Shopify President Harley Finkelstein told the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles that agentic shopping represents the biggest transformation in the company’s history, but that initial rollout will be slow.
Finkelstein believes that AI-powered personal shoppers will act as a “merit-based” discovery engine that surfaces products based on genuine consumer preferences rather than paid placement, which he says traditional search engines currently don’t do well at, and that this type of discovery will give Shopify’s smaller merchants a more level playing field against large retailers.
Finkelstein said:
“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, meaning it’s only going to show you the things it thinks you are most likely to purchase.”
He also noted that only 18% of U.S. retail purchases are made online, but that agentic commerce can change that by acting as the “new front door for e-commerce.”
Shopify was a co-developer of Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and a launch partner for both ChatGPT Instant Checkout and Microsoft Copilot Checkout. As the world’s largest e-commerce platform for independent merchants, it has a lot to gain from agentic commerce driving traffic towards D2C sites and away from Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces, so I can understand the public optimism.
