Marketplace Briefing: Why Shopify believes ‘no one is better positioned to lead’ in the AI shopping 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 is forecasting another quarter of strong growth as it tries to position itself as a leader in emerging AI shopping tools.
During its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, the Canadian e-commerce technology company said that, for the first quarter of 2026, it expects revenue growth in the “low-thirties percentage rate” year over year, roughly in line with its fourth-quarter pace. Meanwhile, gross profit is projected to grow at a “high-twenties” percentage rate, with operating expenses comprising 37-38% of revenues, according to the company.
Shopify reported fourth-quarter revenue of $3.67 billion, up 31% year over year. Fourth-quarter net income decreased to $743 million from $1.29 billion year over year. Gross merchandise volume rose to $123.8 billion from $94.4 billion a year earlier.
On a conference call with investors, Shopify executives made the case that the company is uniquely positioned to power the transactions that happen directly inside AI platforms. They said Shopify already runs the checkout, payments, inventory and merchant data systems for millions of businesses — all of which AI agents will need to complete purchases.
“No one, and I mean no one, is better positioned to lead in this new era,” said Shopify President Harley Finkelstein. “We’ve spent decades building the infrastructure that allows every type of merchant to thrive.”
Finkelstein said that commerce is far more complicated than simply surfacing a product inside a chat window. “Commerce is complex. It’s dynamic, and it’s also easy to get wrong,” he said. “It’s so much more than just a transaction.” He gave examples: monogramming for a leather goods brand, white-glove delivery for furniture, subscriptions for a nutrition company. “It is critical that shopping in an AI conversation is at least as good as shopping at the merchant’s online store,” he said.
Shopify executives said the company’s extensive merchant data gives it a major advantage. “Simply put, we believe we have a more diverse commerce data set than almost anyone else on the internet. And of course, data is what AI is fueled by,” Finkelstein said. “This is an enormous advantage.”
As Modern Retail previously reported, the success of AI shopping tools may ultimately hinge on the quality and structure of the product data they can access. Experts say shopping agents are only as good as the catalogs behind them, and today, many merchant databases are built for keyword-based search rather than the detailed, contextual queries that generative AI relies on. Indeed, OpenAI’s push to turn ChatGPT into a personal shopping hub has been slow to scale, as challenges standardizing and sharing merchant product data have limited the rollout of in-app checkout despite partnerships with Shopify and Stripe, according to The Information.
Some analysts that spoke to Modern Retail for this story agreed that Shopify has a first-mover advantage when it comes to AI shopping, even if it remains to be seen if consumers will actually shop inside platforms like ChatGPT.
“If chat-driven commerce becomes bigger and bigger, Shopify is in the pole position because they organize millions of merchants,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co.
Still, others questioned how quickly that positioning will translate into new revenue streams. Rick Watson, CEO of RMW Commerce, said Shopify does not appear to be introducing a distinct AI-focused software tier beyond its existing payments and merchant services offerings.
“It does not seem like Shopify has planned to introduce new software other than its kind of current capability to take advantage of agentic commerce,” he said. That hesitance likely reflects the reality that “the numbers are still very small” in agentic commerce and that “brands aren’t willing to invest” or pay for “a premium for it right now,” Watson said.
Watson noted that analysts repeatedly pressed executives on the earnings call about how AI would expand Shopify’s margins. “One of the things that analysts kept asking over and over and over is, ‘How does Shopify benefit from this? How do you make more money? How do you increase your margins? And the answer was kind of really the same as before.”
In his view, that’s because “Payments are really their bread and butter,” with Shopify taking “some percentage of the GMV that they sell.” That reliance on payments reflects both the company’s strengths and its constraints. “It’s very common in software that, once you get [a] business model that’s working very well, it’s very hard to break,” Watson said, adding that Shopify is “kind of a one-trick pony” on payments, “for better and worse,” right now.
‘Laying the rails’
Shopify has spent the last few months positioning itself for AI-driven shopping. The company partnered with OpenAI last fall to enable purchases from Shopify merchants inside ChatGPT, and it has also worked with Google on the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard designed to let AI agents complete checkout across platforms. On Wednesday, the company said orders from AI-driven searches have increased fifteenfold over the past year.
“The idea for us was to, in 2025, lay the rails for agentic [commerce] that then allows us to scale them in 2026,” Finkelstein said on the call.
Shopify executives said that AI agents will not bypass Shopify’s core checkout and payments infrastructure. “LLMs do not bypass Shopify checkout,” Finkelstein said. “The economics for Shopify merchants are the same as if the transaction happened in the online store, as well. There should be no difference there.”
For Shopify, maintaining control over checkout is crucial, as roughly three-quarters of the company’s total revenue comes from its merchant solutions business. This includes transaction fees and payment processing via Shopify Payments. The rest comes from monthly subscription revenue.
Shopify’s comments on powering the future of so-called agentic commerce — or the use of AI-powered agents to shop — come just after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors during its earnings call last week that consumers will ultimately prefer “a great shopping agent from that retailer” over “horizontal agents” like ChatGPT.
While Amazon said last year it expects to eventually partner with third-party AI shopping agents, Jassy told analysts that AI shopping agents still fall short of Amazon’s standards for customer experience.
“These horizontal agents don’t have any of your shopping history. They get a lot of the product details wrong. They get a lot of the pricing wrong. We have to try to find a customer experience together that’s better and a value exchange that makes sense for both parties.”
By developing its own AI shopping tools — including its consumer-facing assistant Rufus — Amazon may hold an advantage by embedding agentic features inside platforms shoppers already use regularly. But Amazon may also risk ceding visibility on third-party AI platforms like ChatGPT.
As Luria put it, “When you go into ChatGPT and look for merchandise, you’re finding Shopify merchants. You’re not finding Amazon merchandise.”
What I’m reading
- Estée Lauder has filed a lawsuit against Walmart, alleging the retailer’s third-party marketplace is selling counterfeits of some of the beauty giant’s brands, according to CNBC.
- OpenAI hasn’t yet decided how it will handle collecting sales taxes on purchases made through its site, per The Information.
- OpenAI announced it’s beginning to test ads in the U.S.