Shopify bets big on AI commerce as orders from AI search surge 15x in one year

Bombast or long-term planning? President Harvey Finkelstein makes the pitch that all roads lead to Shopify in the AI shopping era!

Back in May 2015, on the day that Shopify became a publicly-traded company, CEO Tobi Lütke made a bold prediction - Shopify will be the only platform needed to build a retail empire. Flash forward to today and Shopify accounts for 14% of total US e-commerce. So while the CEO might have sounded bombastic a decade ago, he was pretty much right in his worldview, argues Shopify President Harley Finkelstein, who goes on to point out that there was another part to Lütke's vision back then: In that same quote, he also said, 'By the time we're done, we will have created the new normal'. Well, 2026 is about to show the world what he meant by that. The AI era has now reached commerce, and you're about to see what that looks like at scale. You're seeing the start of this new normal. Since January 2025, orders coming to Shopify stores from AI search are up 15x, on a small base admittedly, but that's still a significant jump in 12 months. This matters, suggests Finkelstein: For our merchants, it matters because it powers the long tail of commerce, servicing smaller merchants to the right buyers who might otherwise have never discovered them. This is merit-based discovery at scale. For buyers, it matters because it's like having a personal shopper in your pocket, someone who really understands them, their taste, their preference, their size. This used to be a luxury, but now it's available to everyone, 24/7. And for Shopify, it matters because we believe it can bend the curve of e-commerce penetration by stripping out friction, pulling late adopters in and moving more everyday purchases online. But here's the thing - commerce is complex, it's dynamic, and it's also easy to get wrong. It's so much more than just a transaction. It's a leather goods brand like Parker Clay offering monogramming. It's a furniture brand like Burrow offering white glove delivery or a nutrition brand like ButcherBox offering subscriptions. It is critical that shopping in an AI conversation is at least as good as shopping at the merchant's online store. And no one, and I mean no-one, understands this like Shopify because we've spent two decades mastering this complexity. Shopify was built for this moment, he proclaims, bombasticism clearly being a corporate value at the firm: No-one, and I mean no-one, is better positioned to lead in this new era. We've spent decades building the infrastructure that allows every type of merchant to thrive. We have trillions of data points from billions of transactions across millions of merchants. 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. This is an enormous advantage. One recent development that we're going to hear a lot more about this year is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), co-developed with Google and pitched by Finkelstein as "the common rails Agentic commerce runs on", adding the claim for good measure that this is "literally setting the standard on how the world will shop with AI". He explains: Shopify co-developed this with Google because we know commerce better than anyone. It's an open standard for any agent to connect with any brand on the Internet. UCP is built to flex to the many ways commerce happens. UCP is the only protocol that covers the full commerce journey end-to-end, he claims. There's a basic assumption underlying all this that gets repeated once more: Commerce is complex and it's easy to get wrong. One of the reasons that we wanted to create the standard with Google is because we want to make sure that it's done in the right way to give the consumer the experience that the merchant really wants to do. The goal is simple with UCP, he says: It's one common language for agents and retailers. The idea is that merchants can keep the brand, the attributions, buyers get these incredibly trustworthy experiences and agentic commerce can scale. UCP is specifically geared towards being a protocol that covers the full commerce journey end-to-end from search to cart, then checkout. It includes post order. It keeps the merchants essential checkout logic intact...It doesn't force them to re-build customizations over and over again. It's payment agnostic by design. Agentic commerce may be the buzzword du jour, but it really does matter rather than just being 'the next big thing', argues Finkelstein It's important for us at Shopify that we are really at the center of everything happening when it comes to agentic commerce...we are in pole position, I think, on agentic commerce. He concedes that there are questions around how the agentic commerce is going to evolve relative to e-commerce penetration of total retail. Is it an opportunity to pull more people into modern commerce or digital commerce than otherwise not? He doesn't have the answer here: Our job is to be best positioned so that whatever permutation happens, whichever agentic application becomes the mainstay that our merchants are best positioned. That said, the firm has a very specific way of thinking about agentic, specifically: It's a new surface where merchants can sell to customers. The complex - that word again! - back end of commerce will always flow through Shopify, insists Finkelstein, arguing that this is "the stuff below the surface that every merchant requires" and that's where Shopify shows up: Part of the reason that we feel really excited by the UCP is that commerce is complicated. We want to make sure that whatever surface, whatever permutation is the one that actually becomes the mainstay in agentic that it reflects exactly the experience that the merchants want similar to what they have in the online store as well. so the economics for Shopify merchants' economics are the same as if the transaction happened in the online store as well. There should be no difference there. At present, it seems that no retailer presentation is complete without the announcement of an 'exclusive' tie-up with the likes of OpenAI to being AI and LLMs (Large Language Models) into the online checkout process. Shopify takes a different approach: Just to be clear, LLMs do not bypass Shopify's checkout. And in fact, I think this is really where Shopify shines. Checkout is really two parts, he expands: You have a front end that's the user interface that buyers interact with, and the back end that is processing everything, server-to-server. So if you think about a Shopify store today, Shopify runs both the front end and the back end. Under UCP, Shopify still powers the overall experience, but the merchant gets to keep their own checkout system on the back end. Now with something like ChatGPT, for example, OpenAI will run the front end, which is sort of the screens and the forms that the buyer uses, but Shopify still runs the back end. So things like order processing and payments through Shopify Payments, that all runs through Shopify's infrastructure. One of the reasons that we're so excited by this is because we get to help merchants sell across a new surface area, but we get to simplify the complexity through the retail operating system that we've built here. What I hope you've come to understand about Shopify is that we think in decades, not in quarters. We've been building for this new era of AI shopping for a long time, and it's now here. Against that backdrop, something else Finkelstein says is of note: We're not just doing agentic, although agentic obviously, is something we're focused on. Ultimately Shopify is betting on the days of retailers wanting to build systems in-house and is thinking in terms of a unified commerce stack where they have a single source of truth that scales. And, says Finkelstein: Ultimately, those roads all lead to Shopify. It's more than ten years on, but the bombasticism comes through loud and clear.

Shopify Expands Grip on Checkout as AI-Driven Shopping Surges | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Shopify's fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings report Wednesday (Feb. 11) delivered a complex mix of strong top-line growth, modest earnings disappointment and a compelling forward outlook that sent the stock on a volatile ride. "2025 was Shopify at full throttle, driving compounding growth, while laying the rails for the new era of AI commerce. 2026 will be the year of the builders, and we'll be powering them from first sale to full scale," Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, told investors on Wednesday's earnings call. The company reported fourth-quarter revenue of $3.67 billion, up 31% year over year, capping a fiscal year in which revenue reached $11.6 billion, also up 30%. Shopify now commands more than 14% of U.S. eCommerce market share, based on internal estimates and Census data cited in its release. For a company once defined primarily by its role in empowering independent merchants to get online, these results signal a maturation into a diversified commerce infrastructure provider. The company's revenue mix underscores the depth of its platform strategy. In 2025, subscription solutions generated $2.75 billion, while merchant solutions spanning payments, capital and other transaction-linked services accounted for $8.8 billion. Merchant solutions remain the larger and faster-growing segment, reflecting Shopify's evolution from SaaS provider to financial and operational backbone for its merchants. Still, executives stressed that Shopify is building optionality into its growth engine. Payments, capital, POS, B2B and international expansion each represent incremental vectors layered atop its core subscription base. See also: Shopify Brings Merchant Catalogs to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot Shopify is increasingly positioning itself at the center of what it calls "AI commerce." CFO Jeff Hoffmeister highlighted investments in Catalog, Sidekick and the Universal Commerce Protocol as examples of forward-looking initiatives. The premise is straightforward: as artificial intelligence reshapes how buyers discover and purchase products, merchants will require infrastructure that can translate product data, inventory and payment capabilities into machine-readable, interoperable formats. Shopify's Catalog initiative appears designed to standardize and enrich product data across its ecosystem. Sidekick, its AI assistant, signals a push toward embedded intelligence for merchants -- automation not just in customer-facing interactions but in operations, marketing and decision-making. Shopify's sheer scale, $378 billion in annual GMV, affords it data advantages that could reinforce its AI initiatives. Standardized product catalogs and payment data form the substrate on which machine learning systems thrive, particularly with the rice of Universal Commerce Protocol-driven agentic AI commerce systems. Shopify's primary mechanism for bringing AI technology to its merchants is the Agentic Storefronts feature, which allows merchant customers to purchase products directly within AI platforms like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini. The shift toward AI-directed discovery aligns with patterns PYMNTS has been tracking. Shoppers increasingly begin their product searches with an AI prompt instead of a traditional query. Artificial intelligence tools now perform comparison work, generate shortlists and explain trade-offs, compressing steps that once required multiple searches and shifting early decision-making to conversational systems. See also: Shopify Merchants to Pay 4% Fee on ChatGPT Checkout Sales The question for 2026 is whether Shopify can translate its AI investments into measurable merchant productivity gains. If it succeeds, its revenue mix may tilt even further toward merchant solutions, reinforcing a flywheel in which higher GMV drives more payments volume, which in turn funds more product innovation. At the same time, the company's ongoing transition from being primarily a small business enabler to a full-service commerce backbone is challenging. Enterprises and larger brands demand robust data analytics, customization and integration flexibility. Meeting those demands while maintaining attractiveness to small and medium enterprises requires continued investment and operational agility. B2B remains a "very small portion" of total GMV, according to its financial release, suggesting further headroom. Likewise, offline revenue growth of 27% indicates that point-of-sale and omnichannel capabilities are becoming more material. Still, payments growth of 37% and Shop Pay GMV growth of 62% underscore Shopify's ambition to own more of the transaction stack. That ambition may inevitably put it in closer competition with FinTech providers, marketplaces and even traditional financial institutions, as well as other tech firms building AI-driven commerce and payment experiences.