Shopify says AI shopping will ‘not bypass’ its checkout

Shopify says it is ready for shopping that happens inside AI chats, but not without its popular payment tool.

Products from Shopify merchants will now get discovered and bought entirely within conversations taking place on ChatGPT or Claude. But the company said AI shopping will still have to go through Shopify’s checkout.

So far, Shopify has laid the groundwork for agentic commerce co-developed with Google. Plus, the tech giant that builds e-commerce stores, has invested and improved its AI agent Sidekick with deeper data insights and models. The throughline is a fundamental shift: commerce moving from website user interfaces that brands control to agent interfaces that, well, AI controls. The question is who wins when the storefront disappears.

“The way we think about agentic is it’s a new surface where merchants can sell to customers,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein told investors on the latest earnings call. “In fact, they may be able to sell to customers [that] otherwise they may not be interacting with.”

AI-powered shopping orders jumped 15x since January 2025, according to Shopify.

“But just to be clear, LLM[s] do not bypass Shopify’s checkout,” Finkelstein said, adding, “the complex back end of commerce will always flow through Shopify.”

As agentic capabilities start to take real shape, with Google and Walmart being the stars of the show, execution of agentic AI has become a major talking point.

“If you think about shipping or payments or inventory or analytics, that is really the stuff below the surface that every merchant requires, and that’s where Shopify shows up,” Finkelstein said. “Just in terms of the monetization of agentic, the focus like any other channel is driving both merchant and then consumer adoption and then ensuring it’s done really, really well.”

More merchants will sell through AI conversations powered by Shopify’s infrastructure, breaking through commerce barriers with faster scaling and less friction than ever before, Finkelstein added.