Shopify dropped its second-quarter numbers this week, and they say something bigger than one company is growing fast: AI shopping has stopped being an experiment and started showing up in the revenue line. Revenue climbed 34% year over year to $3.6 billion, merchandise volume rose 32% to $116 billion, and free cash flow came in at $654 million — an 18% margin — for the quarter ended June 30, per Retail TouchPoints' coverage of the earnings call.
"This was a monster quarter," president Harley Finkelstein said, and the numbers back the bravado — GMV, revenue, gross profit and free cash flow all grew more than 30%.
The AI numbers everyone's quoting
Start with the stat that's getting the attention: AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores each tripled year over year. New buyers coming in through AI channels convert at nearly double the rate of other channels, and half of AI-referred sessions land straight on a product page — 2.5 times what traditional search manages.
But the distribution is the really interesting bit. A full 75% of AI-attributed purchases came from outside Shopify's top 100 product categories. AI search turns out to be weirdly good at surfacing niche stuff — Finkelstein's examples included a screen-less phone for kids, reef-safe sunscreen and a harness built specifically for French bulldogs. Products a keyword search would bury, an AI assistant recommends.
That skew matters because niche sellers are Shopify's bread and butter: small businesses making specialized things. And traditional search isn't dying, either — sessions are up 1.3x over two years and still make up about a third of storefront visits. AI is a new discovery channel stacked on top, not a replacement.
Sidekick, and the "AI-pilled" thing
Inside the platform, Shopify's assistant Sidekick handled nearly 34 million merchant conversations in the quarter. Daily active merchants using it grew 3.6x year over year, merchants built more than 36,000 custom apps with it (triple Q1), and Sidekick-guided onboarding got 8% more new merchants to five orders within their first 15 days.
Finkelstein leaned all the way in, quoting AI model developers who call Shopify "probably the most AI-pilled company in the world" — credit he passed to CEO Tobi Lütke for starting early. The plumbing matters here: Shopify's Catalog API lets AI agents read product data, build carts and finish checkout across millions of merchants, and the company co-developed Google's Universal Commerce Protocol at the start of 2026. Dozens of retailers and platforms have since picked it up.
Big brands keep showing up
The quarter brought a parade of enterprise names: Guess, Aritzia, Avon, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Claire's, Burton, Fred Segal and Suitsupply all chose or went live on Shopify, and Balmain moved its whole site over in weeks. Finkelstein's explanation: brands are under internal pressure to have an agentic commerce strategy, and moving to Shopify is a shortcut to having one.
Retention supports the pitch — merchants past $1 million in annual volume stick around at a 92% rate, and 97% at $10 million.
What's ahead
Q3 guidance calls for revenue growth in the low thirties percent, with operating costs easing to 33–34% of revenue. CFO Jeff Hoffmeister noted Shopify now holds over 14% of US ecommerce, and that its merchants have captured nearly half of all incremental US ecommerce dollars since the start of 2025, per eMarketer.
His closing frame was the whole quarter in one line: in an agentic era, any ecommerce acceleration — especially dollars flowing to the long tail — is upside. Right now, the long tail is exactly where the AI money is going.
Image: Kindel Media, via Pexels
