Shopify has turned on AI-powered shopping for millions of merchants as it and the other firms powering agentic commerce try to figure out how exactly it will work best for shoppers, retailers and their bottom lines.

People are already using chatbots to research what they should buy, but Shopify and others hope to turn those chats directly into purchases, and make money from the transaction, too. While it’s still early days, uptake of the technology has also been slow, and experts remain skeptical that the move will create bumper sales and revenue for Shopify or its merchants in the near future.

“It’s reasonable to think that it’s going to accelerate growth,” said Martin Toner, managing director of institutional equity research at ATB Capital Markets. “But, you’re pushing a very, very, very large boulder.”

Still, Shopify is bullish on the potential of agentic commerce. In opening up the tech to its merchants last week, the firm has made a huge range of products available for people in the U.S. to buy through ChatGPT. Even retailers who sell using other e-commerce platforms can add their goods to Shopify’s range and have them hawked by AI agents, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

That’s the plan, anyway. So far, though, the agentic commerce boom hasn’t really happened. Last September, OpenAI and Shopify announced their agentic commerce partnership and said people would soon be able to shop right inside ChatGPT—at a four per cent additional cost to retailers. OpenAI soon backtracked, mostly shelving plans for in-chat shopping in favour of making people complete their purchases in an in-app browser or app. OpenAI’s four per cent fee is also now gone.

Such changes have made it confusing to know if true agentic commerce is happening. Plenty of people already use chatbots for research before completing purchases elsewhere. OpenAI adding an in-app browser is a start, but a world in which people can research, select and buy all sorts of things within a chat session isn’t here just yet. 

So far, adoption of agentic commerce tech has been limited to a handful of bigger brands that got early access to the technology. At a conference last month, Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said the firm had “about a dozen” merchants already using the tech. In November, big names including makeup brand Glossier and Kim Kardashian’s shapewear line Skims were among the first to test out Shopify’s agentic commerce tech, said spokesperson Rachael Hensley. Speaking at the conference, Finkelstein said the firm’s progress on AI shopping was somewhat limited by other firms and it was “waiting for the agentic applications to continue opening the doors.”

Shopify hasn’t said outright how much business AI chatbots are driving. In its most recent earnings call, Finkelstein said orders coming from AI chats had grown 15 times since January 2025. The problem with that number, said Dan Romanoff, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, is that it lacks context and the base is effectively zero. That means any growth, really, looks positive. 

Romanoff doesn’t expect Shopify’s merchants are bringing in much revenue through agentic commerce just yet. “It’s more in the discovery phase right now than the transaction phase,” he said.

Opening up agentic commerce to more merchants won’t have much of an impact on Shopify’s bottom line right away, said Ken Wong, managing director of software research at Oppenheimer & Co., a brokerage and investment firm—echoing a sentiment he said he has heard from Shopify’s management recently. Romanoff added that tight household budgets will likely mean that chatbot shopping will cannibalize traditional online purchasing, rather than adding much. “I don’t see how agentic commerce causes an upward inflection in e-commerce purchasing,” he said. 

Shopify doesn’t seem concerned about this possibility. “Every big shift in how people shop has grown the commerce pie,” said Shopify’s Hensley, citing the early growth the platform is seeing as “a clear signal” that AI shopping will be a boon for merchants.

If that pans out, Shopify stands to benefit big time if its technology and service fees are sandwiched between AI agents recommending what products to buy and people making purchases.

For that to happen, though, Wong said agentic commerce needs to make online shopping demonstrably better and easier. There are some early signs that could be the case, he added, citing better conversion from referrals into sales, and merchants whose products are already being recommended by chatbots reporting higher revenue.

Kurt Elster, a Shopify Plus expert at Ethercycle, which designs, develops and runs Shopify stores for its clients, has been closely watching how much traffic AI has been bringing in. He started noticing traffic referrals from ChatGPT a little over a year ago—and that number has been growing ever since. “We’re excited about it,” he said, adding that the traffic ChatGPT brings to the stores he oversees leads to sales at a higher clip than other referrals.

He hopes hooking more retailers and merchants into ChatGPT and other AI chatbots will start to change how people use AI for shopping, nudging them away from using it as a research tool and into making purchases sooner than they otherwise would. Elster said that these changes could make AI chatbots genuine competitors to Google for researching and buying online.

Over time, as more people use AI for shopping and the technology gets better at recommending products, it’s likely a growing chunk of the money Shopify brings in from its fee on merchant sales will come from agentic commerce. Romanoff predicts AI will be responsible for up to 10 per cent of that total figure five years from now.

While Shopify expects to make money from agentic commerce, it’s not banking on it. “We don’t need it to have that impact for us to continue to be successful and to see the growth rates that we’ve been demonstrating,” chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister said at an industry conference last month.