Y’all — this week’s AI-commerce news is wild.
Shopify just dropped one of the biggest flexes we’ve seen all year. According to them, AI-driven orders are up 11x, and AI traffic has exploded 7x since January.
And while Shopify’s over here throwing a victory parade for AI-powered commerce, Amazon’s busy sending legal threats to Perplexity over — wait for it — AI shopping bots.
So yeah, it’s a mixed bag.
Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re insane.
Shopify’s Q3 earnings call reads like an AI success story on steroids.
They said traffic from AI assistants — like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity — has multiplied sevenfold this year, and purchases through AI-powered search have jumped elevenfold.
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein literally called AI “the biggest shift in technology since the internet” — which, honestly, might not be an exaggeration anymore, it’s in -fact tangible proof that agentic commerce — where bots don’t just recommend what to buy, they buy it for you — has taken off faster than anyone expected.
Instead of typing “buy running shoes” into a website, your AI assistant just… does it.
It knows your size, color preferences, budget — maybe even how many miles you’ve run lately. The dream is frictionless, personalized, invisible shopping.
And Shopify’s advantage? Totally unfair.
They’ve got data from millions of merchants and billions of transactions — basically the largest sandbox for training shopping AI in the world.
They move fast, too. Internally, they’ve got tools like Scout, which scans oceans of feedback and data to make better product calls. Externally, they’re partnering with OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity to bring shopping right into the AI tools people already use.
Finkelstein summed it up perfectly: “AI isn’t a feature; it’s the engine.”
And right now, that engine’s running hot.
Meanwhile… Over on the other side of the internet, Amazon is not loving this new “AI agents buying stuff” future.
Earlier this week, they sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist over its agentic browser — basically telling them to keep their AI shopping bot, Comet, out of Amazon’s store.
Amazon says Comet violates its terms of service by pretending to be a human shopper instead of identifying itself as an AI agent.
Perplexity fired back in a blog post titled “Bullying is not innovation,” — which, you’ve gotta admit, is an A+ headline — accusing Amazon of trying to control how people use AI on the web.
So who’s right?
Amazon argues that other intermediaries — like food delivery apps or travel sites — identify themselves when they act on behalf of users, and that AI agents should do the same.
Perplexity says, “Nah — if it’s working on a human’s behalf, it should have the same permissions as that human.”
Now, this isn’t just a petty squabble — it could define how the next generation of AI shopping works.
If Amazon wins, every AI agent will have to “knock on the door” before making a purchase. If Perplexity wins, the internet gets a Wild West of autonomous bots that buy, book, and browse without asking permission.
And hey — Amazon already has its own shopping bot, Rufus. So yeah, it’s not hard to see the motive here.
At the end of the day, Amazon might just be setting the rules for everyone else — conveniently in a way that benefits, well… Amazon.
And if you think this sounds familiar — you’re right.
Cloudflare already accused Perplexity months ago of scraping websites that blocked AI crawlers. This Amazon fight is just the next battle in a much bigger war: it's about who actually controls how AI agents move across the web?
The big picture.
Shopify’s proving AI shopping isn’t theoretical anymore — it’s here, and it’s working.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s making sure it stays in charge of how that future unfolds. Whether it’s open or walled off depends on who wins this round.
Either way, we’re witnessing the birth of agentic commerce — where your AI doesn’t just find you a deal… it does the deal for you.
And the companies that figure that out first? They’re going to own the next decade of online shopping.
So yeah — Shopify’s surfing the AI wave, Amazon’s drawing legal lines in the sand, and somewhere in between, the future of the web is being negotiated in real time.
