The news: Shopify is enabling its merchants to advertise on ChatGPT via its Shop Campaigns ad network, according to The Information. The company joins Target, Williams-Sonoma, Adobe, and Albertsons among early testers of the AI platform’s advertising capabilities.

Why it matters: Shopify’s decision to add ChatGPT to its list of advertising partners is a sign of its larger AI shopping ambitions. President Harley Finkelstein said on the Q4 earnings call that the company seeks to be “foundational in powering the commerce layer of the AI era.” Shopify is actively developing tools to make it easier for merchants operating both on and off its platform to set themselves up for agentic commerce success.

At the same time, Shopify is determined to maintain a tight grip on merchants’ ecommerce operations. In the company’s view, platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini are additional surfaces where consumers can be influenced to make a purchase—but Shopify expects to be the platform responsible for handling payments and all other back-end services, enabling it to continue taking its cut of sales and driving subscription revenues. That could be meaningfully lucrative for Shopify: We expect retail ecommerce sales from AI platforms to top $20 billion this year and account for nearly 9% of total online sales by 2029.

The implications: Shopify is making the case to merchants that no other platform is better equipped to prepare sellers for an agentic future. The company already manages checkout, payments, inventory, and merchant data systems for sellers, giving it the ability to offer faster and more frictionless experiences to shoppers who choose to transact through AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Adding agentic advertising capabilities to the mix could be an additional sweetener by giving brands an early opportunity to see how users respond to ads in conversational settings.