Shares of Shopify Inc. jumped 7 per cent Tuesday after the Ottawa-based company announced a deep partnership with Meta Platforms Inc. that lets users of Meta’s new AI shopping agent, Muse, buy from any Shopify-powered store using Shopify’s Shop Pay checkout system.
Shopify chief executive Tobi Lutke said in a social media post that the company is “partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores.” Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said the integration gives Muse users access to “a wider range of stores and products,” according to PYMNTS and other outlets that reported the announcement this week.
The deal pushed Shopify’s stock to US$148.01 in early Tuesday trading, according to 24/7 Wall St., while Meta shares slipped slightly and Amazon.com Inc. stock stayed essentially flat, a divergence analysts said reflects sharply different strategies toward AI shopping agents among the three companies.
Amazon barred Muse from its marketplace just two days earlier, on Sept. 20, citing privacy and security concerns and telling users the agent “conceals its identity” while browsing its site, consistent with Amazon’s historically closed approach to outside shopping bots. Shopify, by contrast, is positioning Shop Pay, its e-commerce infrastructure and its order-processing tools as a backend layer that any AI assistant can plug into, rather than building a competing AI shopping app of its own.
It is the second major agentic-commerce partnership Shopify has struck with a leading AI company in about a year, after it teamed up with OpenAI in 2025 to let ChatGPT users complete Instant Checkout purchases from Shopify merchants directly inside the chatbot. Shop Pay passed US$400 billion in lifetime accelerated gross merchandise volume in June, and Shopify has said purchases initiated through AI-powered search convert at roughly 80 per cent higher rates than traditional browsing, with shoppers about 2.5 times more likely to land directly on a product page.
The stock move carries real weight for Canadian markets. Shopify, founded in Ottawa in 2004, is Canada’s most valuable technology company and the top-ranked tech stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange, with a market capitalization of roughly $212 billion as of mid-March, according to a ranking of Canada’s leading TSX-listed tech firms. A single-day gain of this size adds billions of dollars to the value of a stock that Canadian pension funds and retail investors alike hold in significant weight.
For the small businesses that make up much of Shopify’s merchant base, many of them Canadian, the Muse partnership leaves open questions the companies have not yet answered publicly. Neither Shopify nor Meta has disclosed the financial terms of the deal, a rollout timeline, how merchants can opt out of Muse-driven orders, or how returns, customer service and order attribution will work when an AI agent, rather than a shopper, initiates the purchase. Those details are likely to matter most to the retailers whose storefronts are now the testing ground for a new era of AI-driven shopping.
