Shopify’s managing director for Europe, Middle East and Africa Deann Evans and director of product Miqdad Jaffer speak to Retail Week about the marketplace’s AI offering, its new suite of products and always adapting to the retail market
Shopify has been helping all types of businesses build online stores since its inception in 2006, offering services from payments and shipping to customer engagement.
The North American ecommerce platform has grown exponentially in the past two decades and its Europe, Middle East and Africa arm now accounts for 25% of Shopify’s merchant base.
Evans and Jaffer speak to Retail Week about what Shopify is doing to keep growing its merchant base through AI tools and new products.
Which types of merchants and retailers decide to build their business on Shopify?
Deann Evans: “In the UK, we’re working hand in hand with a lot of great brands that make up Britain’s great retail success stories. Gymshark was born on Shopify as it started out in a garage in Birmingham. They now have a store on Regent Street where they’re leveraging our retail point-of-sale solution and have really turned into category leaders on the global stage.
“If we look at Europe, we also have some of the cultural and retail icons, such as [football clubs] FC Barcelona and Hertha BSC, and Inditex group’s Zara has recently launched a secondhand store on Shopify in the UK.”
How does AI play a role in Shopify’s offering?
Miqdad Jaffer: “We believe it’s important for our merchants to have access to the latest technology and help accelerate business processes. AI was a natural fit for a lot of the things that merchants are doing, whether it be generative AI or machine learning. It’s all about making entrepreneurship accessible for everyone and making sure that technology is available to our merchants.”
How have you recently enhanced Shopify’s AI tools with the Shopify Magic suite?
MJ: “What we’ve tried to do is take that complexity away from AI and make it seem like magic, where all you do is type a couple of keywords about your product, a couple of keywords about who you want to talk to, and then let AI take the rest of it on for you.
“It’s not about teaching merchants how to do something new or teaching them how to work with an AI tool that they have to become an expert on. It’s just about how we augment what they already know with the knowledge of their business and the knowledge of AI to accelerate them.”
Sidekick is one of your new products. What is it?
MJ: “Sidekick is a chatbot as an interface and the idea is that it can interact with the Shopify admin. So you can ask Sidekick questions like: ‘What is Shop Pay? How do I understand what the right strategies for my business are? What should I do here? What do I think about this?’
“You can ask it to navigate certain spaces, ask it to fill out forms for you, ask it to edit themes for you, and get knowledge about the industry that you’re in. It can start to fill in all of those gaps, as well as run analysis and analytics.”
As part of your summer 2023 editions, you’ve made updates such as Shopify Marketplace Connect and Shopify Checkout. Can you tell us more about these?
DE: “Shopify Marketplace Connect is an all-in-one solution allowing merchants and retailers to reach millions of new customers and streamline their business operations. It offers a single app for merchants to sell on marketplaces including Amazon, eBay and Walmart, and they can connect to manage and fulfil every order directly within Shopify. So something like Marketplace Connect allows them to scale their sales without scaling the number of solutions that they need.
“Shopify Checkout offers customised delivery options and can be modified to include things like pick-up points, delivery dates and suggested addresses to make it a much more streamlined experience. It’s a key part of the system and a recent study by the big three consulting firms showed that Shopify Checkout’s overall conversion rate is 36% better than some competitors.”
How is Shopify equipped for an ever-changing retail market?
DE: “We let enterprise retailers tap into our unmatched infrastructure while also letting them pick the components they want and need to build a world-class customer experience at scale. An example of this is the commerce component, which we launched earlier this year to make components of Shopify available to enterprise retailers. We’re constantly on that cutting edge and making sure that we’re developing the tools that are needed for this ever-changing retail market.”
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