Despite tariff fears, Shopify’s Q2 results show resilience — with growth driven by AI tools, cross-border payments, and stable demand.
Shopify posted a strong Q2 — but the real story is what didn’t happen.
Shopify Q2: strong growth, no tariff drag
Shopify’s Q2 earnings showed solid growth across the board:
- Revenue hit $2.68 billion, up 31% year-over-year
- Gross merchandise volume (GMV) rose to $87.8 billion, up 29%
- Net income jumped to $906 million, or 69 cents per share
Investors were expecting a potential hit from new U.S. tariffs. That didn’t happen. CFO Jeff Hoffmeister confirmed that Shopify saw “no drops in U.S. demand” — inbound, outbound, or local — and that “the impact [of tariffs] did not materialize.”
Merchants did raise prices in response to cost pressure, but Shopify reported no major change in shopper behavior. In other words, demand held steady even with higher prices and headline risk.
AI, payments, and international: all trending up
Shopify’s Q2 wasn’t just about surviving tariffs. The company is still scaling key infrastructure:
- Shop Pay GMV grew 65% to $27 billion
- Global payments penetration hit 64%, up from 61% last year
- Payments tools expanded into 16 new countries
Shopify also added USDC stablecoin support for international transactions via a Coinbase partnership — early days, but notable given growing interest in alternative rails.
And in AI, the company rolled out new tools aimed at embedding commerce into chatbots and apps:
- Catalog: lets AI agents search and display real-time merchant inventory
- Universal Cart: cross-store checkout across conversations and sessions
- Checkout Kit: embeds Shopify’s checkout directly inside AI tools
CEO Tobi Lütke called this shift “agentic commerce,” betting that chat-based shopping is going to pull share from search-driven discovery. Commerce.com (formerly BigCommerce) is making a similar bet — rebranding to reflect its AI-first strategy and rolling out Feedonomics-powered tools that push structured product data directly into AI engines like Perplexity and Google Gemini.
What matters for operators
- Tariffs are not yet biting — even with the removal of the de minimis exemption for Chinese imports, Shopify’s GMV hasn’t shifted.
- AI integration is picking up — Shopify’s new dev tools make it easier to plug commerce into AI environments. This isn’t just future-gazing. It’s a real path to customer acquisition beyond SEO and paid ads.
- Payments and cross-border are still levers — and Shopify’s pushing both hard, particularly in Europe and high-volume segments.
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