• AI visibility

Guide · AI search

How do ecommerce platforms and apps win merchants who ask AI?

By being named, with accurate costs and capabilities, when merchants and their agencies ask AI which platform or app to use, and by showing that you can get those merchants’ own products into AI shopping. That second part is new: AI channels have become a feature merchants compare platforms on. For an ecommerce software company, each merchant won is worth a share of that merchant’s sales for years, so both parts feed revenue.

By Underneath Team Guide Updated

The short version

  1. Platform revenue rides on merchant sales: in the second quarter of 2026, Shopify (opens in a new tab) processed $115,567 million in merchandise volume and earned $2,781 million from merchant solutions such as payments, against $802 million from subscriptions.
  2. OpenAI documents (opens in a new tab) that Shopify merchants’ product data already flows into ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog, with no additional work required from individual merchants. Getting products into AI shopping is now part of what a platform sells.
  3. Merchants have reason to ask: Adobe’s data (opens in a new tab) shows AI traffic to US retail sites rose 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 and converted 42% better than other traffic in March.
  4. Shopify reports merchant results to match: Stanley 1913 (opens in a new tab) saw five times as many AI-referred US orders as a year earlier, and Cottonique’s AI-referred sales grew 276%.
  5. Recommendations also travel through partners: 40,000 Shopify partners (opens in a new tab) referred a new merchant last year, and the app ecosystem earned $1.3 billion.

Who picks an ecommerce platform, and what is one merchant worth over time?

Founders and ecommerce leaders buy it, often guided by an agency, and a merchant’s value grows with its sales.

Who makes the call depends on how big the merchant is. A new or small merchant usually picks a platform alone, on a free trial. A mid-market brand’s ecommerce director chooses with an agency that will build and run the store. An enterprise retailer runs a formal replatforming project with its chief technology officer, finance, a systems integrator and a request for proposals; enterprise suites such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud (opens in a new tab) list every edition as “contact for pricing,” which tells you the sale is negotiated. Below the platform sits a second market: the apps merchants add for reviews, subscriptions, shipping, email and more, bought one install at a time inside app stores.

What a merchant is worth depends on how much it sells. Shopify’s second-quarter numbers show the shape of the model: $3,583 million of revenue, of which merchant solutions, which grow with the merchant’s sales, were by far the larger part. Monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions was $221 million. Even merchants on Shopify Plus (opens in a new tab) who use a third-party payment processor pay 0.20% per transaction to Shopify. So a platform that wins a fast-growing brand earns more each year that brand grows, and replatforming is rare enough that we infer most of that value is locked in at the original choice.

The app economy works the same way at a smaller scale. Shopify says partners in around 100 countries support millions of merchants, and app developers earned on top of the $1.3 billion the app ecosystem earned last year.

How do merchants choose a platform today, and where does AI come in?

Through agencies, reviews and peers, and increasingly through AI assistants and AI shopping features.

Agencies and other partners are a major route. Shopify’s count of 40,000 partners referring a new merchant in one year shows how much platform choice is advice from a trusted builder. Reviews matter too: in Gartner Digital Markets’ survey of 3,500 software buyers across industries, specialty retailers were among the buyers who rely most on customer reviews (49%), and small enterprises used ChatGPT or other generative AI tools to build shortlists more often than larger firms (31%).

AI also enters the decision as a requirement, not only as a research tool. Merchants now see AI shopping as a sales channel. Adobe, analyzing more than 1 trillion visits to US retail sites, found that AI-driven revenue per visit was 37% higher than non-AI traffic in March 2026, reversing the pattern of a year earlier. Shopify’s 2026 holiday report says 65% of shoppers plan to use AI for at least one shopping task this season. A merchant comparing platforms in 2026 therefore asks not only “which platform is cheapest to run?” but “which platform gets my products into ChatGPT, Google and other AI shopping surfaces?”

Which questions do merchants and agencies ask AI assistants?

Questions about switching, total cost, AI shopping readiness, B2B features, integrations and apps.

We wrote the prompts below to illustrate merchant and agency platform questions; none come from real buyers:

  • Switching: “Best platform to migrate to from Magento 2 for a $20M apparel brand with 3,000 SKUs.”
  • Total cost: “Shopify vs WooCommerce total cost for a store doing $2M a year, including payment fees.”
  • AI shopping: “Which ecommerce platforms let my products appear in ChatGPT shopping results?”
  • B2B: “Best ecommerce platform for wholesale with customer-specific price lists and net terms.”
  • Integrations: “Which headless commerce platforms integrate with NetSuite and our warehouse system?”
  • Apps: “Best subscription app for a Shopify coffee brand, and how do the fees compare?”

Agencies ask the same questions on their clients’ behalf, which means a single answer can shape several replatforming decisions. That is our inference from how agencies work, not a measured effect.

How does a platform recommendation become years of merchant revenue?

Through a trial or an agency brief, then a launch, then years of transaction-linked revenue.

Small merchants. The assistant names a few platforms; the merchant starts a trial on one, builds a store and begins paying a subscription. Payments and other merchant services follow as soon as orders do.

Mid-market and enterprise brands. The assistant shapes the shortlist that a brand and its agency take into a replatforming evaluation. We infer that these deals rarely show up as an AI referral: they arrive as a request for proposals, an agency introduction or a direct inquiry from a team that already knows your name.

Apps. A merchant asks for the best tool for a job, then installs the app named from the platform’s app store. The AI answer and the app store listing work together, so both need to tell the same story.

Growth. The platform’s revenue then rises with the merchant’s sales. AI shopping makes that loop tighter: a platform that helps its merchants sell through AI channels, as Shopify Catalog is designed to do, earns more per merchant if those channels grow. How AI answers bring merchants their first-time buyers is covered in our guide for DTC brands.

Why does an assistant suggest one commerce platform or app over another?

Platforms document how they handle products, not platforms; for software choices, the evidence is studies and inference.

Documented by the platform. OpenAI says that when ChatGPT lists merchants for a product, “merchants are ranked based on factors like availability, price, quality, and whether they are the maker or primary seller.” That governs your merchants’ visibility, not yours, but it is why AI-shopping integrations are a selling point. Google says AI Mode draws on “shopping data for billions of products” (opens in a new tab) and uses a “query fan-out” technique, issuing related searches across subtopics and combining the results, so a question about choosing a platform can pull in pricing pages, reviews and comparisons at once.

Observed in our studies. In our study of self-ranking “best of” lists, 24.2% of AI-cited numbered lists with an identifiable publisher ranked the publisher first; Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing platform, was among the repeat publishers. Our llms.txt adoption study found 11.5% of top websites publish a valid file, and notes that an outside tracker attributes much of the recent growth to Shopify enabling it across its platform. That is a platform deciding, for all its merchants at once, how readable their stores are to AI systems.

Observed in industry data. Adobe found that around 34% of retailers’ product pages cannot be properly accessed by AI. A reasonable expectation is that merchants will increasingly ask which platforms fix this for them, and that platforms able to show it will be described that way in answers.

Trust factors specific to ecommerce software. Merchants weigh total cost including payment fees, migration effort, uptime during peak season, app and agency ecosystems, B2B and international features, and now AI-channel support. Shopify’s own merchant story makes the point about independent sources: a Stanley 1913 executive said agentic optimization means positioning “our brand and product story in other authoritative sources,” not only on the brand’s own site. The same applies to the platforms themselves. It also applies to the merchants on those platforms: an outdoor gear brand, for example, earns its place through expert reviews and retailer guides, as our guide for outdoor brands explains.

What does a commerce platform give up when merchants never hear its name from AI?

Years of a merchant’s transaction revenue, decided at one moment.

Because platform revenue grows with merchant sales, a merchant lost at the selection stage is not one lost subscription; it is a share of that merchant’s sales for as long as it stays on a rival platform. At Shopify the transaction-linked part of revenue was more than three times the subscription part last quarter. We infer that the cost of being absent from AI answers falls hardest on platforms selling to fast-growing brands, and on apps competing for the few slots an assistant lists for a job. For the broader effect of fewer search clicks, see our article on what happens if you skip GEO.

What does GEO cover for a commerce platform or app developer?

It makes your platform or app easy to describe correctly and easy to verify; it cannot guarantee a recommendation.

For platforms and app makers selling to merchants, generative engine optimization (GEO) usually comes down to six pieces of work:

  1. Clear total cost. Publish plan prices, payment fees, transaction fees and typical app costs in one current place, so answers comparing platforms do not rely on old figures. If an assistant already quotes an outdated fee, how to fix wrong brand information in AI answers explains the repair.
  2. Documented AI-channel support. State plainly which AI shopping surfaces your merchants’ products can reach, how product data is structured and what merchants must do. If it is automatic, say so in public documentation.
  3. Migration and comparison pages. Merchants and agencies ask switching questions, so publish fair migration guides and comparisons by source platform. Whether migration and comparison pages earn citations is weighed in our article on comparison pages.
  4. Agency and partner proof. Make partner directories, case studies and certified agency lists public and current, since agencies both influence the choice and write about it.
  5. Reviews and independent coverage. Keep review profiles, app store listings and coverage in ecommerce trade media current. Our article on which “best of” lists matter helps pick targets; how product content helps AI shopping assistants covers the merchant side.
  6. Measurement by buyer type. Track merchant, agency and enterprise questions separately across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google, and connect them to trials, app installs, agency referrals and enterprise inquiries.

What is still unproven about AI’s role in choosing an ecommerce platform?

No one has measured how often AI assistants decide which ecommerce platform a merchant chooses.

The strongest numbers here describe shoppers and merchants’ sales, not platform selection: Adobe’s traffic data, Shopify’s holiday report and the brand results Shopify publishes about its own merchants. The Gartner Digital Markets survey covers software buyers across industries. Merchant case results are self-reported and selected by the platform. Our own studies record which pages AI answers cite; they do not follow merchants into a trial or a replatforming. Treat AI as a growing influence on platform choice, and a proven sales channel for merchants, with its effect on platform revenue still unmeasured.

What should a commerce platform or app check before chasing more trials and installs?

Check what assistants currently say about your fees, migration paths and AI-shopping support.

A practical first step is an audit of the switching, cost, AI-readiness and app questions merchants and agencies ask, across the main assistants and Google’s AI features, matched against your trials, installs and agency-sourced deals so gaps are ranked by the merchant revenue at stake. To have us build that view with you and plan the fixes, ask us for a merchant-question audit. Our generative engine optimization service page covers how the follow-on work is handled for a platform or app, from cost pages and AI-channel documentation to migration guides and partner proof.

Frequently asked questions

Do merchants really use AI to choose an ecommerce platform?

Some do, and smaller firms appear to lean on AI tools most when shortlisting software. No published study measures platform choice specifically, so treat it as likely and growing rather than measured.

Why does AI shopping support matter to platform sales?

Because merchants now see AI as a sales channel and compare platforms on it. OpenAI documents that Shopify merchants’ product data reaches ChatGPT automatically, so rival platforms are compared against that.

Should ecommerce apps worry about AI search, or only about the app store?

Both. Merchants ask assistants for the best app for a job and then install from the app store, so the answer and the listing need to agree on what the app does and costs.

How do we measure AI’s effect on merchant acquisition?

Track AI referrals to trial and pricing pages, ask new merchants and agencies how they heard of you, and check regularly how often assistants name you for merchant questions. Then follow those merchants’ processed volume over time.

Sources

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