Shopify is in a good place. In fact, we could say it is in a great place, driven by a combination of technological adoption, business diversification, and steadily improving profitability.
The platform closed the second quarter with a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of more than $115 billion, up 32% from a year ago, while revenue rose 34% to $3.583 billion. The company attributes part of this momentum to the rapid adoption of tools powered by artificial intelligence and expects to maintain a similar growth rate in the coming quarter.
“It was a monster quarter: we grew by more than 30% in GMV, revenue, gross profit, and free cash flow. AI is expanding what our merchants can do,” said Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify
Shopify explains that much of this acceleration is due to the ongoing integration of AI-based solutions, which is allowing stores to optimize their catalogs, personalize the customer experience, and automate operational tasks much more easily. Shopify argues that AI no longer only helps create stores or generate content, but is in fact beginning to become a new sales channel. During the quarter, it introduced tools to identify purchases made through assistants such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or Google AI Mode, reinforcing its commitment to agentic commerce.
This commitment to these tools is also beginning to show up in adoption: the number of daily active users of Sidekick (an artificial intelligence assistant natively integrated into the dashboard) has increased 3.6x over the past year.
Since its launch at the end of 2023, Shopify has promoted the use of Sidekick, which it considers its flagship for applying artificial intelligence to the building and management of online stores. Sidekick allows entrepreneurs to interact with it in natural language, receiving personalized recommendations, analytics, SEO optimizations, and automations that help them make more informed decisions. In fact, more than 36,000 custom applications have been built with this tool, tripling the figure from the previous quarter.
Shopify’s commitment to agentic commerce is already beginning to show up in the numbers. According to the company’s internal data, traffic from AI-powered searches to merchant stores has tripled over the past year, as have orders originating from these environments.
To capitalize on this trend, Shopify is building infrastructure designed specifically for agent-driven shopping. Its Shopify Catalog tool, a structured product database that automatically syncs inventory with artificial intelligence assistants and sales channels, already structures more than 1 billion products with information on pricing, variants, availability, and delivery, allowing AI assistants to find and recommend items more accurately.
According to the company, searches conducted through AI convert at twice the rate when assistants can access this structured information, rather than having to interpret the data by scraping web pages. The better organized and standardized a merchant’s data is (price, availability, variants, or delivery times), the easier it is for an agent to recommend the right product and complete the purchase.
Another especially striking figure is that 75% of AI-attributed orders come from categories outside the top 100 most popular. This suggests that assistants are gaining ground as a discovery tool for niche brands and products.
Another pillar of Shopify’s growth continues to be Shopify Payments, its integrated payments solution. During the second quarter, gross volume processed through this service reached $78 billion, representing 68% of the platform’s total GMV: in other words, Shopify Payments now accounts for more than two-thirds of the commercial volume it manages. It seems clear that more and more merchants are choosing this solution, reinforcing Shopify’s strategy of offering an increasingly comprehensive infrastructure that goes beyond the creation and management of online stores
Looking ahead to the next quarter, management’s forecasts remain optimistic, anticipating that Shopify’s revenue growth will once again come in above 30%.
Image: ChatGPT
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