Shopify is preparing for the transformation of a lifetime, according to its president, Harley Finklestein. Speaking at this year’s Upfront Summit in Los Angeles, the longtime e-commerce veteran spoke about how the company is going all in on agentic shopping.
Shopify is second-largest ecommerce provider in the U.S. behind Amazon in America. But Finklestein says that only about 18% of retail purchases in the U.S. are made online. Agentic can change that, acting as a new front door for e-commerce sellers.
“We’re going to begin to use these agentic applications as these kinds of personal shoppers,” he said, adding that the initial rollout will be slow. Agentic personal shoppers are predicted to be the future of shopping in some ways — able to discover, buy, and compare products for consumers more effectively.
Finklestein said that agents will bring context to shopping, which is not something traditional search engines do well at the moment. He offered the example of searching for athletic shoes. One of his favorite brands, he said, is On.
“Agentic is fundamentally merit-based as opposed to, if you go to a search engine, you type sneakers, you’re going to see Footlocker,” he said. But once his agentic shopper knows his preference for On running shoes, the next time he searches for such shoes, the agent will do a better job of representing options from On, rather than options sold at popular, mass retailers like Footlocker.
This is, we’d point out, a bit simplistic. Current search engines already tailor shopping or search displays towards a person’s search and browsing history.
But it is also true that agentic shopping should one day be able to take the person’s preferences into consideration at a much high …