Shopify is preparing for AI shopping agents to change everything, exec says | TechCrunch

Shopify is preparing for the transformation of a lifetime, according to its president, Harley Finkelstein. Speaking at this year’s Upfront Summit in Los Angeles, the longtime e-commerce veteran spoke about how the company is going all in on agentic shopping.

Shopify is the second-largest e-commerce provider in the U.S. behind Amazon. But Finkelstein says that only about 18% of retail purchases in the U.S. are made online. Agentic can change that, acting as a new front door for e-commerce sellers.

“We’re going to begin to use these agentic applications as these kinds of personal shoppers,” he said, adding that the initial rollout will be slow. Agentic personal shoppers are predicted to be the future of shopping in some ways — able to discover, buy, and compare products for consumers more effectively.

Finkelstein said that agents will bring context to shopping, which is not something traditional search engines do well at the moment.He offered the example of searching for athletic shoes. One of his favorite brands, he said, is On.

“Agentic is fundamentally merit-based as opposed to, if you go to a search engine, you type sneakers, you’re going to see Footlocker,” he said. But once his agentic shopper knows his preference for On running shoes, the next time he searches for such shoes, the agent will do a better job of representing options from On, rather than options sold at popular, mass retailers like Footlocker.

This is, we’d point out, a bit simplistic. Current search engines already tailor shopping or search displays toward a person’s search and browsing history.

But it is also true that agentic shopping should one day be able to take the person’s preferences into consideration at a much higher level.

“We’re still going to be influenced by the people we see, the people we watch on social media, on television, but I think the chat application is actually a more authentic personal shopper because it’s generally not on commission,” he said, “meaning it’s only going to show you the things it thinks you are most likely to purchase.”

He added there are a lot of merchants on Shopify that struggle with having their products discovered, “and actually, this is where we think agentic will play a huge role in surfacing new brands to those customers.”

He said Shopify is currently building an AI assistant for merchants called Sidekick. It is also building an agent to handle support issues and a protocol so agents can better understand merchant data, such as product details. Overall, he thinks agentic shopping will be another spoke on the retail operating machine.

“We’re probably more excited about this particular new era of commerce than we have ever been because we think it’s just going to create so much opportunity,” he said, “not just for the large merchants, but for the long tail of merchants.”