Shopify AI sales tripled YoY, 75% from outside top 100 categories. Nearly half of consumers want AI agents for shopping, PYMNTS Intelligence says.
Alpha Score of 47 reflects weak overall profile with strong momentum, poor value, moderate quality, moderate sentiment.
Shopify Inc. reported that 75% of purchases attributed to artificial intelligence on its platform came from outside the company's top 100 product categories, President Harley Finkelstein said on the Aug. 5 earnings call. The volume of AI-referred traffic and the orders behind it each tripled year over year, according to a transcript of the call published by PYMNTS.
Finkelstein cited specific products the AI surfaced that quarter, including a car seat designed for three-across sedan installation and a reef-safe sunscreen that leaves no white residue. A standard keyword search would bury both under higher-volume competitors. An AI system matching against a detailed description can find them directly.
That discovery channel strains the advertising model retailers have spent two decades building. Retail media networks have relied on human attention – sponsored listings and visual promotions aimed at someone scrolling a page. An AI agent that handles discovery reduces browsing time, making impressions and conversions a weaker proxy for purchase influence.
Chris Selland, founder of Differential Factor and a lecturer at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business, described a new competitive front. "AEO is the new battleground for digital shelf space," he told PYMNTS, using the term for AI engine optimization. He sees product selection happening through an API call rather than a person browsing a page.
Consumer demand is moving in step with that discovery shift. Nearly half of consumers, 48%, said they are at least somewhat interested in using AI agents to buy groceries or plan meals, according to PYMNTS Intelligence's report "The Intelligent Spend Shift." The same survey found 48% would let AI manage subscriptions and 44% would use it for gift purchases. These systems can initiate a transaction on a consumer's behalf, not just suggest what to buy.
For retailers with large catalogs, the shift changes the economics of inventory that never justified a homepage banner or a paid search budget. An AI system can find a niche product and describe it directly to a shopper who asked for exactly that.
Promotions built around visual merchandising and urgency will not disappear. The more agents mediate discovery, the more those promotions need to shape the preferences and rules an agent weighs rather than catch a shopper's eye in the moment.
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