Shopify's holiday report: 65% of shoppers plan to use AI this season
On October 6, 2026 Shopify shared findings from its 2026 Global Holiday Retail Report. In the survey it commissioned, 65% of shoppers say they plan to bring AI into at least one shopping task this season. At the merchants Shopify chose to profile, AI-referred orders and sales have multiplied compared with last year.
Shopify says agent-led shopping hits the mainstream this holiday season
In a post on its newsroom dated October 6, 2026, Shopify framed this holiday period as the first in which shopping through AI agents reaches the mainstream. As the company describes it, a shopper can now hand an agent the whole job of finding, comparing and buying a product while staying inside a single conversation. Shopify backs that thesis with numbers from its own 2026 Global Holiday Retail Report.
According to Shopify, 65% of shoppers say they plan to rely on AI in at least one shopping task this season. Among regular AI users, 71% are more inclined to pick an indie brand this year than they were last year, and the company adds that shoppers who report using AI tools are the group most open to independent and niche labels. Shopify also reports that among shoppers who use AI regularly, 81% are picking more products this year that feel personal, intentional or considered.
Nine markets in the survey, and merchant examples picked by Shopify
The report's methodology section says the consumer survey reached 18,000 shoppers aged 18 and over in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain. Sapio Research ran those interviews online in July 2026, recruiting participants by email invitation. The SMB side covered 7,500 owners and decision-makers at businesses employing under 1,000 people in the same nine countries, also interviewed online, in August 2026. Another finding quoted in Shopify's post: 35% of shoppers pick the version of a product that best fits their needs even when it is not the cheapest.
On the merchant side, Shopify describes two layers. Shopify Catalog organises a merchant's product data into a form agents can parse, and Agentic Storefronts surface those products in AI channels such as ChatGPT, Google and Muse. In the company's examples, Stanley 1913's AI-referred orders in the U.S. this year reached five times the level of the same period a year earlier. Clean beauty brand ILIA saw AI-referred sales come close to tripling year over year. Hypoallergenic apparel brand Cottonique saw AI-referred sales rise 276% on the year and total sales up 52%. Its co-founder Nikhiel Genomal puts it this way: "AI channels are the first search interface that has ever spoken our customers' language."
Being found now depends on whether a machine can read you
The central idea in Shopify's post is legibility: whether an agent can work out what you sell, who it is for and whether your brand deserves trust. The company argues that traditional search forced shoppers to phrase their needs in the SEO vocabulary brands invested in ranking for, while AI lets people describe a problem in their own words, which favours smaller brands built around a specific customer need. The 35% finding points the same way. Shopify stresses that an agent sees the price at once, so the reasons a product is worth it have to be written down somewhere the agent can reach.
The framing matters when reading the numbers. This is Shopify's own report and a company post about its own products. The percentages come from a survey Sapio Research conducted for Shopify, and the brand results come from merchants Shopify selected, so they should not be read as platform-wide averages. The direction is still clear: as AI assistants become the first stop for shoppers, small brands that make their product data machine-readable can end up on the same shelf as much larger ones. We covered Google's AI performance insights in Merchant Center on September 17.
Türkiye is not in the survey, so this section is commentary
The sources contain no information about Türkiye. It is not one of the nine markets surveyed, so the 65%, 71%, 81% and 35% figures do not measure shoppers in Türkiye. What follows is not a fact drawn from the sources but explicitly UNALSOFT commentary.
To spell out the unknowns: how many shoppers in Türkiye will use AI this season, what Turkish SMBs expect from the period, and whether brands selling from Türkiye see gains like the ones Shopify reports for its merchants cannot be derived from these sources. Our view is that making product information readable by an agent is technical groundwork that does not depend on language or market. A store whose product titles, attribute fields and descriptions are consistent and structured starts better prepared, whichever AI channel gains ground. Doing that groundwork is a sounder step than carrying percentages from other markets over to Türkiye.
UNALSOFT's take
We read this less as a product announcement and more as a reminder about data hygiene. An agent sees the price on its own; who the product suits, why it is worth the money and what the brand does differently only travel if someone has written them down. In practice that means a consistent title for every catalogue item, complete attribute fields and a description written in the words a customer would use to describe their own problem. That is why, on the e-commerce panel side, we keep product data in structured fields rather than free text. Because the sources do not cover Türkiye, we do not present these figures as a local expectation.
Can your products explain themselves to an AI agent?
A short conversation is enough to review your catalogue data and product descriptions before the season starts.