S16 E13: Shopify's AI Revolution: What You Need to Know

I'm your host Nick Sharma, and today we're going to talk through the new Shopify everywhere additions release. So Shopify does their additions. I believe it's twice a year. I think it's winter and summer.

And it's usually, you know, 100 plus updates, a ton of good stuff.

There's always stuff for developers, stuff for marketers, stuff for the ops team, stuff

for the merchandising people, stuff for, you know, basically everybody. And this year or this summer rather, a lot of their focus was really on how to make your store kind of very omnipresent and omnivailable. And that doesn't mean the same thing as omnichannel, well, actually, it kind of does. But, you know, omnichannel people tend to immediately think of retail and Amazon.

But what they're saying is, you know, Shopify wants to be the engine that powers commerce no matter where it happens, whether it's in a mobile app, whether it's in a chat window with a cloud or, you know, chat GPT, whether it's inside a video game, and, you know, there's a commerce component. And so there's a lot of updates in this specific additions that are tied to agentic or AI

or, you know, that whole kind of world. So all that said, I want to go through, I've spent about an hour and a half going through the entire, you know, every feature that came out.

And I basically put together what I thought was interesting for, you know, the people

who are listening to this podcast, growth marketers, brand owners, brand founders, people who are scaling brands, et cetera. So I'm not just walking through basically my notes and kind of narrate them, talk through them. There's anything that, you know, you want to double click on or you would like be to go

deeper on than shoot me a DM on Twitter, Atlas, Sharma, and we'll get right to it.

“Now, before we get into this, a quick question, did you sign up?”

Are you coming? Am I going to see you at our econ founders, AI summit? This is happening tomorrow, June 25th in New York City at Webster Hall. So my listening to this late, but if you're not and you're around New York, you want to come shoot me a DM, shoot me an email, I'm be happy to get you a ticket.

Okay, so let's jump into it, so Shopify just released their additions. And at the end of this, I'm going to give you a website where I kind of took all these

notes and basically turned it into kind of just a quick illustrative web page where you

can go and reread or reseal out of these things. So I'm going to drop that link at the end here, but until then let's start talking. So number one, your products are now going to be optimized for AI by default. So the last few months you've probably heard me talk about on the podcast, as well as we had Dylan on, you know, a while ago, he talked about how to basically optimize your site

for LLMs when they crawl it, when they're coming to read from it, when they're consuming or pulling information or trying to do research or anything.

“And your site pops in, you need to be sure that your site is formatted in a way that these”

LLMs are actually able to read and pick up everything as they should in the way that you intended, not in a kind of a confusing way or in a way that's like not done properly. So the LLM is then making its own assumptions. You want to basically make sure you give it everything. So what Shopify is saying now is that is going to be the new, you know, standard, the

new default. The sites will now be optimized for LLMs, LLM consumption, product data structure is going to be designed that way. Sales attribution is going to be done per AI surface, so whether it's cloud or chat, GPT or perplexity.

And so they're basically going to become fully agentic friendly, which also means that, you know, number two, they're making a huge push. And honestly, I thought this was way under talked about by everybody, but essentially what they're doing is they're almost creating like this API to my understanding where any publisher can now plug in and basically get access to the Shopify merchant network.

So, you know, previously, like if you were a pop sugar, you would use, and you're writing about an article on your website, you would use something like skim links, which is one of these affiliate platforms where the brand is plugged in and the publisher is plugged in. And you would say, hey, I'm talking about, you know, this is my article for Oregon protein powder.

So you would search skim links and then route the skim links link in so you get a commission. Shopify is now saying that because people are going to be selling everywhere, whether it's in a Facebook group, whether it's in an app, whether it's in an LLM chat, you know,

“if you're like, there's a famous influencer named the bendest, right?”

Or Michaela Nagira, who's known for make up. If these people are now recommending products in their LLM, they can actually plug directly into Shopify and basically route these orders out and then take a commission. So there's a huge affiliate push that's about to happen from Shopify if I'm understanding

And I think I am.

“The thing I saw that actually came out, I think yesterday of the day before I'm recording”

this on June 23rd. So I think this came out in the 22nd is shop or sorry, striped also came out with their

version of this where they basically said, we've now got the striped directory.

So if you're trying to make a payment or send a payment or involve a merchant, you can use striped directory and basically get in and see our entire network emergence. So it's, it's very interesting to see where this is going to go because they basically just broke the walls when it comes to affiliate, right? You used to have to be in the right affiliate network, used to have to be opted in, yada,

yada, yada, yada. They're going to basically consolidate this whole process of getting opted in because it's not going to be native and Shopify. And then because they own the rails and the, you know, the train tracks, they can basically push orders anywhere.

So I thought that was really cool.

“The next update is one that I'm probably most excited about myself, which I think I've”

talked about at least once or twice before, but the ability to now.

So we've talked about vibe coding or, yeah, basically vibe coding landing pages, listicles,

ad tutorials, you know, comparison pages, product launch pages, special collab product pages, whatever it is, right? Now, before you had to basically host all this on a sub domain. So you know, if you were a truff hot sauce, it would be on pages.truff.com or shop.truff.com or whatever your sub domain was for the brand.

Today, what you can now do is, if you're Manus, if you're replant, if you're levelable, if you're versel, you're now fully integrated directly and Shopify. So you can basically build a landing page inside Manus or cloud code where you might have your own design system built out, you know, the platform to know your brand name. They understand your copy, they might be connected to your ads manager, so you're able

to actually pull insights about what's working and what's not working. So you're not just making a guess as to what's going on the page. That whole process of now building a landing page and getting it to the final live state was possible before, but now it's actually possible. And it's in your Shopify main Shopify store, which is cool.

So you can basically, you know, if you get the setup right, like all those pieces I just

talked about, even if you're using a Manus where you've got a design system, a copy style guide, you know, performance marketing results that it knows to, you know, it can figure out where, what to keep using or what, what not to keep using, you know, copy or messaging or creative wise. If you get that whole system built out and then connected to Shopify, you can actually

now one shot landing pages, meaning you can say, hey, take this skew and build a landing page for Father's Day, you know, with a three for, by two get one for Y offer for Father's Day with this product and, you know, all the copy, all the messaging, all the creative goes live and boom, it's now live within Shopify as well. So, you know, I used to have a landing page agency called Hooks and this is basically what

I saw coming soon, which is why I decided I, you know, didn't want to continue doing that. But all that said, you know, the ability to now take a landing page idea that you have handle all the research, write all the copy, form at the page, take design guidelines or design modules that are already live and implement them within the page and then, you know, set up these tests is insane.

I can't believe that this is now here and, you know, anybody that you ask in the world of become one of the biggest drivers of better efficiency is better funnels and better landing

“pages and better offers and if you look at what any of the big brands are doing now, right?”

They're basically testing, you know, 20 to 100 ads angles per month and whichever, you know, let's say, let's say you're testing 50, right? Maybe 10 or 15 of those really hit and do well from a performance standpoint. They're clicked through right as high or they're add to cart, you know, cost of add to cart went down a bit because that angle's really good.

Then they go ahead and take landing pages and attach landing pages to these 15 out of 50 that work really well and, you know, you run some more spend and you see what happens and then you narrow that down to maybe three to seven pages that are just ripping with spend. And so the biggest bottleneck or the biggest barrier to kind of activate the strategy,

which is basically the very, you know, 20, 26 meta-friendly strategy of angles versus just spray and pray with a bunch of creative, the benefit is now you can basically build these entire funnels really quick. You don't have to wait a week or two weeks or three weeks for your dev team or a sight team to go and duplicate the page.

So as you can tell, I'm very excited about this one. I think that this is going to change the game for marketers, especially the ones that are super proactive. Okay, sidekick is now an actual chat bot that is useful.

being phenomenal, I'm not going to say it's sidekick was bad. You could actually diagnose problems usually pretty quickly. You could get answers. You could ask questions to the data, et cetera.

It was generally, it was basically like a AI 1.0 chat for within Shopify.

But now what they've done is they've kind of taken the cloud code approach where you've got everything, instead of integrating apps and whatnot in cloud code, Shopify naturally now integrates with all the apps that you have attached to your Shopify store. So you could say, pull this information about Klaevio or go through my reviews and, you know, pull the ones that sound like this or, you know, look at my gorgeous customer service

inbound messages and reviews and identify places we can improve our product. You know, whatever it may be, you can now basically have multiple layers of data and information you're going through when you're using sidekick. So if you're somebody who uses sidekick, then you're probably going to be stoked. If you're somebody like me who's usually just trying to plug all of these individual apps

in the my own instance of cloud code or a hermese agent where I've just got more control or it has more information on me and how I work and all that kind of stuff than you're probably doing

that as well. But, you know, it is pretty amazing to see what sidekick is evolved to.

“Okay, so the next one is that the shop app, the shop app is pushing a lot of updates and I think”

we're going to see the shop logo start to pop up everywhere. We're going to see it start popping up at checkout at stores that are not on Shopify because that just became a thing. Shop pay is now available pretty much anywhere. You're going to see the shop app pop up inside chat GPT inside your cloud. You're going to see it pop up inside different apps that have, you know, the ability to pull products or merchandise products or make product recommendations on the

publisher side, basically anywhere where there's a chat interface you're using. You might find it there. And then on the consumer side, you know, your own cloud code, your own open cloud, your own hermese agent, any sort of AI systems you've got set up. Shop is now basically trying to be your go to agent for shopping assistance. So, no matter where you're using AI or where you're, you know, leveraging a shop is going to basically now try to insert itself and try to be the agent

of record you could say. That's actually a good term. We should go in agent of record. So just like agent brands have an agency's of record. Shop now wants to be the agent of record as you're shopping a system. Now the thing that I think is also interesting is, you know, like where does this, where does this leave Amazon? I'm curious to see what Amazon's response will be or like an Etsy's response or eBay, you know, Amazon? I mean Etsy and eBay are probably too small for this,

but Amazon's response will be interesting and their response is probably going to be something like, yeah, Alexa is now going to be open for everybody to use because, you know, they reap the rewards much bigger when people do that. But in any case, I'm excited to see kind of what happens here, you know, Amazon, I don't think has to, I mean, I'm not actually aware, I should say, of a bunch of different integrations that Amazon Alexa has when it comes to shopping,

recommendations like this. I know they were super early to like TikTok to integrate and create storefronts with creators there, but I don't believe that they, you know, they've made a ton of

“pushes here and maybe that's because the rails weren't there for that, you know, like you need to”

have these chat surfaces or chat platforms or agentic platforms where there's already a ton of users and then Alexa gets integrated. But yeah, so so those were basically those five things were like the five biggest things that I thought. So in summer, you know, that was products being optimized for AI, so LLMs can read them. The entire whole affiliate play that they're about to run with LLMs and publishers, then all the new vibe coding partners being added, whether it's

Manus or Versel or Reply or Level Bull Clock Code, etc. Then sidekick, you know, again for people

use sidekick, I think that's amazing. And then the shop apps, so whether it's just being able to

plug shop pay in on a non Shopify store or their whole three-sided play, you know, with brands, they're powering the catalog with the publishers with affiliate through the LLMs or on the consumer side where it kind of becomes your native shopping agent. The shop app is also about to get way better and I think from both a standpoint of whether you are ordering from Shopify merchants or not, they're going to really improve the shop app because, I mean, I just know for a fact talking

to people at Shopify, it's a huge focus for them and it's something that they didn't expect to do so well and and perform so well for the entire, you know, ecosystem of Shopify.

“So a couple of the things I want to call out that are smaller wins, but I think just like”

awesome. So one is AB tests on live themes. So if you've got a full new site theme, you've got a holiday redesign, your testing some new sections, you can now split test those themes.

With that too, you can also schedule a theme go lives. So again, if you're launching a new site and you want to flip it right at like 330 in the morning, that's when you have the least amount of traffic, then you can now schedule it so you don't have to stay up for it, although, you know,

“if it was a new site, I probably want to stay up. But where this, I think gets really helpful is like”

all the e-commerce managers that unfortunately have to stay up until 11.59 p.m. or be on their laptop at 12.01 a.m. for you guys, you don't have to do that no more. Shopify themes cannot be scheduled, which is awesome. That are online search. So again, this is one. I'm curious to see how it does, but I believe with all the advancements in L.P. in AI and being able to, you know, just everything happening and everything we're talking about, I do want to believe that the Shopify native

organic search for the site is getting better. And I'm sorry, I don't mean organic search, but like search on your own on the product website. You know, there's companies like Bloomreach that

exist that their entire business is basically, how do we build the best possible search

from merchants so that, you know, consumers can find products better easier faster, more efficiently. So I'm excited to see what better online search means for Shopify. L.P. in price overrides on draft order. So if you've ever done friends and family orders,

“you've ever put those in for your friends or homies. You know that you have to basically use”

100% discount code to, you know, wipe the whole order, 100% off and ship the order out. Well, you know, it's a small thing, but I thought it was cool and I feel like a lot of people would relate, but now you can actually just line item price override individual things. So if you've got three things, you can, you know, price override two of them and charge them for one, if that's what you're trying to do, or you can now just do it individually with your school.

Customer accounts now stay signed in for a full year, which is pretty cool. That means, you know,

repeat purchase friction drops a little bit. Check out intelligence, which is basically the new Shopify

checkout page. It kind of reorder payment options based on what your specific customers like way to choose. So I'm kind of excited for that one to be honest. I think that'll be cool. Native product compliance disclaimers. So basically all the legal language you need to put around, you know, if you're a supplement product, if you're a beauty product, if you're a peptide, whatever it is, you can now natively insert product compliance disclaimers, which also,

if you think back to the first thing I mentioned, the site B more agent friendly. That means that now this is now because this is native in Shopify. It's also going to be index properly and properly fed to the LLMs. What's app became an official marketing native marketing channel, which is done a cool with Shopify before it wasn't official, but now it is. Custom conversion events are now easier to set up. Now for for most people, you're probably using something like

converge to run custom conversion events or, you know, create those and report those back to Facebook. That's like when you see these big supplement brands running a 90-day subscription, you know, they're not running a normal purchase event at checkout. No, they're running, you know, they've got like a custom converge 90-day subscription event that fires and that sends a very specific signal back to meta as far as, you know, what just happened. So

a version of that is coming natively in Shopify, but again, most people listening to this are probably going to be using converge or something of that sort. Now, a couple of the things that are coming, I'm not 100% sure on, I'm kind of excited to see where these go. One is the AI sales associate. So basically answer customer questions in real time, you know, think a chat bot for your site.

You know, I'm curious to see, like, who uses that? Again, Shopify always, you know,

Harley will always say, we build, you know, products for entrepreneurs who are doing things. They might be solarpreneurs and might be small teams or may not be ventr funded, but the brands that are probably listening to this and might be doing anywhere from 10 to 500 million in revenue or a billion in revenue. I don't know that you're going to be using Shopify's native sales associate. You'll probably be using something a little bit more enterprise, a little bit

more security-happy and a little more robust. Campaign autopilot is another one that Shopify's pushing really heavily, and that's basically the promise of, hey, we're basically an AI powered marketing engine. You set the budget and it basically runs. So, you know, I'm curious again to see where this goes. I don't, I don't think this is going to be for most people listening to this. And yeah, that's pretty much it. My, you know, my take is look, Shopify is basically realizing.

“And, you know, I remember last year we were talking about this and it just felt surreal. Like,”

it felt like it wasn't going to be true for five to six years at least that websites could be going away, but websites are definitely going away. Just think about even the usage. If you're, if you're at power AI user to some degree, and you're using Cloud Code or using Codex or Hermes or OpenClaw,

MCP meaning, you don't actually have to log into the dot com site of GoDaddy or Higgsfield

“or whatever it may be to go in and whether it's make that ad creative or pull that report,”

you can now just do it through the chat interface. And so commerce is definitely heading there,

you know, early performance of friends of mine who are running chat GPT ads, for example,

“it's pretty good. And obviously it is because the intense super high and people are searching for”

these things. So this is, this is not going anywhere. It's obviously here to stay. It's exciting to see

Shopify take these steps forward and kind of figure out how to prepare us and also like coach us along the way. And yeah, if you're doing anything cool in this world of agentic commerce, please reach out. Maybe we'll have you on, but I'd love the chat. And that's pretty much it for this week. I hope you've had a great time listening to this podcast. I appreciate you rocking with me this whole season. Thank you for being a limited supply listener, and I'll see you in two weeks for

our next season premiere. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on

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