AI transforms Shopify commerce: traffic up 7x, orders up 11x amid OpenAI partnership

E-commerce platform Shopify has reported a dramatic rise in AI-driven activity across its ecosystem, with traffic from AI tools up sevenfold and AI-attributed purchases rising elevenfold since January 2025. The company described artificial intelligence as “the biggest shift in technology since the internet” during its third-quarter earnings call, underscoring its growing commitment to AI-powered commerce.

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said the company’s competitive edge in the AI era comes from its access to data spanning millions of merchants and billions of transactions, coupled with its agile “founder mode” culture that enables rapid product development. He explained that Shopify’s AI initiatives extend beyond consumer-facing products to internal decision-making systems, as per a report by TechCrunch.

Among its internal innovations is Scout, an AI tool that allows employees to sift through hundreds of millions of pieces of merchant feedback to make better product and strategy decisions. Finkelstein said Scout is one of many tools designed to turn Shopify’s extensive data — including support tickets, reviews, usage data, social interactions, and Sidekick prompts — into actionable insights. He emphasised that AI is “not just a feature at Shopify” but “central to the engine that powers everything we build.”

The company’s AI expansion includes partnerships with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, integrating shopping capabilities into chat-based environments. Shopify teamed up with OpenAI in September to enable users of ChatGPT to discover and purchase products directly from Shopify merchants.

According to a Shopify survey, 64% of shoppers said they are likely to use AI in some form when making purchase decisions. Finkelstein noted that the company’s aim is to make it “really easy to bring shopping into every single AI conversation,” and added that collaborating with industry leaders demonstrates Shopify’s intention to keep its merchants better prepared for the AI-driven future.

He said the company is currently focused on building infrastructure for what it calls “agentic commerce”, where autonomous AI shopping agents help consumers browse, compare, and buy products. However, he also acknowledged that the space is evolving quickly, and Shopify is preparing for multiple possible directions that agentic commerce could take.