Shopify’s economics don’t change when shoppers find products through OpenAI, Meta, or Google, because the purchase still happens on the merchant’s store and runs through Shop Pay, CFO Jeff Hoffmeister and Head of Growth Archie Abrams told investors at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology conference on September 10. Shopify has only been getting meaningful traffic from chatbots for six to nine months, but it says those visits already convert about 80% better. Merchants’ use of Sidekick has taken off over the same stretch, which has pushed up Shopify’s LLM costs. Shopify is holding those costs down by caching common merchant questions and using distilled open-source models, and it doesn’t need frontier models because it can lean on 20 years of its own transaction data.
