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

0:01Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

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1:12Nik:Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. And today, we're gonna talk through the new Shopify Everywhere editions release. So Shopify does their editions, 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 omni-available.

1:54Nik:and that doesn't mean the same thing as omni-channel well actually it kind of does but you know omni-channel people tend to immediately think of retail and 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 uh clod 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 editions 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 spent about an hour and a half going through the entire, you know, every feature that came out.

2:40Nik: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 gonna just walk you through basically my notes and kind of narrate them, talk through them. And if there's anything that you wanna double click on or you would like me to go deeper on, then shoot me a DM on Twitter, at Mr. Sharma, and we'll get right to it. Now, before we get into this, quick question. Did you sign up? Are you coming? Am I gonna see you at our Ecom Founders AI Summit?

3:13Nik:This is happening tomorrow, June 25th in New York City at Webster Hall. So you might be 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'd be happy to get you a ticket. Okay, so let's jump into it. So Shopify just released their editions. 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 re-see a lot of these things. So I'm going to drop that link at the end here, but until then, let's start talking.

3:46Nik: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 make 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.

4:23Nik: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 Claude 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 are making a huge push. And honestly, I thought this was way under talked about by everybody.

5:04Nik: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 pop sugar you would use and you're writing about an article on your website you you would use something like skim links which is one of these affiliate platforms where the brand is plugged in and the publisher's plugged in and you would say hey i'm talking about or you know this is my article for or gain 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 uh 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 bentist right or mikaela nogeira who's known for makeup if these people are now recommending products in their LLMs, they can actually plug directly into Shopify and basically route these orders out and then take a commission.

6:09Nik:So there's a huge affiliate push that's about to happen from Shopify, if I'm understanding this right. And I think I am. The other thing I saw that actually came out, I think yesterday or the day before, I'm recording this on June 23rd. So I think this came out on the 22nd, is Stripe also came out with their version of this, where they basically said, we've now got the Stripe directory. So if you're trying to make a payment or send a payment or involve a merchant, you can use Stripe directory and basically get in and see our entire network of merchants. So 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?

6:50Nik:You used to have to be in the right affiliate network. You used to have to be opted in, yada, yada, yada. They're going to basically consolidate this whole process of getting opted in because it's now going to be native in 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, advertorials, you know, comparison and pages, product launch pages, special collab product pages, whatever it is, right?

7:34Nik:Now, before, you had to basically host all this on a subdomain. So, you know, if you were Truff Hot Sauce, it would be on pages.truff.com or shop.truff.com or whatever your subdomain was for the brand. Today, what you can now do is, if you're Manus, if you're Replit, if you're Lovable, if you're Vercel, you're now fully integrated directly in 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 platforms know your branding, 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.

8:13Nik: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 this set up right, like all those pieces I just talked about, even if you're using a madness 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 not to keep using, you know, copy or messaging or creative wise.

8:47Nik: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 SKU and build a landing page for Father's Day, you know, with a three for buy two, get one free 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, format the page, take design guidelines or designed modules that are already live and implement them within the page.

9:43Nik:And then, you know, set up these tests is insane. I can't believe that this is now here. and anybody that you ask in the world of e-com, 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 20 to 100 ads angles per month and whichever, let's say you're testing 50, right? Maybe 10 or 15 of those really hit and do well from a performance standpoint. Their click-through rate is high, or their add-to-cart, you know, cost of add-to-cart went down a bit because that angle's really good.

10:26Nik:Then they go ahead and take landing pages and attach landing pages to these 15 out of 50 that worked 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 this strategy, which is basically the very, you know, 2026 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 site team to go and duplicate the page.

11:06Nik: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. um okay sidekick is now an actual chat bot that is useful so before sidekick was kind of just you know shopify used to always talk about sidekick being phenomenal i'm not going to say sidekick was bad you could actually diagnose problems usually pretty quickly you could get answers you could ask questions to the data etc it was general 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.

11:53Nik:So you could say, pull this information about Klaviyo or go through my reviews and pull the ones that sound like this or look at my gorgeous customer service inbound messages and reviews and identify places we can improve our product, 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 gonna be stoked. If you're somebody like me, who's usually just trying to plug all of these individual apps into my own instance of Claude code or a Hermes 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, then you're probably doing that as well.

12:38Nik:But, you know, it is pretty amazing to see what Sidekick has 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 ChatGPT, inside your Claude. you're going to see it pop up inside different apps that have the ability to pull products or merchandise products or make product recommendations.

13:15Nik: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, your own Claude Code, your own OpenClaw, your own Hermes 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 it shop is going to basically now try to insert itself and try to be the agent of record you could say um that's actually a good term we should coin agent of record so just like agent brands have agencies of record shop now wants to be the agent of record as your shopping assistant 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.

14:11Nik: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.

14:47And maybe that's because the rails weren't there for

14:49Nik: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 those were basically, those five things were like the five biggest things that I thought. So in summary, 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 Vercel or Replit or Lovable, ClockCode, et cetera. Then Sidekick, you know, again, for people who use Sidekick, I think that's amazing.

15:29Nik:And then the Shop app. So whether it's just being able to plug ShopPay 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 perform so well for the entire, you know, ecosystem of Shopify.

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17:26Nik:other things i want to call out that are smaller wins but i think just like awesome so one is a b tests on live themes so if you've got a full new site theme you've got a holiday redesign you're testing some new sections you can now split test those themes so you don't you know flip a new site live and tank conversion overnight with that too you can also schedule theme go lives so again if you're launching a new site and you want to flip it right at like 3 30 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'd 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.

18:08Nik:or be on their laptop at 12 01 a.m. For you guys, you don't have to do that no more. Shopify themes can now be scheduled, which is awesome. Better online search. So again, this is one I'm curious to see how it does. But I believe with all the advancements in NLP, in AI, in being able to, you know, just everything happening in everything we're talking about, I do want to believe that the Shopify native organic search for the site is getting better. And sorry, I don't mean organic search, but like search on your own on a 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 for merchants so that, you know, consumers can find products better, easier, faster, more efficiently.

18:56Nik:So I'm excited to see what better online search means for Shopify. line item price overrides on draft orders. 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.

19:31Nik:Or you can now just do it individually, which is cool. 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. Checkout Intelligence, which is basically the new Shopify checkout page. It kind of reorders payment options based on what your specific customer is likely 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 being more agent friendly, that means that now this is now because this is native in Shopify, it's also going to be indexed properly and properly fed to the LLMs.

20:21Nik:WhatsApp became an official marketing, native marketing channel, which is kind of cool with Shopify before it wasn't official, but now it is. Custom conversion events are now easier to set up. Now for most people, you're probably using something like Converge to run custom conversion events or create those and report those back to Facebook. That's like when you see these big supplement brands running a 90-day subscription, they're not running a normal purchase event at checkout. No, they've got a custom Converge 90-day subscription event, that fires and that sends a very specific signal back to meta as far as what just happened.

21:01Nik: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. I, 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. It might be solopreneurs, it might be small teams or may not be venture 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.

21:44Nik: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 heavy, and a little more robust. Campaign autopilot is another one that Shopify is 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 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.

22:24Nik: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 a power AI user to some degree and you're using Cloud Code or using Codex or Hermes or OpenClaw. Almost everything that you're doing is probably done either via API or can be done via API or MCP, meaning you don't actually have to log into the.com site of GoDaddy or Higgs Field 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.

23:02Nik: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 intent's 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 um and and also like coach us along the way and um 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 to chat and um that's pretty much it for this week.

23:35Nik: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.

23:50Nik:Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG, retail, and e-commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.

24:04Thank you.