CEO & Co-Founder, Yotpo
Shopify x Yotpo AI Webinar
... what does it mean and we brought the builders from Shopify that actually on the maybe have like a front row seat to how Shopify ...
About Tomer Tagrin
Tomer Tagrin, CEO and co-founder of Yotpo, has described a company "reset" driven by the realization that Yotpo was unable to execute on multiple products, including email and SMS, which affected its core reviews and loyalty business. He stated that the company decided to sell those products to partners to refocus on areas where it is "truly best in class." Tagrin has attributed this shift to several forces, including the belief that AI is fundamentally changing how reviews are written and consumed, and that loyalty is becoming more important for merchants, particularly amid tariff introductions. He has characterized the current period as a "reset of the playground" for commerce, noting that a significant percentage of consumers are already using large language models for product discovery. Tagrin has also discussed a broader cultural and strategic transformation at Yotpo, which he refers to as "Yotpo 2.0." He has stated that the company needed to change "from the inside out" by improving how it builds products, does marketing, and goes to market. He has emphasized a focus on long-term excellence over short-term growth, saying the company stopped tolerating "mediocre product" and "mediocre marketing." Tagrin has also highlighted the importance of authenticity in an AI-first world, arguing that customer reviews are becoming more critical as a source of trust. He has announced the upcoming launch of a tool called Atlas, which he said will help merchants leverage AI to understand customer sentiment and provide actionable guidance.
Transcript (53 segments)
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Tomer Tagrin0:00
So hi everyone. We are very excited to have you here. Already while we are recording, there are hundreds of people that signed up. This is a very hot topic and I'm very excited about the guests we have today. It's my first time trying to host a podcast, so I hope I'll do a good job. If not, feel free everyone here to direct me. The idea here is that we're talking a lot about how AI is changing the world, and today it's about how AI is going to change commerce from shoppers to brands and what does it mean. We brought the builders from Shopify that actually have a front row seat to how Shopify thinks about it. We also have our VP of Strategy, who spends a lot of his time researching and thinking about AI and commerce. And myself, one of the two co-founders and CEO of Yotpo, also spending a lot of my time specifically on discoverability with AI, but AI and commerce also on a broader spectrum. So I'll let our guests introduce themselves better than me.
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Ellen Dunn1:15
Great, I can start. I'm Ellen Dunn. I'm a product director at Shopify. I've been at Shopify for almost a decade, and I have been working a lot in conversational commerce from years ago, which was focused on merchants actually talking to their buyers in real life and trying to sell through those conversations. And so I'm really excited about this era that we have entered and this future that has arrived with AI really bringing conversational commerce and fully automated conversational commerce to life. So excited to be here to talk about this and how we can ready everyone for this future.
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Mucha Kambati1:53
Hi everyone, my name is Mucha Kambati. I'm sort of new to Shopify, but I've been in the industry for well over two decades and I've spent the last decade doing work on AI. I've seen all the failures and all of the successes lately with AI, the extreme interest with agentic capabilities that AI offers and how consumers are now rushing to do more things with AI, particularly with shopping and discovery. We'll get into some of that, but it's been quite fun diving into shopping with AI as sort of the focal point over the last several months here at Shopify. And I'm excited to talk to you all about some of the stuff we're doing and seeing as we work on this together.
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Tomer Tagrin2:52
So I'll follow it. I'm VP Strategy at Yotpo. Strategy at Yotpo basically has two sides. So I deal with product strategy, our own research and thinking about how AI is going to change commerce and what that means for us and where we should invest. The other side is actually strategic partnerships. So one of the areas I work on is our Shopify partnership. So this topic is close to my heart in this forum. So yeah, very excited to be here today.
Thank you. So to be honest, when we were preparing for this show, we did a prep talk and it was amazing. We had four different topics that we outlined that we think are interesting from our experience with brands. The first one is discovery in the age of AI agents. That's going to be the first topic we're going to cover. After that, in that kind of a world, what's even a PDP and if a product page has a new kind of a role. We're going to talk about authenticity, user-generated content, and trust in general in a world of AI, which is becoming more and more important. And of course, some practical strategies that brands can actually take today to drive their strategy in an agentic world. There's a lot of statistics around how AI is impacting discovery, product search, shopping. We did our own survey and we saw 48% of consumers are now searching on LLMs. I know Adobe had their own survey that the Shopify team shared that 39% of US consumers are already using generative AI in discovery. So definitely it's massive. Even if conservatively we say in three years, 10, 15, 20 percent of commerce is going to move to agentic, this is probably the biggest shift. It's like saying retail is now opening on the moon and there's a billion people on the moon. So this is something that everyone needs to be prepared for. It's something that we picked up a few quarters ago, probably like a year and a half ago, that we started to double into that. And I'll shamefully just mention my own newsletter about it, Commerce GPT. The entire purpose of the newsletter is exactly the hours that we spent with our own research, with our own data science team, to share what we see working in discoverability in LLMs. So Commerce GPT, check it out. And leave that aside. So now let's talk a little bit about discovery at the age of AI and what's called agentic commerce, right? So where shoppers are not going to go to the storefront, they're actually going to do the research and they're actually shopping inside the LLM. We saw Shopify announce some really exciting stuff from the MCP capabilities to the checkout inside the ChatGPT that was announced a while ago. So I'm just curious for the builders here that are actually helping everyone from an ecosystem standpoint moving forward, how do you see and how do you view discovery in the age of AI in general before we go to some tactics?
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Mucha Kambati6:16
Yeah, maybe I'll kick off and Ellen you can follow in on some thoughts. What we're seeing, of course, is an early wave. We have from BFCM, the Black Friday, Cyber Monday that happened in the past, already some very high numbers where users were converting more when they went to stores that had agents on them. We were also seeing that a large number of purchases were being made, and this is the quotes that Tomer was mentioning at the beginning, Adobe numbers, a large number of purchases that were being made through some AI interactions. And we are seeing this, it's quite common in our day-to-day that we have incorporated AI into our day-to-day lives and so have consumers. So when it comes time for particularly considered purchases, there is a lot of actions that users are doing inside say ChatGPT or Perplexity to weigh options and get some research. So you're not as a consumer having to read all these different reports and websites and compare, and you get a little bit of intelligence back. We're seeing that start and more users are doing it for more actions. The thing though is if you're a merchant, you got to be asking yourself, the conversation may be happening outside of your storefront and it may be important for you to show up in that conversation in an accurate way. When users are asking what are the best shoes to go buy, is your brand showing up amongst what is considered by that AI as best? If the user is asking I want to buy a luxury watch, is your brand considered a luxury watch? Because that is an ambiguous term that somebody like an AI is disambiguating. But if you follow through on that discovery part, users will then make decisions based on a lot of different aspects like return policies, shipping to your destination, very specific information. And we know that AI needs to rely on accurate information to be able to answer those questions. So I want to just pause here to motivate the fact that this is happening. We're seeing this happen. We have evidence even from the last BFCM. We should probably see more of it at the coming BFCM. But I want Ellen to be able to jump in because there's a bit more towards making your brand participate accurately in this discovery journey.
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Ellen Dunn9:08
Yeah. I think there's two things that are interesting. One is just to put a finer point on what Mucha just shared. I think a really easy way to think about it is in the old world someone's typing into Google best running shoes. In the new world they're saying I'm training for a marathon, I need good shoes for flat feet and running on pavement or something like that. So does your product information deliver on those types of details? Or if a buyer is asking a similar question around best brands for marathon style running shoes, do you have brand information that would indicate or structured information that would indicate that your shop specializes in that kind of thing? Right? So that discovery, that understanding of a brand is really easy to do when you land on a storefront because these merchants, these sellers have spent a lot of investment making their storefront bring their brand alive. But when these conversations are happening on other surfaces, how do you translate that brand story into a ChatGPT or Perplexity? So that's what I think is really interesting and those are some of the tools we're trying to build to help merchants show up in that way. Even when it's not just product information, which I think we'll get into a lot in this conversation, but if it's your brand and your brand story and who are you and who founded the brand and what do you really care about and are passionate about, that kind of structured data, we're also at Shopify helping merchants to put that into a place that is accessible for LLMs to pull out and be able to tell that story on your behalf.
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Mucha Kambati10:48
And maybe...
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Ellen Dunn10:49
Yeah, it's almost like the...
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Mucha Kambati10:51
I'm sorry, go ahead.
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Ellen Dunn10:52
It's almost like the store needs to get richer or more structured.
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Mucha Kambati11:00
Both probably.
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Ellen Dunn11:02
Both, right? And more nuanced. Also, something you both are talking about is the difference between old search, right? You get a lot of results and you click in and you do your research. And here, so much more of the research is being done for you and is taking you so much further into this research journey. Being specific, answering the use cases, the needs, how you differentiate yourself is so critical. And it's one of the places where Shopify is so unique to be able to power so many different DTC brands with so many specific brands and specific products. It really is critical to add that kind of information and really explain to the agents what your brand and your product is all about to be able to be surfaced. Yes.
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Mucha Kambati11:54
And I would say the other thing that we see, which is pretty cool, is that buyers who are coming out of these conversations where they've actually been able to get all this information, when they eventually do land on your storefront to make the purchase or to make their final decision between two products, they have way higher intent and they're way more likely to convert because they've already done all that research upfront inside of an AI agent. And so they land on your store and it's like boom, they get what they need and they make the purchase. That's the great news. Storefront traffic that comes from these agents, really high intent, really likely to convert.
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Tomer Tagrin12:31
Yeah. So I have a question. One of the things we did in our customer advisory board, we showed our top people from the merchant side a few capabilities of how we can take their reviews and reviews attributes into the LLMs. And one of the first things that came out is control, right? Because in the storefront they have 100% control and in LLMs they have zero control. So what do you recommend brands, like practically, to think about the control inside LLMs?
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Mucha Kambati13:01
That's an excellent point. I think when we see storefronts from the pre-AI, let's say two, three years ago, they were being optimized for human eyes, right? Like on your mobile screen, on a large desktop screen, make sure that it's visual, the information is summarized because people are busy. But now you've got AI and it's got this voracious appetite to read and ingest and it can reason over large volumes of information. So you almost have to have the human eye version and the AI detail version so that the AI that is sort of summarizing, if it's Perplexity for instance, it's getting the right information and not missing things. You can put more for that AI. And so we've been thinking through how merchant storefronts can evolve. Sometimes you can put stuff on your storefront and AI will reason over it because it has the web and it can search, etc. But sometimes it's just like you don't want to clutter up your storefront. And so we've created an app that we announced in May at Editions called the Knowledge Base app that gives merchants the ability to view what we already know about your store. You install the app and there's auto-extracted FAQs that show up and you can say, 'Yep, that sounds good. I have nothing more to add.' Or you can look at that and say, 'I do have more to add. I think it's missing a brand story.' Or, 'I think I would like to say something about how I handle tariffs. Maybe that was sensitive and I don't want to be able to talk about that on my storefront.' So you can now use the Knowledge Base app to sort of create this extensive version if you want to that AI will have access to in order to answer questions about your store. Remember AI is just going to try its very best to answer users' questions and the more information you provide it, the more it can then be factual and accurate about your store.
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Ellen Dunn15:22
I would like a funny, as a former designer and having been in this world for a while, everyone remembers like above the fold and below the fold when you're designing, right? So as a visual, you have to have all the important information above the fold. Like LLMs in this new world of agentic commerce gives us the opportunity to put so much below the fold that you would never have put back in the old days. But all of that additional content, all those rich details can now live in a way that LLMs can pull them out, summarize, search through them, find the pieces of that information that are relevant to the exact user who is doing the search. But you don't have to have a product page necessarily that's cluttered with all that information. Like your above the fold is still looking great for those who are actually landing and interacting with your storefront. So I like that analogy because it's such an old term that goes way back to designing.
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Tomer Tagrin16:19
So basically you're saying like PDPs and storefronts in general are no longer for just humans.
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Ellen Dunn16:26
They're also for agents. And therefore when designing, Shopify is building capabilities that can help. Yotpo is building capabilities that can help. But more in general, less tactically, what does it mean that I need to now think about my storefront, some of it for humans, some of it for agents. So above the fold, below the fold is a great example. Any more thoughts on ideas that brands need to think about when they think about designing their storefront also for agents?
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Mucha Kambati16:58
Yeah, I'll offer one more. Remember when users come to storefronts, we sort of define the thing that they go see. We give them maybe a popup that says you can get a 10% discount if you give us your email. We might give them some choice spots. Enter this door if you want men's stuff. Enter this door if you want women's stuff. And we sort of leave it to the user to navigate. And we try our best to make the visual appeal of our products show up very well. Users aren't often now operating in the same way as they were operating two, three years ago. And we know this from how you see users change their search habits. The big question is what's happening to Google? Is ChatGPT taking some of the queries away? Well, the honest truth is behaviors have changed. Users are wanting more conversational ways to look things up. So you've got to maybe embrace some aspects of your storefront to be more conversational. You can have your visual elements as you had before, but having the ability to have natural language questions where users can search or maybe ask detailed questions. I'm on a PDP and I now want to know what your...
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Tomer Tagrin18:19
Returning our product roadmap. We're going to announce a few stuff very soon. You're seeing it.
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Mucha Kambati18:23
We'll talk more, but I do think storefronts get evolved in conversational ways too.
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Ellen Dunn18:30
Yeah. And rethinking your search bar on your storefront even, what does that return if you ask a long-winded question? What is the user going to get results that make sense? Like let's hope so, right? Because that is the behavior that we're seeing.
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Mucha Kambati18:46
And it's such a power, right? Because now you're able to actually get from people the questions that they want answered. It's not just clicks and monitoring where they're going and the funnel to go to conversion and what products they looked at. They're actually asking you and you're learning from that data. It's gold. And then to Tomer's point, our roadmap is how do you then take that and turn it into a loop of collecting the right data from the users that would end up getting surfaced and sorting and showing the right user the right data to those customers and the agents back on the PDP is such a different kind of mentality to how e-commerce was happening on the DTC website until now, right? The guesswork is kind of getting done.
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Ellen Dunn19:30
A great flywheel, right, is what you're describing. And that could even change based on the season or the trends and what are people asking about? How are they asking it? You being able to as a seller see that in real time and then adjust the descriptions that are on your product page, etc. What do people really care about? They care about where it's manufactured or they care about its sustainability or what kind of materials. Those are all things you can dynamically be updating to make your products again have a better chance of being discovered for buyers where those are the things they've expressed to the agent that they really care about. And that's just a really cool thing to be able to do in such a quick iteration.
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Tomer Tagrin20:13
Yeah. I have to say one of the things that maybe it's my entrepreneurial spirit that gets me excited. It's a reset, right, in user behavior like you said. So now I can compete with Nike, I can compete with the big ones. When you think about entrepreneurship in general, so many small brands now, they need to figure out a way and they can have an early move advantage versus the big ones that in SEO, go beat Nike in SEO. Good luck with that. That's probably a war that no one is worth fighting. I don't know any brand by the way from our customers that is really trying to win versus the massive ones. And on the other hand, we have some massive brands that I see how they're enjoying the organic traffic coming from SEO. And now with generative engine optimization, this is why I think when I at least talk to our customers I try to instill urgency because if you do move quickly, and I think it's phenomenal that Shopify is helping its merchants, because then you can get a head start and you can optimize and then you can do it by season, you can get better. That doesn't really matter as long as you're in the game. And now many brands are not in the game, right?
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Ellen Dunn21:26
And if a buyer is not searching for a brand name or a specific branded product name, then it does level the playing field quite a bit for other brands to get to show up in those results, which is great because yeah, you're right. In the world of SEO, you're not going to get on the first page of a Nike search result, right? But you might get on the first page of marathon shoes for flat feet. So I think it is exciting and I agree with you on the urgency there.
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Mucha Kambati22:00
I think when we look at this with queries, it plays out exactly, Tomer. You're absolutely right. The search box versus the chat box. When you look at the queries people put in the chat box, they tend to be longer. As Ellen was saying earlier, the running shoes for flat feet, for a marathon, people will be a bit more descriptive in a chat box and more keyword in a search box. And so what that means is that you get the ability to show up because you can meet the intent more richly, more deeply for the user. A user looking for vegan leather versus a user looking for a specific type of thing that makes them feel special. I think this is a great opportunity for brands to really shine without being drowned in that maybe SEO game and an ad game that was maybe favoring bigger brands or bigger spenders in the search era. This with the AI era starts to open up some opportunities for sure.
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Ellen Dunn23:05
Yeah, for me...
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Mucha Kambati23:06
I think any of us... go ahead, go ahead.
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Ellen Dunn23:10
I was just going to say that any of us that use ChatGPT or Perplexity, you all of a sudden see these results. I get linked to these Reddit pages or these blog posts that I would have never probably arrived on in the classic SEO. And again, brands have such an opportunity to identify this new evolving mechanism. And that again, I don't want to steal the sort of move to a different topic but going back to discovery, I think a big part of discovery is now making sure that reputation management, making sure that you surface not only on your PDP, definitely on your PDP, but there's these new channels that have been coming up that I think I haven't thought as much about Reddit or YouTube kind of expert content until the last few months, but it's really changing the game and I think brands have an amazing opportunity to get surfaced and control their own fate through being first, like you said.
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Tomer Tagrin24:16
Yeah. And I also think to remind everyone, at least my opinion, there will be ads there. The ad game will begin someday, right? We saw that on any new consumer platform. And until the ads are going to arrive, because when ads are going to arrive we all know prices go up pretty quickly, brands have to take advantage of that. This is like the biggest, I don't know, I think since at least Yotpo started, it's the biggest shift we've seen. And again, even if 10%, 15% of e-commerce is going to move in the next three years to agentic commerce, that's massive. That means so much. And I actually think again the first movers here will have a lot to gain. This is why at least we are building, a lot of our roadmap is going towards exactly those areas. Also a lot on what you said about conversational on the PDP because if I start my buying journey through a conversation I would probably want to continue it and getting more detailed questions now on specific products and all of that. Something we are big believers in. We're starting to see some really interesting results. So it makes tons of sense. It's a great segue. We have a saying inside Yotpo that no user reads review number 1,270. But you know who does read it? The LLM, the agent. And therefore quality and authenticity, and we invested heavily to extract the attributes very accurately from the reviews. So if that specific product, we have a customer that had a specific, I think it was a pan or something that was two users or three users said it's great for the sausages. No one would never have seen that but now when you ask, actually the agent knows about it. Because when you think about PDPs, context really matters. Because I can ask Ellen, 'Ellen, this is a great necklace, where did you buy it?' You can share a little bit about the brand, the story, your connection. The agent doesn't know. And a lot of the PDP is about context like you mentioned. And we are big believers, of course biased, but big believers that from the reviews you can extract and create metadata that can give much more context. And actually the quality of the content now becomes much more important for users. Okay, I just want to see there's more than X amount of reviews, the average star rating is 4.7, and I read one or two reviews, great. An agent doesn't work that way, right? And so I'm just curious your point of view on in general authenticity, now that you talked a little bit about the fact that it needs to be accurate. So what's your thought? Because the AI, right, everything is fake, that's another problem. I don't know if we are actually talking or it's your avatar now talking to me and it's going to get worse. So what's your thought on authenticity, trust in general in the world of agentic commerce?
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Mucha Kambati27:22
Yeah, I want to be real. We are all excited and I've spent so much time on AI as well. We're talking so much here about AI. The thing with AI is it is new and as it is new we're discovering guardrails and learning things. It does create some sense of anxiety in terms of being authentic, making sure you're well represented. If you're listening to this, you're probably one of those who want to be prepared and some of that aspect of being prepared stems a little bit from a little bit of anxiety, too. Not everything has been solved. Hallucination has and will continue to be a thing that we have to take.
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Tomer Tagrin28:06
Can you explain for everyone what do you mean by that?
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Mucha Kambati28:07
So if users are asking an AI what your return policy is, the AI is more biased towards trying to answer your question. And if you provide an answer, it will most often use that answer. But if you don't provide an answer, it may try to invent an answer based on the fact that perhaps 30-day return windows are common. And such promises then become like made-up promises by the AI and the user might believe them. So the way that AI tackles it separate from merchants is provide sources and links. But what merchants can go do is make sure that there is adequate FAQs. Perhaps we talked about the Knowledge Base app. That's one source that you can have a lot of FAQs. You can have them directly on your storefront too. The Knowledge Base app certainly is an option, but you can have them on your storefront because what you're doing is you're pre-paring your storefront to be read by AI and giving it the information to answer questions. Now, you can take the horse to the water but can't make it drink. You can do what you can to prepare. The tool that we have is somewhat an imprecise tool. AI is going to sometimes hallucinate and we are still as an industry trying to work through the guardrails around this. So the suggestion of knowledge base, put stuff on your storefront, think about AI is certainly good, you should go follow, but it's not going to be the 100% guarantee unfortunately.
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Tomer Tagrin29:56
This is why by the way we try to help with generating as many reviews and have specific questions and specific prompts. And we actually have an AI assistant that helps users to write content exactly from the reason you mentioned. Because the merchant cannot think about everything themselves and we try to enrich.
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Ellen Dunn30:15
And we know this is not new behavior. Like a very savvy buyer who, especially if you're buying, like Mucha mentioned, the considered purchase, something big, something you're going to buy once every 10 years, you're not just going to look at the content on that store, right? You really do care about reviews because that's other people who are talking. Like I have dry skin and I want to buy this product, I don't really care about any other review except the ones that are from people who say I have dry skin and here's what it did for me. Then there's another body of evidence out there that the AI agents are good at summarizing, which is like Reddit and other sites like that. So it's like that triangulation. So yes, you have some control over trying to collect a lot of reviews and having good customer service and all those things. Because if a merchant, people have bad experience with customer service, that's going to show up on Reddit and in other sites like that. So you need to be aware of where people are talking about your brand and make sure that you know what's being said and that you can respond to it or you can address it. So it's like those three bodies of content: your own site and everything rich that you can include there, product reviews because they're so key to people making purchasing decisions, and then the other stuff that's out there where people really are habituated to go and look at those sources and trust those sources because there are so many voices who are chiming in there.
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Tomer Tagrin31:46
So great segue now to the next topic. So let's talk about brand strategies. You talked about now shifting on the storefront, you talked about outside of the storefront. I think besides maybe buying Reddit stocks that I think everyone here is now taking Reddit and Reddit is becoming more important. Any other ways from a strategy standpoint? So the Knowledge Base app is... We said outside of your storefront, we said about the importance of reviews. We said about conversational elements on your storefront. Anything else that you think from a strategy or tactic that you recommend brands thinking about?
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Mucha Kambati32:31
So I want to come back to one aspect which maybe starts to address some of this topic. So we left the last segment with maybe AI can hallucinate, we should be prepared, do the very best. A lot of the talk outside tends to be very worrisome sometimes about AI, but it does grow the pot, right? Like I think the ability for us now with AI to connect more users that have an intent to buy with products they want to buy is greater there. We've always seen that we've had our own shopping lists in our mind. If I had time, I would go buy this. I wish I had the right desk lamp. And we never find the time sometimes to go do this research. With AI, it unlocks this. And so we are starting to see with BFCM all of those numbers are indicative of the fact that products are being matched with greater conversion to users that have intent. And so I think that the ability to maybe think through who the users are that you try to serve and make sure that we have the ability to frame your brand really to embrace that allows you to stand out. When we talk about this vegan leather example, when people are choosing a particular style for their life, for what they want to wear, how they want to represent themselves, these are the things that usually people are asking friends, asking AI, looking at. And I think the ability to describe the shoes that you make or the bags that you make very specifically, that elicits the right reviews, that allows you to sort of shape the FAQs around the product that you have, makes that brand really stand out within your storefront and outside of your storefront for these kinds of conversational purchases.
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Tomer Tagrin34:30
Uber awesome. Uber awesome. Ellen, anything that comes to your mind?
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Ellen Dunn34:36
I mean just doubling down on the brand story thing. You had mentioned my necklace, right? I could totally tell you the artist who made this necklace and all of that and it probably all those details are not on her website but it is the reason that I continue to buy products from this person. And this is where Shopify is really wanting to represent DTC, direct to consumer, these merchants who are entrepreneurs are out there building a product they're really passionate about and that is such a unique thing that a lot of consumers these days care about who they're buying from and what the story is there. And so if you haven't thought about bringing that to life on your website or other ways like through your customer service and the touch points that you have with customers, this is a really good time to do that because I do feel like consumers are making different decisions why they want to buy something and sort of knowing the story, having some connection to that product or the person behind the product is really key. And I'm biased because I work at Shopify and I get to talk to a lot of these merchants, but it really makes a difference in how I think about any purchase decision. It's like understanding who the brand is and why they're passionate about making whatever it is they're making. And so I just can't overemphasize the brand story. I think it's such an interesting way to distinguish yourself in this market. And you're not gonna, buyers aren't seeing just a giant page of search results, right? They're seeing some selective results and that should resonate with them. And if there's some key points in there around why you made this particular color palette or whatever it is, then I think that really helps in converting those buyers.
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Mucha Kambati36:27
If I can tell a bit of, so we in Editions announced Knowledge Base as well as Storefront MCP. We didn't talk a lot about Storefront MCP but just a brief mention, it allows you to create the storefront conversational agent. There is a brand in India, so weddings in India, if you look it up, they're very colorful, they're multi-day events. And so there's this brand in India that built using the Storefront MCP, very sort of center of the screen, bottom of the screen as soon as you enter, you can imagine it's a wedding attire website. So it's very colorful already and they have this thing at the very bottom that welcomes you. So the thing that the merchant, the developer was telling us was a lot of people feel that personal touch. It's an emotional time. There's tons of color. There's tons of things to go and decide. And so if you're the groom's family, the bride's family, just having that personal touch through the Storefront MCP chat that they built on the site, yes, the website's beautiful, but that sort of added that human element. And when Ellen was talking about I can tell you the artist and the story and that made a big difference. They're seeing it in their users. So people are coming in. They feel like I'm talking to auntie somebody who is helping me plan what I should wear for the different days of my wedding versus it's just a store and I'm all left on my own and I've got so many stresses anyway and now I got to stress about what I got to go buy.
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Tomer Tagrin38:13
Very interesting. No, that's actually a great example. And I also have to be in my first Indian wedding. I heard so much about it. I have to go one time. I really have to go.
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Mucha Kambati38:27
Go hungry. You will eat a lot.
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Tomer Tagrin38:29
Yes. Yes. Yes. I heard. So I think we covered so many different topics here and so much actually very useful information. So I don't know if again just to wrap it up if you have any other small tips or anything to think about how to take my brand. It can be even if I'm an entrepreneur. So we talked a lot about telling your story and how you're unique but even if I'm let's say an executive in a large brand what should I do to really carry my brand forward in an agentic-first world? I don't know if you have anything because we really covered so many different points, but if you do, now's a great time.
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Ellen Dunn39:12
Yeah, just to follow up on the storefront agent example that Mucha just gave. I think having a storefront agent is becoming, even though yes, a lot of discovery and shopping is happening on these platforms that are not your storefront. Buyers are expecting, like you said earlier Tomer, to continue the conversation when they get to your storefront, ask a few last questions. And I just want to make it clearer how easy it is to really train your own storefront agent to speak the way you want your brand to be spoken about and use the vocabulary and the lexicon. It's very similar to if you have a retail store, you hire a new sales assistant, you very much train them on how to talk about the products, how to talk about sizing, how to talk about whatever that's very specific to your products and your brands. And you can do the same with a storefront agent with AI that is on your own store where you really can control the voice and the tone and the types of words it uses and all of that. And again that really brings it to life and helps buyers connect with the brand and the story. And so it's a fun thing to play around with. Even if you just...
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Mucha Kambati40:20
Storefront, yeah, it's very easy to set up and then you can just start training it against what you care about, how you want things to be spoken about.
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Ellen Dunn40:30
You know, and it's just a fun thing to do. And while we can't completely translate that to how your brand gets spoken about in Perplexity or ChatGPT, you can still with the Knowledge Base and with what you have in your product detail page, you can create ground truth that has some of that in it that then the LLM will use and extract and hopefully that brand essence will come through a little bit. So it's not to say you have no control over what's happening when the LLM is talking about your products. You can influence that. And it's definitely worth setting something up on your store, playing around with it, seeing how it works, seeing how it feels, seeing what the connection, like the emotional connection can be because it's quite powerful.
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Mucha Kambati41:18
I'll say three things. One, hopefully you're already on Shopify. If not, consider being on Shopify. We have our merchants show up on Perplexity. We talked about some agentic commerce capabilities recently that Shopify announced as well. So we are recognizing users are spending a lot of time on chat apps like Perplexity and others and we're making sure our catalog for our merchants shows up there. Number two, as Ellen mentioned, consider a storefront agent. It's really easy to set up Storefront MCP and you can customize a lot. And number three, we talked about the Knowledge Base app as your opportunity to really view all the FAQs associated with your store that AI will be able to see as well as a lot of usage data on how AI is already answering or not answering questions about your store. So you can start to get more prepared.
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Tomer Tagrin42:23
I could maybe add two to that list. I would say treat AI LLM search like SEO in the early days. So it's trial and error. There's no Google Analytics. Go see exactly the clicks. You have to try. A great way to do that is actually to have conversation on your website and see what questions people are asking to make sure that you're answering those questions. Another great way to do that is to look at your reviews and look what people are talking about in all the different nuances of it. And the second recommendation which is related is really to focus on sharper positioning again of the brand, of the things that matter to your customers that you want to represent your products. I think one of the biggest differences is that agents can be so much more scientific, right? So much more specific in researching so many more websites. And so making sure that you really touch on all those criteria and all those different specs in your products and who they're good for and not just the majority, the main PDP, all that long tail of information for different types of users is just a major, major opportunity.
Yeah. So for me I actually also wanted to say use Shopify. I really think it's a leading platform. Use Yotpo. I really think it's a leading platform. Definitely I want to say stay curious, go read more. Again this is why I did my newsletter on Commerce GPT. There are tons of places, but you have to experiment because again, this is a reset of the playground and you want to be a player in the playground. And that's it. Thank you if you stayed with us. Thank you for staying with us. It's all about helping you move to an AI-first world. And thank you so much for the Shopify team. You've been great and I think this has been tons of value for merchants. And thank you so much everyone.
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Mucha Kambati44:22
Bye-bye.
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Ellen Dunn44:23
Thank you. That was fun.