Shopify Leans Into AI Commerce as Profit Pressure Mounts

The eCommerce landscape is changing, and infrastructure platforms like Shopify are at the center of this shift.

Shopify’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings report Wednesday (Feb. 11) delivered a complex mix of strong top-line growth, modest earnings disappointment and a compelling forward outlook that sent the stock on a volatile ride.

“2025 was Shopify at full throttle, driving compounding growth, while laying the rails for the new era of AI commerce. 2026 will be the year of the builders, and we’ll be powering them from first sale to full scale,” Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, told investors on Wednesday’s earnings call.

The company reported fourth-quarter revenue of $3.67 billion, up 31% year over year, capping a fiscal year in which revenue reached $11.6 billion, also up 30%.

Shopify now commands more than 14% of U.S. eCommerce market share, based on internal estimates and Census data cited in its release. For a company once defined primarily by its role in empowering independent merchants to get online, these results signal a maturation into a diversified commerce infrastructure provider.

The company’s revenue mix underscores the depth of its platform strategy. In 2025, subscription solutions generated $2.75 billion, while merchant solutions spanning payments, capital and other transaction-linked services accounted for $8.8 billion.

Merchant solutions remain the larger and faster-growing segment, reflecting Shopify’s evolution from SaaS provider to financial and operational backbone for its merchants. Still, executives stressed that Shopify is building optionality into its growth engine. Payments, capital, POS, B2B and international expansion each represent incremental vectors layered atop its core subscription base.

See also: Shopify Brings Merchant Catalogs to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot

Shopify’s Bet on AI Commerce

Shopify is increasingly positioning itself at the center of what it calls “AI commerce.” CFO Jeff Hoffmeister highlighted investments in Catalog, Sidekick and the Universal Commerce Protocol as examples of forward-looking initiatives.

The premise is straightforward: as artificial intelligence reshapes how buyers discover and purchase products, merchants will require infrastructure that can translate product data, inventory and payment capabilities into machine-readable, interoperable formats. Shopify’s Catalog initiative appears designed to standardize and enrich product data across its ecosystem. Sidekick, its AI assistant, signals a push toward embedded intelligence for merchants — automation not just in customer-facing interactions but in operations, marketing and decision-making.

Shopify’s sheer scale, $378 billion in annual GMV, affords it data advantages that could reinforce its AI initiatives. Standardized product catalogs and payment data form the substrate on which machine learning systems thrive, particularly with the rice of Universal Commerce Protocol-driven agentic AI commerce systems.

Shopify’s primary mechanism for bringing AI technology to its merchants is the Agentic Storefronts feature, which allows merchant customers to purchase products directly within AI platforms like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini.

The shift toward AI-directed discovery aligns with patterns PYMNTS has been tracking. Shoppers increasingly begin their product searches with an AI prompt instead of a traditional query. Artificial intelligence tools now perform comparison work, generate shortlists and explain trade-offs, compressing steps that once required multiple searches and shifting early decision-making to conversational systems.

See also: Shopify Merchants to Pay 4% Fee on ChatGPT Checkout Sales

The question for 2026 is whether Shopify can translate its AI investments into measurable merchant productivity gains. If it succeeds, its revenue mix may tilt even further toward merchant solutions, reinforcing a flywheel in which higher GMV drives more payments volume, which in turn funds more product innovation.

At the same time, the company’s ongoing transition from being primarily a small business enabler to a full-service commerce backbone is challenging. Enterprises and larger brands demand robust data analytics, customization and integration flexibility. Meeting those demands while maintaining attractiveness to small and medium enterprises requires continued investment and operational agility.

B2B remains a “very small portion” of total GMV, according to its financial release, suggesting further headroom. Likewise, offline revenue growth of 27% indicates that point-of-sale and omnichannel capabilities are becoming more material.

Still, payments growth of 37% and Shop Pay GMV growth of 62% underscore Shopify’s ambition to own more of the transaction stack. That ambition may inevitably put it in closer competition with FinTech providers, marketplaces and even traditional financial institutions, as well as other tech firms building AI-driven commerce and payment experiences.