... the software sector here at Citi. Welcome to day one of the tech conference. We're happy to have Shopify's CFO, Jeff Hoffmeister. Jeff, I think it's been about three years since you joined the company, and appreciate you making the appearance here. I thought it'd be great, you know, three years ago I think shortly after the prior Shopify CFO presented, they announced that you were joining, and so-
That sounds ominous.
Yeah. Hopefully no surprising news this time.
No, no.
It'd be great if you could just start us off, walk us through what were your priorities when you joined Shopify? How would you sort of measure how the company's doing against those goals? And how are you thinking about the years ahead?
Yeah, no, I obviously, Shopify is an amazing company. It had a lot of success before I joined. And I had known in my prior life, I'd worked with Shopify, with Tobi and the team, on taking them public.
Yeah.
I'd had a long-standing relationship with Tobi, with Harley, with a bunch of others. It's obviously a business which has done very well to you over time. To your specific question, for me joining, it was coincided with us thinking about, and me trying to do my own part, along with the whole team, sort of how we think about free cash flow, how we think about free cash flow margins. Obviously, there were some changes we made to some elements of the business, just in terms of mix shift. You know, specifically from a financial perspective, we've changed a little bit how we talk about guidance, and again, some of the just kind of the way we talk about the free cash flow profile of the business. But this was me joining Tobi and team and, trying to accomplish some good things. And obviously, the business over these past few years has done really well.
Yeah.
You can tell by the numbers.
Sure. And I think, you know, the efficiency that, to your point, it was, you know, underway maybe a little bit before you joined. But, you know, exiting logistics business, really doubling down on, you know, efficiency, every dollar kind of being scrutinized. Talk to us a little bit about that in more detail. Because obviously, the growth, I think, gets a lot of attention-
Yeah.
But what is kind of that underlying philosophy that underpins this great, you know, free cash flow and margin expansion story?
Yeah, well, we've, as we've talked about on some of the calls, as you know, we've tried to be really thoughtful in terms of... And we've talked about now for three or four calls in terms of getting to a free cash flow margin profile that we think is appropriate for this business, and not looking to maximize more for free cash flow margin, but getting to a level which we think demonstrates the health of the business and allows us to continue to invest in the future. And as we think about, and there's various timelines in terms of how you think about the investment thresholds for all of those, right?
As we think about a product that, hey, maybe we want to introduce a new product, and it's gonna take us a year or two to develop, a little bit like what we announced with, I'm sure we'll talk about this some more later, catalog on the AI side. But set something in motion that's gonna be a multi-year effort, and obviously will hopefully reap, rewards for years and years to come. And you see that with a lot of the... You know, it was roughly two and a half years ago that we introduced a lot of the things that fall within other merchant solutions.
So you think about, like, tax, some of the things we're doing with installments, B2B, a real push on point-of-sale, a real push on international, a lot of those things, you know, they just get momentum in the first year or two and then really take off. And so we have various timelines in terms of how we think about those investments on the product side, and we also have talked a lot about the timelines or thresholds that we have on the marketing side, for example, right? We've talked a bunch about some of the paybacks and how we think about that. And again, international is a piece where we're continuing to make a lot of investments, and you've seen that in some of the product announcements in terms of the role, some of the roles of capital and payments and some things like that.
Right. Right. And we'll dive into the products in a minute, but I think, you know, would be remiss not to start off on the strength that you've seen on the top line. I mean, GMV and revenue growth of 31%, last quarter, pretty remarkable, considering everything going on. So what, maybe just what are some of your observations around the broader e-commerce and consumer environment? Obviously a lot of changes as it relates to the de minimis,
Yeah
... exemptions and everything, and how are you kind of seeing that, those trends continue here into September?
Yeah. There's a lot in there.
Yeah.
I'll start maybe in terms of to your point about the top line. As I mentioned, it was a month or so ago, since the-
Yeah
... the last call. I talked about the strength we saw in Europe, which we've had for several quarters right now. The last couple of years, the GMV growth rate, the revenue growth rate in Europe has been very strong. It had an even, an additional uptick last quarter.
Mm-hmm.
And I also mentioned the same thing in the US. The US has been very strong for us for a while, and Q2 was an even better performance, and it was also performance across all the different merchant sizes. As we think internally, we look at various stratification levels on size of merchants in terms of what their annual sales are, and you look across those various sizes, the merchants were strong across the board. To your point, we recognize that's in contrast to some of the other things that we're seeing out there. You talked about de minimis. I can talk about some of the tariff pieces, aside. But we've really, I think, testament again, and when I talked about Europe, I talked about the 4x growth rate that we're seeing in a lot of countries, even more than that, vis-a-vis the e-commerce growth rates in those countries.
Mm-hmm.
So I think what we're doing is everything we can to help be an accelerant behind the merchants. Not taking credit for their success, just helping them take advantage of the tools that we can give them, so that they can be even more effective in getting more consumers and advancing their business. And I think we're doing a good job with that in Europe. I think we've got the product market fit in a good spot in Europe, and I think we've been very thoughtful in terms of how we had some of the marketing spend support that.
Right.
So, like the investor day a couple of years ago, and also in Harley's prepared remarks, we talked about how frequently almost every quarter where our merchants outperform the overall e-commerce growth rate in terms of quarterly cohorts. So I think we're doing some things to help the merchants be more successful.
Yeah. And I almost feel like that gap maybe has even accelerated since the investor day.
Yeah.
Which has been great to see. And I guess just any, you know, observations in the last month on kind of the macro environment. You know, since you last reported, it's pretty broadly consistent with the, what you-
Yeah. I'm gonna have to stay to the comments from the last call.
Sure.
'Cause I don't wanna be giving kind of, quote, inter quarter guidance. I would go back to what I said on the call, which, now, as we talked about some of the things, when I talk about to your point, I can talk about tariff piece. I can talk including de minimis and some of the things we've seen on the buyer side. I went into it, the call a month ago, I went into less detail on some of the stuff on the buyer side. The call before that, I mentioned that one of the wonderful things that our merchants are enjoying is that on the margin, their consumer base tends to be a little bit higher in terms of wealth, income, and that's helped, I think, in some regards for them.
In terms of tariffs and the impact, we talked about de minimis, we talked about price levels, we talked about inventory. All those comments are ones I try to give pretty good detail on. And we spend the majority of the time, I spend the majority of my time focusing on the internal data. And as you know, you can go out there in the press, and you can hear one story, and then an hour later, you can hear something completely different. Some of it is very retailer specific in terms of what we're seeing. But for us, in terms of the impact of tariffs, we're trying to be very specific on what we're seeing with our own data.
Mm-hmm.
That's what I tried to cover on the last call.
Right.
And so again, de minimis, we've kind of alluded to it twice. I like, on the de minimis piece, on the call back in May, we were basically a month into what had been announced with China.
Mm-hmm.
And we talked about that being roughly 1% of our GMV. And then, on the last call a month ago, I talked about roughly 5% of our GMV was subject to de minimis, and then how that was allocated more broadly. And so as we look at those various trade routes, obviously, we monitor that daily in terms of how we think about this stuff. And as I mentioned on last call, we have not seen any impact on China.
Right. Right, and that also includes sort of the supply chain and
Yeah
... logistics, distribution-
Yeah
-part, too.
Yeah. I obviously, as you alluded to Deliverr before. Post Deliverr, our vantage point on fulfillment is a little bit different than it was before, but obviously we still have the partnership with Flexport. We have partnerships with a few others in the 3PL space. And of course, as we monitor tariffs, we kind of look through the supply chain as best we can to see that.
Right. Right. Is there a scenario where you see these tariffs actually as a positive for the business in a sense? I think last call you did allude to some higher than normal price increases or inflationary dynamics within your merchant base. Obviously, you know, business is a-
Yeah
take rate business in parts of this. Is it... Do you think that's a possibility?
Well, I guess it feels a little odd to be cheering for tariffs. I'm certainly not doing that. What I would say is that. But two things. Number one, we have seen some price increases. You're absolutely right. I alluded to that on the last call, that of all the different things when we looked at inventory levels and trade routes and de minimis and all this stuff, we had. That was the one spot where we had seen some movement in prices. And it's, we look at it on a merchant-by-merchant basis. And logically, there's just some segments. Maybe you're in an industry which is a little bit more competitive, it's probably a little bit harder to raise prices.
Maybe if you're a different competitive position, you probably have a little bit more ability to do that and/or if your supply chain is linked to spots where maybe you've seen a little bit more tariff impact, then that's a logical spot, or maybe you would need to do a little bit more. I do think, just as I take tariffs and kind of elevate it to kind of dynamic macro uncertainty movement change, I think that works really well to our platform. Only because the quality of the engineering team, the product development team we have, is we can make enhancements to the platform very quickly, and we've done that over the last few months.
We've made a lot of changes, tweaks, things here or there, even if there are a bunch of small ones that, in the aggregate, add up to some meaningful change, to help merchants deal with changes in cross-border trade, changes in pricing, changes in inventory, all those things, and so what that does is essentially helps differentiate our platform versus anything else out there, and that's not something where I expect some sort of immediate impact or a bunch of merchants say, "Oh, I have to shift to Shopify because of all this," but I do think it is a continuation of the long-term trend and another demonstration of a product first, building amazing product, and then that will get more merchants to realize how impactful to their business it can be if they use that platform. I think that's one of the things we've been able to do over the past few months.
Right. On that thread, I mean, the international growth was really impressive last quarter, accelerating from Q1, which was already a pretty high number. What would you attribute that to? Is that, you know, kind of driven by some features and stuff you put in the product, or is this kind of more go to market? Maybe a little bit of both, but would love to just hear-
Yeah
how you're thinking about that.
Yeah, it's a little bit of both. I think we've. It's really a couple of years ago that we started to make a more concerted push internationally. Obviously, we had meaningful international revenues if you go back several years. But yeah, and we disclose on a quarterly basis kind of what is percentage of revenues. Europe is a meaningful portion of our business, depending on how you look at it, on GMV or revenue or merchant count. I mean, I think of it as roughly a quarter of our business, and it's been growing. I mean, it's all in the disclosures. And part of it is product market fit, part of it is introducing more products. As I mentioned, we've introduced capital.
We've had it in four countries for a long time, and recently introduced it in Germany a couple of months ago. We introduced it in the Netherlands a little bit over a month ago. We obviously introduced payments in 15 new countries in Europe. That's something we talked about two calls ago. And I think we've been very good and thoughtful in terms of how we have marketing support some of that.
Mm-hmm.
and I think the brand of Shopify throughout Europe is very strong. I just, the brand recognition, the power of the brand is good. So all those... And as you know, like, when you start to get above, I don't know if I'll say tipping point, but you start to get to a point where you are the brand that people think just intuitively, like, "That's the platform I should be building on.
Right.
And so you get to a point where you've had enough successes, and it just kind of brings more success, and I think that's part of what we're seeing.
Right. And I know you don't specifically guide to GMV for the year, but obviously there's some range of GMV within the quarterly guidance. But just the building blocks of that, how are you thinking about that, kind of between new customer acquisition versus, you know, same-store sales effectively?
Yeah.
Is that any different than kind of the most recent quarters?
No, it's not really that different. I talked about one tweak on the last call, which I'll come to in a second, but I've been most vocal about this in Europe and talking about this in the last few calls, where I've talked about it as roughly half and half. Half new merchant acquisition, half same-store sales growth in terms of helping existing merchants, and for us, that's a merchant that's been on the platform for over a year when I talk about same-store sales growth, and even though I've been most explicit about it in Europe, I've also kind of hinted at, made references to, on some of the Q&A following the calls, 'cause it also is applied to North America. It's been roughly half and half.
This past quarter, the one that we announced a month ago, only because of some of the things we're doing on the paid trials and some of the changes on subscription solutions, that had a slight, slight tweak to it. But if you look over a multi-quarter period, it's been pretty consistent in terms of evenly split. And so that, to me, says, one, as we alluded to before, we're helping merchants be successful. And we've talked about that in a few different ways. If you go back to the Investor Day, which now a couple of years ago, I talked about, and I had a chart which looks at the various cohorts in terms of how merchants on the quarterly cohorts on our platform have essentially outpaced e-commerce more broadly. Harley gave an updated statistic on the last call about that. So we're one, helping existing merchants be more successful, and two, I think it also speaks to the merchant acquisition engine working.
Right. Right. And on the new customer front, obviously, you know, we've seen a lot of strength in some of the company-specific stuff you've done on the trial motion. One topic we often hear, kind of in the SMB space, is just the topic of search engine optimization, the impact that's having on, you know, some of the marketing automation vendors. But I guess specifically for Shopify, how do you think about your own lead gen as it relates to SEO? Has that been a headwind at all, for you, or do you kind of have a diversified enough strategy to offset any pressure that might be there?
Yeah, I think that, just for our own marketing overall, obviously, we've talked a bunch about kind of some of the different strategies we're using.
Mm-hmm.
And we had one call in particular, which is now, I think, five calls ago, where we went into some of the things that we're building, and we've tried to use a couple of case studies in terms of the different platforms that we're on. And, I think we've been doing a very good job of building a lot of things internally, and, and that's really how we do this in terms of the marketing space. A lot of different tools, algorithms, models internally, and also doing a very good job of pattern recognition in the data that we see, which we get from the platform. In terms of the platforms, we'll give you information in terms of kind of, this is how effective your ads were, and this is what you see, and then we correlate that with what we see. To the extent that we can find signal much faster, that allows us to be much more effective on this.
Right.
SEO, all the different platforms we work on, to us, is just a combination of how we think, and we try and be as dynamic, real time on this as possible. How do we think about the returns across the different platforms, and where does that next incremental dollar of marketing spend go?
Right.
And so any platform, channel, geography, you know, on a given day, week, month, it may go up or down in terms of efficacy, but that means we can be thoughtful in terms of where we shift that dollar, all staying within guardrails.
Right. And if I recall, at your Investor Day, I remember sort of talking about reducing your paid search budget at that point and kind of seeing, you know, incremental, you know, leads and traction even after doing that, so.
Yeah, we're always testing. We're always trying to find what's the most effective way to do it. And there's a balance between how do you think about paid marketing? We don't do a whole lot of product-specific marketing, but how do we think about certain products or geographies or things we want to support? And obviously, the Shopify brand is very strong, and I've mentioned that before. And so there's a balance between where does the Shopify brand kick in and of itself pull in merchants, and how do we think about the platform, the time, the merchant type that we want to get?
Right. Great. Let's definitely talk about AI.
Sure.
I know that's. We've gone through half the chat without mentioning it. So, last fall, a lot of great announcements, you know, examples that Harley gave on the call. Maybe just for the audience here, there's a lot of folks in the room, like, what is Shopify's approach as it relates to helping merchants with AI? What's the strategy?
Yeah, well, there, there's a couple pieces, and I obviously, it started with Sidekick, most specifically-
Mm-hmm
... which is something that Tobi announced a while ago now, and that is doing what we can to, and this is why we call it Sidekick, to basically capture the brain of an entrepreneur and have it be the sidekick, the kind of person on your shoulder, helping give you advice in terms of some of the decisions you should be making to grow your business. And that is, in its own way, separate from everything that Harley talked about last quarter in terms of the things that we're doing, the partnership with Microsoft and things we're doing with catalog and checkout, and all that. As it relates to Sidekick, like, we, that is a technology which is focused on the merchant.
And so I think what sometimes lost is a lot of people think about, well, what is being developed in agentic commerce for the consumer? Which is excellent and needs to happen, because for this, quote, "network" to happen, both sides of the network need to grow and need to get more sophisticated. And then actually going a little bit back to your SEO comment, if you are a merchant, and if the way that consumers find brands is going to change, then you need to adapt and get more sophisticated at the same time. And we're trying to make sure we have the tools for merchants to do that.
And so in the, quote, "SEO-driven world," where you had to make sure you're trying to figure out the keywords or things to be found as a merchant, obviously, as those algorithms, as the search platforms, as the starting point for the consumer on their buying journey changes, how does a merchant adapt to that?
And so we want to make sure that we are, the catalog is effectively making sure we're the source of truth, the taxonomy, the library, the, hence the catalog, for all the things that merchants have on their websites and capturing that in the most factual, accurate way. How do we use our excellence in checkout to continue to via partnerships, make sure that the checkout experience is as wonderful as possible for both the consumer and for the merchant? And how do we help the merchant overall just succeed in a way where they feel like, as a merchant, if you're not using the Shopify platform, you're making life harder than it should be.
Right.
That's what we're really trying to do.
Right. Right. Got it. And in terms of the way this flows through to the financials, you know, so there are plans to kind of have incremental monetization of these AI features? Or is it, "Hey, we just want to make our merchants more efficient," you know, if they're more efficient and can target customers better, obviously, you get paid for that at the end of the day. What's kind of a monetization strategy?
Yeah, when you look at Sidekick, this is something that's really been built into the platform. You know, and when you look across all of tech, as you know, there's some business models that are built on monetizing AI. There's some companies that have both some AI platforms they charge for and other stuff that's built into the platform. For us, right now, this is what we're building into the platform. This is separate from some of the things we talked about agentic commerce, right? If someone's coming in through an LLM and, they're using Shopify Payments or a form of Shopify Payments in the engine, obviously, we get monetized for that. But as it relates to the advice, the Sidekick, helping merchants be successful, where we are right now is building it into the platform.
Right.
As you know, like, we are still in the very early stages of all this, so business models will change for everyone in this ecosystem, some a little bit, some drastically, but from our vantage point, we're trying to just help this whole process be successful, as we do think agentic commerce is good for the consumer.
Right. And as we think about agentic commerce for Shopify, I mean, is your sort of take rate in opportunity in an agentic-driven commerce kind of the same or greater than in a traditional sense? Like, how should we think about that?
Yeah, you know, it's a good question, but it's just too early.
Yeah.
And that's just a function of a lot of these. You know, a lot of the LLMs are figuring out how they're going to do this. Google is adapting. Like, everyone involved in the commerce side is adapting, and so there'll just be some changes I don't think we've foreseen yet. But I do know from our vantage point, we have an amazing set of merchants that we work with. We've talked about our market share in commerce. We talk about all the different, just in terms of running these businesses, effectively, the platform that runs these businesses, all the insights we get on that in terms of just from how they are themselves running a business, how they think about marketing their business, how they're thinking about getting more consumers, all that stuff.
I think we're in a position where, with the strength of our checkout, our knowledge of commerce, the products that we've built and everything there, and especially with what we set in motion a while ago on catalog and how catalog's manifested itself, is again kind of the source of truth for what's out there on the websites for our merchants. I think that puts us in a good spot.
Great. And I wanted to come back to some of the product innovation that you hit on earlier. But just for the audience, as we think about the biggest drivers for merchant solutions growth going forward, obviously, payments is you know still the bulk of that business, but there have been a lot of new products that seem to be doing well, whether it's tax you know installments markets-
Yeah.
Et cetera. How would you sort of stack rank the biggest growth drivers on the merchant solutions side of the business?
Maybe I might take it slightly differently and think about just the growth drivers overall.
Sure.
Some in merchant solutions, some not, because some of them are just broader. Like, we talk about international a lot, like, that remains a very large opportunity, right? Even as successful as Europe has been, as a percentage of our revenues, it's, you know, again, that's roughly a quarter, and we disclose all this by region. Like-
Mm-hmm.
Do we have a lot of presence in Latin America? Yes. As a percentage of our revenue, is it still very small? Yes. Like, in terms of what are we doing in the Middle East, what are we doing in Africa, what are we doing in India? Like, there's significant opportunity. Southeast Asia, as you know, we're strong in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, but there's a lot of countries where we have massive opportunities to go.
Mm-hmm.
International is a big one. B2B is another important growth driver for us. In addition to B2B in and of itself, it's doing two things: It's essentially enhancing what we're doing for enterprises, which is another growth driver I'll get to in a second, but it's also getting us more and more industry verticals where we're serving, and it's just really broadening the appeal or maybe the awareness by merchants in Shopify, and that's helped a lot. Enterprise continues to be an opportunity, not only in terms of what we're doing in the actual revenues, but just the breadth of things that merchants are buying from us, and Harley talks about that on a lot of the calls with a couple of the big wins.
And for some smaller merchants, when they see, you know, some very well-regarded, large multinational retailer using our platform, that gives them the confidence, "There's no way I'm ever gonna outgrow Shopify." And so enterprise is helpful in itself, but it also brings a lot of ancillary benefits. Retail, point of sale, if you will, is another thing which, you know, even though roughly 20% of commerce is online, there's 80% which isn't, and so this gives us access to the other 80%. There's a lot of things, good things going on there. We've talked about advertising. There's just a whole slew of things in addition to what's in other merchant solutions. Capital is the one in other merchant solutions that's been around the longest.
Mm-hmm.
So, and it's had continued success, and as we talked about, the two new countries where we recently introduced it. So that one is one of the bigger drivers of that segment. But you're absolutely right when you look at, like, tax has been very successful, installments have been very successful. The FX feature functionality of payments, which is also in other merchant solutions, have been very successful, so we feel good about it.
Yeah. I guess, is there anything as you look across the product portfolio that maybe hasn't gone as well as expected and could be an opportunity as you know, kind of re-execute and, you know, reimagine it?
I think the biggest thing for us right now is because a lot of these products are still new, like, I don't, I don't want it to get lost that these, these products are still new. The international push is still relatively new. Like, we have massive opportunity there. And so as we think about durability of growth going forward, it's a compilation of the S curves, the growth rates of all these products, that really says: All right, of all these different segments, even if I had one maybe slow down or trip or something, I have so many others that can pick up the slack. But of course, our goal is to have none of them slow down.
Right. You hit on enterprise and that opportunity. Clearly, the accelerating GMV growth, I think, is another strong signal that you're adding, you know, larger merchants to the platform. And, you know, certainly we can see from Salesforce and Adobe's disclosures that their commerce offerings kind of continue to slow. So what have been the big unlocks in the enterprise space, and how have you kind of seen that competitive landscape evolve?
I think for the enterprise space, it's, I think sometimes forgotten the capabilities of the platform really going into this, 'cause it's about three years ago, roughly three years ago, where we really started to make a bigger push to go to the larger markets. Plus, at that point, still had been primarily a mid-market solution. But when you think of the flash sales that we've done for some of the biggest celebrities out there and some of the biggest brands out there, that will have a huge spike in traffic on a given day. So, for example, if a famous singer, who I won't name, who, like, has a big merchant drop and says, "Tomorrow at noon, we're having a huge merchant drop," and the demands on the network, on our platform are super high.
And if we can handle that, we can handle what some multi-large multinational needs to do on any given day in terms of what they're doing. And so enterprise for us, I won't call it only a go-to-market effort, but it was largely kind of how do we build the system around what is already there from a technology perspective. And so we started to build some of the partnerships with some of the SIs, which has been very helpful for us, because whether the systems integrator is sitting alongside us or the systems integrator is advising the retailer or the merchant on what's the best technology out there, that's wonderful for us.
To have like a third-party assessment of what's the capabilities of the platform, because we have invested a lot in this platform, and we've built some great things, and we have a team of engineers that can build and enhance the product very quickly. So how that platform continues to stand out, it's "easier" for the systems integrator to say Shopify is the best platform that you as a merchant should be using. We had to grow some of the sales force and, you know, but that's something we set in motion a while ago; we've accomplished that in terms of general size, so it's not like we need to add a bunch of people there. B2B was a little bit different for us, but that's where we had to build some new capabilities.
We had some B2B functionality in the platform before, because even when you go back to some medium-sized merchants, for example, they may have the vast majority of their business be direct-to-consumer, but they probably had 5% or 10% that they maybe were selling through some bigger brand or retailer, and so they had a B2B element to the business, and so this was something which a couple of years ago, we said: "Hey, we should really make a concerted effort here and build out some of the modules." Sometimes just in terms of industry-specific functionality, can get very nichey.
Mm-hmm.
And so it's not like you're building a new engine, but you are building out the UI, some of the flows, some of the things that help that, and that's helped the enterprise a little bit, too, because it's just the larger the business, the merchant is, the more likely to have a B2B piece, so that helps. So in a lot of... we say enterprise, but I'll just say larger merchants. So a lot of these larger GMV merchants, like it may be an Italian or French fashion house, which is still run by the founder or-
Mm.
one of the children of the founder, and so there's still a founder mentality to these businesses, and that really helps. It's a merchant you know and understand how they make decisions. But ultimately, we're, we're helping platforms, merchants be more successful. And I think as we have, and I alluded this before, as we have more and more changes because of AI and other things, it makes a lot of merchants that had their own in-house platforms up until this point say, "I just can't adapt as quickly as Shopify can for me." And I think we're giving merchants, for the first time, a third-party software solution, which is better than anything that they could have had, and so in the past, they would have decided to build it.
Mm-hmm.
And so, this enterprise segment is part of a great multi-year continued march for us in terms of, you know, maybe for one of the big brands we get, and many of them have a lot of commerce stacks, so maybe we get one of their commerce stacks, or maybe we just get payments across all their commerce stacks, or maybe we just get A, B, and C, and we kind of slowly start to build trust and build more and more solutions with them. And we're. That's playing out in terms of what we're seeing in the funnel.
Right. Right. So a lot of mix of displacing homegrown as well as some of the legacy.
It's still, at this point, Tyler, it's still more homegrown than anything else, but we are definitely doing some displacements of other vendors.
I got you. Gotcha. I did wanna hit on payments, because obviously, that's an important part of the business.
Yep.
So how do you think about just the ability to potentially negotiate better economics on the payments business over time? And obviously there's a, you know, somewhat recent partnership with PayPal. So just kind of walk through those dynamics for the audience.
Yeah, I don't think there's anything in terms of renegotiating of a contract where people would just say, "Oh, well, this fundamentally changes the economics to Shopify." We've obviously been successful in helping a lot of merchants for many years, and so we've been a platform that I think from a payments provider perspective, you wanna make sure you're working with Shopify, just like we wanna make sure we're working with all the platforms out there that merchants want to use. I think that's one of the things that's made us very successful, is we try very hard to make sure that if a merchant wants a capability, a payments partner, a marketing partner, or whatever, like, let's give them the capabilities to do that. Let's put that all in the admin, which is what we did with PayPal.
Let's put that all in the admin, so this is super easy for them to use whatever they think will help their business be more successful. So like what we did with Stablecoin, too. Like, there are certain geographies or niches, B2B is one, where we say: You know what? We think this can have a real impact. Not everyone's gonna use it, but that's okay, and that's some of the things we've seen with the Amazon partnership, too.
Right.
Like, let's give the merchants the tools to be successful. And so from a payments perspective, yeah, our payments contracts generally come up every few years, and we have a great relationship with Stripe. We have this relationship with PayPal, which you just alluded to. We've worked with them for a while. We worked with them in France.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, working with them now in the U.S. We work with Adyen in Europe, which is a natural evolution, as we are doing more in enterprise and we're doing more in Europe, and that's obviously a particular strength for Adyen, and we had a few merchants in Europe that came to us and said, "Hey, we'd love to be able to do more and more with Adyen," and this obviously goes back a couple years, and we obviously wanted to make sure that was in the platform.
Right. And lastly, I did want to hit on margin. So obviously, free cash flow margin improvement was a big focus for you since you came in, and we've certainly seen that growth in the business, which has been great to see. But what are the sort of next big areas of efficiency you're targeting, and how are you thinking about the role that AI plays in that, kind of internally?
We've used AI in a lot of different segments internally, and we've also, as you've seen in Tobi's memo, we've made sure that this is something people across the company use it-
Mm-hmm.
irrespective of department, and so I can tell you there are certain departments which have seen more aggressive adoption than others, and this is, for us, this is acceleration of the capabilities of the team. How can we make an engineer accomplish more on a daily basis? How can we make our salespeople more efficient? How can we make our finance people more efficient, et cetera? How can we make our support capabilities even better?
It's not from a support perspective, for example, to say, "Well, we need to get headcount from X to Y." It's saying: Let's make AI a powerful tool, so that if a merchant calls in and wants to ask a question, maybe a quote, dumb question, which they wouldn't normally ask a human, they feel like they have a sophisticated agent, AI agent, that they can ask a bunch of questions with, kind of work with that, and if they have elevated questions, then they get to a person. From our vantage point is, how do we use AI throughout the business.
Mm-hmm.
- and give the whole business more leverage? And you can see that in, obviously, us keeping headcount flat for two years now.
Right.
We continue to grow the top line very meaningfully, and that's a function of using AI or automation more broadly to do everything we can to continue the product development, the engineering engine moving as quickly as possible.
Yeah. You think that's kind of sustainable in terms of keeping headcount flat with the top line growth?
Yeah. Without giving specific guidance on anything, I think we feel good about what we can do with-
Yeah.
with this headcount. Yeah.
Awesome. Well, great! I know we're running out of time, Jeff.
Good.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate the discussion, and thanks, everyone.
Thank you.