Shopify says it may offer voice-enabled shopping through home devices
Shopify Inc. is eyeing voice-enabled e-commerce and says it will likely join in on the trend if voiceactivated devices continue to rapidly pick up users.
Voice-enabled artificial intelligence, which allows shoppers to make a purchase by talking to an internet-connected home device, is being hailed by some as the future of retailing.
Currently, the big players in the field are digital voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Now, which already allow shoppers to make payments, arrange shipping or products, build shopping lists and track orders.
“If that sort of vocal user interfaces or voice-enabled commerce is meaningful to your audience, I think that absolutely that’s a place where Shopify will be,” senior vice-president of data and analytics David Lennie said Thursday on a conference call.
The Ottawa-based online store platform hinted at the potential move after it reported a betterthan-expected fourth quarter results on Thursday.
The company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, said it lost $3 million in the last three months of 2017, narrowing a loss of $8.9 million a year earlier.
Revenue jumped 71 per cent to $222.8 million.
The revenue surge comes as Shopify continues to dabble in rapidly-evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality.
The company, which runs its Shopify Plus business for larger e-commerce customers out of offices in Waterloo, currently uses such technologies to allow shoppers to customize products on their phone or computer and then visualize them in their own home with a headset, and to offer in-game purchases of physical products.
It’s earned praise from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who got a peek at Shopify’s AR and VR offerings on a recent visit to the company’s Toronto office.
“We’ve actually been very early to the AR and VR space and so we have teams that are always working on sort of the cuttingedge of technology and thinking about how could we deploy (voice-enabled e-commerce) in a way that will transform commerce,” said Lennie.