Shopify shares surged more than 17 percent on Wednesday after the Ottawa-based e-commerce platform posted a second quarter that answered the market’s two main questions, whether growth can stay above 30 percent and whether artificial intelligence is a real revenue driver or a marketing layer.
The numbers are clean
Gross merchandise value rose 32 percent to nearly US$116 billion in the quarter ended June 30, the fifth consecutive quarter of GMV growth above 30 percent. Revenue climbed 34 percent to US$3.58 billion, with merchant solutions, the higher-margin slice, up 37 percent year over year to US$2.78 billion. Free cash flow margin increased 18 percent to US$654 million. Net income jumped 66 percent to US$1.5 billion from US$906 million in the same quarter last year. Jefferies analyst Samad Samana called it a clean sweep and said the stock is being rewarded for addressing key investor worries.
AI shows up in the order flow
AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year over year in the quarter, president Harley Finkelstein said on the earnings call. Daily active merchants using the Sidekick assistant rose 3.6 times. Agentic AI traffic orders grew threefold. Finkelstein described AI as baked into every decision, experiment and merchant interaction. The company’s OpenAI partnership for ChatGPT Instant Checkout, the Google-co-developed Universal Commerce Protocol launched in January, and a merchant-facing AI suite are now feeding the top line. National Bank Financial’s Doug Taylor wrote that the quarter cements Shopify on the positive side of the AI winner-and-loser discussion.
Growth levers beyond the hype
International GMV grew 37 percent. The platform added enterprise clients including Holt Renfrew, Guess and Avon. Third-party research cited by Taylor shows Shopify captured nearly half of incremental US e-commerce dollars since early 2025, with similar trends emerging in Europe at an earlier stage. Finkelstein noted the company has captured less than 1 percent of global retail sales and remains underpenetrated internationally.
The productivity trade-off
Internal AI adoption has lifted engineering productivity by at least 20 percent while keeping AI costs in check, the company said. At the same time, job postings fell 36 percent year over year to 71 open roles in the quarter, the lowest quarterly figure in over five years, according to RBC Dominion Securities analyst Paul Treiber. Chief executive Tobi Lütke told staff last year they would need to prove why jobs cannot be done by AI bots. The workforce contraction is the quiet counterpart to the revenue beat.