E-commerce software maker Shopify seems to be benefiting handily from people using AI to search.
On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a “complement to search, rather than a substitute for it,” and had particularly benefited the long tail of e-commerce, including the smaller merchants that make up the majority of its customer base. Indeed, the company credited its earnings beat and soaring revenue to AI search, at least partly.
This is quite different from how AI is impacting online publishing, where AI summaries have led to a measurable drop in click-through rates, which lowers traffic and consequently eats into advertising revenues.
Instead, Shopify believes that AI is a boon to its business. The company noted that AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores had tripled year-over-year in the second quarter.
And, this was not a result of AI taking share from search. “In fact, search remains one of our largest sources of buyer traffic to our merchants, and it’s still growing,” Finkelstein told analysts on the call. “Traditional search sessions are up 1.3x over the past two years, holding roughly a third of all storefront sessions.”
