Hi Reader,
Whew! This year has really gotten off to a bang for ecommerce. First, we found out that Amazon is scraping online shops and stealing their content to sell using an AI bot. Then, unfortunately, Shopify followed up with bad timing and relentless positivity to announce to merchants that they were about to turn on "Agentic Storefronts" for all Shopify shops.
With these two things happening at the same time, shop owners became understandably upset and confused about what on earth was going on. I'm here to clear up some misconceptions and get you some clear-headed info on what Agentic Storefronts and AI shopping are all about.
A few things that are NOT happening:
- Shopify has NOT partnered with Amazon to put your listings on the Amazon site and send you mysterious Amazon orders. Amazon did this behind everyone's backs, including Shopify's.
- Amazon is NOT only targeting Shopify sites. They can do this to you no matter which platform you're on. So if you're thinking of jumping ship to Squarespace or BigCommerce, know that Amazon can do the same thing to you there.
- Shopify's Agentic Storefronts are NOT the same thing that Amazon is doing. In fact, their new features give you MORE control over how and if your products are shown in AI chats, not less.
- Shopify's not introducing AI to your shop for the first time. AI can already see what's on your website. This gives you a way to manage and improve what it knows.
- Shopify is the frontrunner in this new technology, but that does NOT mean other ecommerce platforms won't be adding it as soon as they can.
We're waiting to see how everything shakes out, but my team and I think this will be part of the future of shopping, and it's a good idea to be informed and decide how you want to participate. This may feel like how it felt when we first made the jump to shopping on smartphones: the first year or two, you could ignore it, but then it became imperative.
Having your site appear in AI conversations is comparable to having your site show up in search results. You want Google to know about your site, and you want it to know the right things about your site. Shopify is helping you control how your brand is represented through a new protocol it developed in partnership with Google, Etsy, major credit card companies, and other ecommerce giants. Amazon is not mentioned, which is perhaps why they resorted to scraping content without consent.
The bigger, more mind-bending part of Shopify Agentic Storefronts is that ChatGPT and Copilot (and more coming soon) will not only be able to talk more accurately about your products, but also place an order right in the conversation.
Helen Hulskamp, Aeolidia's Ecommerce Strategist, has written a new blog post with more details. Learn more here:
