Apple’s new Siri could favour marketplaces over small stores

Companies No. 9 14 September 2026 · 1 min read

Apple's new Siri could favour marketplaces. Siri AI goes live in beta with iOS 27 on 14 September, works across 300,000+ apps and handles 2.5bn requests a day. Safari can track products, Siri can act inside apps, and visual search can pull products from Amazon, Etsy and Anthropologie. Even iOS 27's code appears to leave room for sponsored results in visual search.

That could be a problem for small Shopify stores. Agents don't care about pretty websites. They care about clean data, and marketplaces already have all of it in one place.

Amazon's Rufus reached 300mn+ customers in 2025 and generated nearly $12bn in incremental annualised sales. OpenAI and Stripe have built a checkout protocol for ChatGPT, while Google, Shopify, Walmart, Target and Etsy are building a common commerce protocol. Visa and Mastercard are making cards agent-ready.

But Shopify is using cataloging. It turns products from millions of independent stores into structured feeds. AI searches using Catalog converted at 2x the rate of those using scraped data. It processed $115.6bn GMV in Q2 2026, up 32%, while AI-driven orders tripled YoY.

Shopify's gross merchandise volume grew 32% to $115.6bn in Q2 2026 as AI-driven orders tripled.

Who is building checkout for AI shopping agents: Apple, Amazon, OpenAI and Stripe, Google and retailers, Visa and Mastercard, and Shopify.

Sources