On Sunday night, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) began blocking Muse, the two-week-old personal artificial intelligence (AI) agent from Meta Platforms, from shopping on its site. Ask Muse to buy something on Amazon now, and a message says access by “an unauthorized AI agent” violates the site’s conditions of use.
One day later, Shopify (NASDAQ:SHOP) went the other way. CEO Tobi Lütke said Monday that the company is “partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores.”
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Shopify shares rose 7% on Monday and another 7% on Tuesday, closing at $147.74 — up about 15% in two days.
So what does Shopify collect when an AI agent does the buying — and is it worth a pop like this one?
Amazon’s objection
Amazon says Meta never told it Muse would shop its store, that it doesn’t identify itself as it browses, and that it appears to capture and store customer credentials.
“We think it’s fairly straightforward,” an Amazon spokesperson said, that agents buying on customers’ behalf “should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.”
There is money behind the principle, too. Amazon generated more than $68 billion of advertising revenue last year, a business that benefits from shoppers browsing its pages. The more trips agents handle, the less browsing there may be.
Meta says Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods.” And the agent found an audience fast, overtaking ChatGPT as the leading free iPhone app in the U.S. within 10 days of its Sept. 8 launch.
An agent’s order pays Shopify like any other
When Muse completes a purchase on a Shopify store, the order checks out through Shop Pay, the company’s one-tap checkout button. Shop Pay orders run on Shopify Payments, so Shopify collects its payment processing fees on each one — just as if the shopper had tapped the button.
“[T]he agentic transactions carry the exact economics as an online store transaction,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said on the company’s August earnings call.
Merchants sold $115.6 billion of goods across the platform in the second quarter, a total the company reports as gross merchandise volume (GMV), up 32% year over year. Merchant solutions revenue (payment fees plus the other services merchants buy) climbed 37% year over year to $2.8 billion. In other words, Shopify collected about 2.4 cents of every dollar its merchants sold, up from about 2.3 cents a year earlier.
