Shopify stock jumped following market open after it beat revenue expectations and forecasted continued growth in its second-quarter earnings, fuelled in part by growing demand for AI-driven shopping.
On Wednesday, the Ottawa-founded e-commerce giant released its latest financial results, which show revenue growing by 34 percent year-over-year to reach $3.58 billion USD ($5 billion CAD), beating Wall Street estimates. At the same time, Shopify saw its gross profit, free cash flow, and gross merchandise volume (GMV)—a measure of its online merchants’ transactions—grow by more than 30 percent compared to Q2 2025.
“Shopify is probably the most AI-pilled company in the world.”
Harley Finkelstein, Shopify
Shopify’s net income came in at $1.5 billion USD, compared to $906 million USD during the same period last year. Gross profit hit $1.7 billion USD, compared to $1.3 billion USD last year. The jump in earnings comes after a $581-million USD net loss last quarter, mainly due to its equity investments.
The company’s stock jumped by more than 17 percent on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) as markets reacted positively to the growth forecast. Thanos Moschopoulos, an equity analyst at BMO Capital Markets, told BetaKit in an email that the “bear thesis” ahead of earnings predicted that Shopify’s revenue growth would decelerate while rising AI costs would impact its margins. “With their strong results and guidance, they firmly disproved both concerns,” he wrote.
Shopify has embraced AI, both mandating its use internally and toward agentic commerce externally, with chatbot interfaces working as “storefronts” where customers can make purchases. Last quarter, Shopify said that AI-driven traffic to its online stores had grown significantly year-over-year, while orders from AI-powered searches increased nearly 13 times.
“Shopify is probably the most AI-pilled company in the world,” president Harley Finkelstein said on the company’s earnings call today, crediting the direction to CEO Tobi Lütke.
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While merchants saw their gross transaction volume hit $115 billion USD, compared to $87.8 billion USD in the same period last year, Finkelstein noted on the earnings call that the volume of agentic commerce is still small compared to the company’s total GMV. But the “growth trends are impressive,” he added. In particular, he said AI products have disproportionately benefited some of Shopify’s more niche brands: three-quarters of AI-attributed orders came from outside Shopify’s 100 most popular categories this quarter.
The company also shipped a number of AI product updates for its merchants this quarter, including an AI-powered marketing “autopilot,” improved order fulfillment workflow, and integration of the Sidekick AI assistant into more third-party apps. In addition, Shopify added options for purchase pickups and returns for brick-and-mortar stores. Finkelstein noted that large, complex retailers such as Canadian retailer Holt Renfrew make up Shopify’s “fastest-growing segment.”
Board support following recent public scrutiny
The earnings beat comes shortly after online statements from some Shopify board members have invited public scrutiny. Lütke drew broad media coverage when he commented online in support of restrictions to pensioners’ right to vote and giving extra votes to people who pay more income tax. Separately, board member and 37signals co-owner David Heinemeier Hansson published a blog post on July 21 that drew a parallel between shooting wolves to protect sheep and deporting Romani people who live in public spaces in Denmark, writing that such actions follow the “basic logic of self-preservation.”
The comments appear to fall outside Shopify’s Code of Conduct, which covers all board members and staff, and says to “treat people with respect” and not to act “in ways that might embarrass Shopify.” Shopify did not respond to BetaKit’s request for comment on whether Lütke and Heinemeier Hansson’s statements contradict those guidelines. In a 2025 analysis by The Globe & Mail of Canada’s corporate boards based on governance practices, Shopify ranked third to last.
In response to online criticism about Lütke’s comments, Heinemeier Hansson and fellow board member and Rostra founder Lulu Cheng Meservey posted in support of Lütke. BetaKit has reached out to all Shopify board members for additional comment; Heinemeier Hansson didn’t respond to BetaKit’s emailed questions about his blog post, Lütke’s comments, or Shopify’s code of conduct, but referenced the outreach publicly on X Tuesday, saying “you can fuck right off.”
The public scrutiny does not seem to have affected Shopify’s market standing. Shopify’s share price surged by roughly 17 percent on the TSX on the strong earnings outlook, and was trading at around $203 CAD per share by 1 p.m. EDT. This helped Shopify regain some of the ground it lost this year alongside other tech stocks, amid investor fears about AI disrupting traditional software businesses.
Shopify ended the quarter with $1.66 billion USD in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet. Next quarter, the company is forecasting a revenue growth rate in the low thirty percent range, gross profit in the mid-to-high twenties, and continued free cash flow margin growth in the high teens to low twenties.
Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Feature image courtesy Shopify.