify’s sandbox. “It’s really a note for developers who will be poking around,” Juozas Kaziukenas, an independent e-commerce analyst, said at the time.
“I think that was the first defensive move of Shopify, [saying], ‘We’re going to take control of how the AIs are supposed to interact with Shopify,” William Lewis said.
Shopify has invested in AI in other ways over the years, specifically with Sidekick, an AI assistant for merchants that helps answer questions for them like how to optimize their inventory to avoid sellouts.
But Shopify spent more time talking up its agentic AI features during the earnings call, because as Finkelstein put it directly “we want to make sure that we become the best partner for these AI companies to work with and these agents to work with.”
In the shift toward agentic AI, William Lewis said the big risk for brands is if AI agents don’t properly scrape information from their website or miss important information from their product detail pages. It could prove to be an issue, he said, for brands that “are used to having a lot more control over the customer journey.” But that’s also what Shopify is trying to circumvent by encouraging AI agents to connect directly to its catalog.
Still, it is early days for agentic AI. Watson noted that Shopify executives didn’t directly answer a question during the earnings call about how much traffic is shifting towards AI assistants — indicating that it’s still pretty small. As Watson put it, there’s two potential outcomes as agentic AI becomes more mainstream. One, is that “merchants [continue to] stay on the platform they are on now, and at some point the transaction still needs to go through Shopify.”
The other potential future — which Watson admits is a “narrow, far-off world,” — is one in which “If agents can build any software for you very easily. Why do you need Shopify anymore?” Or, “if all purchases are happening through these agents, why not just build a storefront within Open AI?”
That’s a future that Shopify is trying to get ahead of very early, by striking all these partnerships with AI platforms, and touting new agentic AI-friendly features.
And right now, William Lewis said, he hasn’t really heard any negative feedback around Shopify trying to take more control over interaction with agentic AI agents.
“Brands want to be in the AI [engines], period,” William Lewis said. “They want to get picked up and indexed by the LLMs. … People see it as one of the next big sales channels.”
What I’m reading
- Amazon is reorganizing its podcast studio business, but it has denied reports that it is shutting it down altogether.
- Wayfair posted its first quarterly profit in four years.
- The Trump administration has drafted new rules that would allow companies to make more deliveries by drones.