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53rd Annual Nasdaq Investor Conference

Dec 10, 2025

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

All right, so we'll get kicked off here. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. My name is Keith Weiss. I run the US Software Equity Research Franchise here at Morgan Stanley, and I'm very pleased to have with us from Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister. Jeff, thank you for joining us.

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Great, of course. Good to see you, Keith.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

So, it's a super exciting time at Shopify. I feel like it's always a super exciting time at Shopify. A lot of stuff to talk about. I'm actually going to start at the bottom of my question list and work the way up.

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

All right.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Because I want to touch on some of the newer innovations for two reasons. One, it's very interesting what Shopify is doing when it comes agentic commerce. And this is a new potential kind of channel, a new theme that we've been talking about. But it's also, I think it really exemplifies Shopify and what makes Shopify special, just how far ahead of the marketplace you guys have been in getting out technologies to help support your merchants for the potential agentic commerce, but also to create new rails for agentic commerce providers to actually be able to execute on this.

So maybe to start out with, take my statement and make it into a question, what's the kind of current thinking agentic commerce from Shopify in terms of where are we with sort of pushing this out? What are the technologies that are going to be important? And what's Shopify's role going to be in agentic commerce?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

There's a lot in there. So we are definitely, as you alluded to in your initial statement before the question, we've tried very hard to make sure we're building the technologies, the rails to make this happen and help accelerate what we think will happen agentic commerce. We are definitely bullish agentic commerce. There's people that are kind of bulls and bears in terms of how much this is going to expand consumer spend, how much this is going to change the dynamics of spend, and I'll come to that in a second. But we've tried very hard, as you know, our Catalog product is something that we set in motion more than two years ago. Some of the stuff that we're doing around Sidekick, right? Tobi talked about that more than two years ago.

So a lot of these are things that we felt a little bit kind of the analogy if you build that they will come. We've tried very hard to make sure that we help the merchants by giving everything they need in terms of the tools, the technologies to be at the forefront of this. That's what we're trying to build. And we'll spend some more time, I'll spend some more time on Catalog and Sidekick and all that. But effectively what we're doing is we're starting to see now, really over the past couple of quarters, the fruits of some of that labor of what we've been agentic commerce has a lot of different definitions for various people in terms of how seamless it's going to be. Is it just kind of me, for example, giving a budget to an LLM and letting them spend, or do I?

It's a little like adoption of any technology. We'll have some early adopters, and some people are more comfortable doing a lot of shopping online. Some people want to do more in person, so with the various changes that we'll see in kind of the pace of adoption, our technologies are helping the merchants, right? There's a lot of people who are trying to spend on technology, do advancements, do things to help on the consumer side, right? What the LLMs are doing to try to help all of us as shoppers. We're really the only ones we think that are doing something really significant in terms of building technology to help the merchants. I think one of the things that you'll see in terms of how the LLMs searches play out is, you know, generally they're longer queries.

They're more sophisticated. You do a Google search, it's usually fewer words. And what we're seeing, for example, like the old Google search versus the Gemini search, right? Usually it's like five words versus 25 words, or some kind of longer, more complex, more thoughtful question, which is coming out of the LLMs. And so therefore the opportunity for us is to help put our merchants in a good position where they're the source of the answer when someone says, "All right, I want A, B, and C in terms of what I'm shopping for." And we're still, having said that, in the very early days of this.

And we see this to a certain extent too, just in terms of how we're interacting with all the LLMs, some of our knowledge around commerce and how we're helping them think about, to a certain extent, their business models and evolve what they're trying to do. And we're working in partnership with all of them to do that. There's a lot there we can go on.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

So let's click into a couple of those components. One, in terms of helping the merchants, product Catalog enables the merchant to expose more of the, not just the products, but about the products so that it could better match the query being put into the prompt engine into what the merchants actually bring to the equation. Where are we in terms of the rollout of that solution, the adoption of that solution? What are you seeing in the customer base thus far in terms of their affinity to participate, if you will?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yeah. Yeah, well, Catalog is a huge advantage for merchants because essentially it becomes the definitive source of truth on your products. And one of the things that we're seeing across all the LLMs, and I give them credit for this, is they're trying to make sure that they have the best, most accurate, most fact-based, most authoritative answer when we type in our questions. And so if we can therefore on the back end be the so-called back end on the merchant side, if we can be the authoritative source of truth in everything they're doing, then it's very natural that all the LLMs are going to want to work with us in terms of us helping them give the best answer possible to the people that are on their websites doing the searches.

And so Catalog has been, again, it's something we've had in place for a while, thinking of it essentially as kind of like the taxonomy, the definitive source of what's out there for products. And it's worked very well. And so as an LLM, if you're not pointing people towards Catalog, or if a merchant, if you're not using Catalog, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage effectively.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Got it. And then more broadly, you talked about working with your merchants to understand how to position agentic commerce. You also said that you think this is a big positive. You're bullish agentic commerce. There is a bear case though, that unlike traditional search or SEO, SEO sent the consumer to the merchant's website and everything was transacted on the merchant's website. Part of the reason you paid so much for SEO is because then you have that consumer relationship on a go-forward basis. Does that agentic commerce, right? The risk is the agent is transacting on behalf of the consumer.

The consumer's never on your website, and the consumer never has an affinity for your brand. You don't get that repeat buying behavior that the merchants are trying to facilitate. So how do you agentic commerce against that potential bear case of that they're losing the connection to their end customer?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

I think, again, it's still early days, but we're actually seeing a lot of whether you start with OpenAI, you're still probably going to the merchant's website. Some consumers will go straight to the merchant's website. Maybe they find the brand because they do a search on Gemini or ChatGPT or wherever, and as you know, a lot of times the search results come back a little bit differently. Before, as you point out, for example, you would do a search on Google, you'd get a bunch of links, and while the answer now may look different, because you'll do a search on Gemini and you'll get a box that will give you two, three paragraphs in terms of this is what we think the answer is, some pros and cons, some things to think about.

And maybe then there's a link to an article or a blog, and the merchant's website is listed in that article or the blog. So the way that they need it, I agree with you, the way they think about SEO needs to evolve and is evolving. But from our vantage point right now, I don't see a fundamental shift in terms of people still going to the merchant's website and the merchant still interacting with that consumer, building that relationship, building that brand. I think brands, as much as anything, will be even more important in the next world of kind of where we agentic commerce play out. And I also think it's actually going to help some of our small and medium-sized brands, partly because, again, before in the old world, sometimes the advertising budget of some of the brands would impact how you are discovered.

Now, if you're asking an LLM a very thoughtful, again, maybe longer, complex question, you're more likely to discover some brands that maybe had flown underneath your radar. And so maybe you historically had kind of relied on some paid advertising links to find, "All right, so I want to buy a new pair of dress shoes, and so I'm going to find it through some of the traditional answers." Now, maybe you're going to find, I don't know, maybe there's a small European manufacturer that makes a phenomenal product that you otherwise would not have found. So I think through Catalog and agentic commerce, I think some of the small and medium merchants actually will be better off.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

But what about the other side of the equation though? Because you guys have also rolled out universal cart and Checkout Kit.

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yep.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

And ultimately, OpenAI doesn't want to send you to the website. OpenAI wants to transact that business themselves and be able to take the fee associated with it. They want to take their 4% to 8% against whatever that transaction is. And you're enabling them to do it within agentic commerce experience. Does that consumer ever make it to the website? Do they ever make it to understand the brand, understand the merchant that's your customer?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yeah, I think they still will. And I think the other thing too, to my comment about being in the early stages of all this, part of it is just all the business models to a certain extent are still evolving as it relates to agentic commerce. Because just all the CEOs, you know, Microsoft's going to think about this slightly different than Google, which is going to think about this slightly different from OpenAI, kind of, et cetera, kind of go down the list. They all have very different business models, cash balances, approaches to commerce. And I think that's going to play out. And again, we're still in the very early stages of this. I think that's going to play out in terms of how they all think about how much they do on platform versus sending to the merchant's website.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Got it. Rounding out the conversation a little bit, we recently wrote a report agentic commerce along with our internet analyst, Brian Nowak, and we specifically dove into Shopify and your role there, and one of the conclusions that we kind of led with was Shopify tends to do well in periods of disruption, right? Because of the fast pace of innovation, because you tend to be technology leaders. When we have disruptions in these core markets, there's even more of an affinity to go with Shopify.

That's what we thought of as the bull case for Shopify. agentic commerce probably leads to more E-commerce penetration, and you guys get a larger share of that E-commerce penetration during the disruption, so the question is like, one, do you kind of agree with that underlying premise? When you say you're bullish agentic commerce, is it in that same dynamic of that just there's going to be more E-commerce being done?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yeah, no, I would agree with all that. I think there's some people that believe, and again, it's also too early to tell on this, agentic commerce will make transactions, make shopping easier. So it actually will expand the pie as it relates to consumer spend. We don't have a whole lot of data to suggest that. There is a possibility that the easier it is to get something done, the more that it will happen and that there may be an expansion of consumer spend. For the moment, let's assume that consumer spend at a certain level is going to be consistent. And so then it's just a little bit of a mixed shift in terms of where does it come from. And if more of that, as you know, kind of given any given country geography, roughly 20% of commerce is online versus 80% that is offline.

And you've seen, I know you know well, the kind of the multi-year trend of the percentage of commerce which is online and continues to shift year in, year out. If there's an inflection in that curve and more commerce happens online, that plays right into our strengths, right? We have obviously a very good point of sale, offline solution. Online commerce has been our historical heritage, right? And I also agree with your premise in terms of technology shifts that also really plays into our strengths because we have across the board, we've always led with technology. We've always led with putting more in the core platform. And we've significantly differentiated ourselves when maybe there's some more legacy platforms out there, especially on the enterprise side. So I think this all plays to some very strong tailwinds for us.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Got it. Got it. I want to shift gears and dig into the core business. Results have been very strong. In the most recent earnings call, you talked about strength in merchant ads, right? It's the holiday season. If you wanted to give me a christmas gift, merchant count would be a great reason. I would love to see that number.

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Put it on the list.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Back. Absent that, maybe you could give us some color. When you're talking about strength in merchant ads across geographies, across brands, could you give us any kind of color on the sort of magnitude or kind of what's driving that strength in merchant ads?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Well, I think our merchant acquisition engine on top of the funnel overall has been very good. As you know, the platform itself is very, very powerful in terms of getting more people to transact on the platform. The brand recognition of Shop Pay is drawing more and more from enterprises to the smallest kind of one-person entrepreneur startups. It's been a really powerful force in terms of getting more people on the platform. The marketing strategy, we've talked about this a little bit in Europe in terms of how I think we've done a very good job here in terms of getting some products out there, get the product-market fit, and then have marketing support it. And I think our marketing strategy has been very effective. I know on some of the MRR numbers because of the change in paid trials that it makes that a little noisy.

But the paid trials have worked very well. Part of what you sometimes see with entrepreneurs is they're starting a business while they're also keeping their day job. And so they're trying to kind of work during the day and do the entrepreneurship thing at night or on weekends. And to the extent that we can give them more time on the platform, three months, for example, free to get on there and kind of really understand the power of the platform, get some of the sales, get up and running, and get really familiar with that. In addition to what Sidekick and everything we're doing agentic commerce, it just really helps the merchant be more successful.

And so, not surprisingly, and you also know from, especially from COVID, there's just an uptick, and it's stayed at this level, an uptick in the number of new businesses that are being started across the globe. All of those things are helping us get more merchants. So while you look at the MRR, and it again is noisy, when I look at kind of the pace of merchants that we're seeing, and you get a little bit of a sense of this from MRR, but the pace of merchant additions we're seeing on "the low end" as well as we're seeing on the enterprise, it's very solid.

I guess the other thing I would have you triangulate on is when I talk about the GMV growth in Europe, when I talk about, and I say this less explicitly when I talk about the US or Canada, when I talk about the growth. I'm usually saying it's kind of half same source sales and half new merchant acquisition. So if half of that is coming from merchants that we've added in the last year, then obviously there's a lot to be said for that. As you know, one single merchant ad on the enterprise side can have the equivalent amount of revenue as many SMBs, but we're growing across the board. I also on the last earnings call talked about the strength across the different GMV bands. I also talked a little bit about the strength of the different cohorts.

The cohorts that we've seen, there's one of the, I think, often underappreciated elements of our business, and I kind of alluded to it on the last earnings call, is that the cohorts, when you look at, and it's in our investor deck, if you look at the Q1 2025 cohort and how that's grown over time, it's been excellent. And in the investor deck on the very next slide, I have one that shows the cohorts for Q1 of all the years since 2015, and they all have grown very consistently steady and up and to the right. And the only two that are a little bit outliers and slightly below the trendline perspective are 2020 and 2021 for obvious reasons as it relates to COVID. The cohorts have been very consistent on a multi-year basis. They continue to grow.

And so when you look at our revenue this year or any given year, it's a stack of all those cohorts. And that's only going to be happening if we continue to add a lot of great merchants to the platform. So we feel really good about the merchant acquisition engine right now. And I know I'm forcing you to triangulate a little bit on the numbers, but the proof is there in terms of how we think about it.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yeah, so it sounds like the marketing spend that we all gave you such a hard time about the beginning of last year is actually, as you predicted, is going to yield gains a year later as those become merchants. You mentioned the sort of push up-market into the enterprise, and I want to dig into that because the nature of those enterprise customers, while the potential is to be much larger, they don't come on the same way as the small businesses in that they're not going to push the entirety of their business into Shopify all in one go.

S o you could talk to us about where we are in terms of it feels like we got product-market fit and we've got the affinity for merchants and the large enterprises started to come on. Where are we in terms of kind of ramping them up? It feels like it's going to be a stacking function over time?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

No, I think that's exactly right. I think we all can do studies around the size of the opportunity and all the different merchants out there kind of by vertical, by geography, however you want to slice it. I think one of the things that's sometimes lost about kind of appreciation for enterprise business was on our earnings calls, we hardly usually is the one that's talking about, "Hey, here's a bunch of merchants that we won." and then we'll talk about, "Here's when we now have this large enterprise kind of up and running on the platform, kind of selling via our platform."

That we don't always get into excruciating detail around, "Hey, maybe they're most of them, the bigger the enterprise, the bigger the brand, the more likely they are to have a bunch of commerce stacks." They may have done it intentionally because they built the commerce stack for, "Hey, I have a luxury item, kind of high-priced, low-volume brand that has a different commerce stack than the one that's the inverse, which is higher volume, lower price." Maybe I did a bunch of acquisitions.

“Maybe I just kind of started building it. I have a little bit of kludge stuff.” And this is part of the stuff which is helping us as a tailwind for us to win more. But a lot of times they just have a bunch of different stacks where maybe we take part of the stack, maybe we start with just payments, maybe we take payments, point of sale, installments, tax, a bunch of things. But most of the time we're taking just a piece. Either we're taking one full stack and then we're going to take more stacks over time, or we're just taking maybe a horizontal slice of the stacks. And so the opportunity for us, exactly as you said, is a continued stacking of, in a good way, a multi-year steady trend in terms of just doing more and more with each of these merchants.

And one of the things that's coming out agentic commerce is, again, kind of the necessities of the quality of the technology and the platform, the table stakes for that are much higher than they've ever been. And so for our "competitors," and we don't have really many in the large enterprise space, if they're not spending as much on investing in the technology, the platform, and we are, we are clearly distancing ourselves. I don't think we're to the point yet, Keith, where we've got, in fact, I know we're not to the point where merchants are coming to us and "agentic commerce is the sole thing that's causing my decision," but it's clearly in the roadmap. Whereas six months ago, it wasn't as much in the conversations.

Now people are like, "All right, so I'm choosing you for these four or five, six reasons, agentic commerce is one. And help me understand over the next two quarters, two years, et cetera, what are you doing? What are you building?" And we clearly stand out in that regard.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Got it. So you've talked about, and correct me if I'm wrong, winning roughly four out of 10 enterprise deals, which is an impressive win rate and also a very honest one. Most people tell us they win 90% of the deals, which not everyone can win 90% of the deals. So when you're not winning the deals, right, when they're going with either sort of sticking with the incumbent or one of the larger competitors, what's the pushback on the Shopify platform? And what do you guys do to consistently improve that win rate over time?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yeah, the pushback for us is never technology or the quality of the platform. We do not intend to be the cheapest, but at the same token, we have a lot of pricing power here if we wanted. But there are, in some situations, people. Some of our competitors will be, and there's one in particular, will be a little bit more aggressive on price. And if they already have, if the merchant already has a bunch of other software from one of our competing platforms, it's easy for them to bundle. I mean, it's logical because the vendor can bundle and still get a good deal. And the merchant feels like, "Hey, I've got a bunch of data in this platform already. I can integrate it with what I have and I can get a bundled price." I totally get it. That makes total sense.

But when you do a kind of head-to-head stand-up competition on tech, we do extremely well in that category. And yeah, sometimes they choose to stay with their existing platform because they've probably invested a lot in getting it there. As you know, mostly on the enterprise side, it's the custom in-house built solutions that we're going up against. And I think we're to the point, I agentic commerce is going to accelerate this. I think we're to the point where we're offering something that they've never had before, where they feel like the quality of the external software is better than what they can build internally. And at Shopify, you've got all these engineers that are focused 24/7 on building the best commerce platform on the planet. No one else can say that.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

So really aligns to sort of my thesis of periods of disruption act as an accelerant of market share gains for Shopify.

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yeah, without calling out specific market share numbers, I think it's going to help. And I think even if you try, we talk about being 12% of E-commerce in the US But even if you look at some of the Black Friday, Cyber Monday statistics and kind of what we talked about in terms of growth rates, I mean, we most specifically in the US called up the US growth rate. We talked about the European growth rate of 34%, the Asian growth rate of 31%. Compare that to what you're seeing across the board, and you have to assume that we're continuing, I mean, we've talked about this in almost every one of the last three or four earnings calls in terms of the multiple of the E-commerce growth rates we are in any given country or region. We can clearly continue to take share.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Got it. So when we're talking about Shopify, and we're running short on time, so I'm going to fast forward this a little bit.

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

All righty.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

We typically talk about sort of the GMV part of the equation, and you guys have been doing an extraordinary job of taking market share, of growing that GMV base. Merchant ads is a part of it. Uplift into enterprise is a part of it. The offline retail has been additive to it. The international expansion has added to it. All of this is working really well to grow the base of GMV, right, and that helps MRR. The other side of the equation is the take rate against that GMV, right, and the most consistent question that I get about Shopify, I would love to hear your answer, is payments penetration, right?

Today we're about 65% payments penetration. So your payments for sales being used in 65% of the value being transacted through your platform. Where could that go over time? What's a theoretical maximum in terms of payment penetration?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

I've never given a theoretical maximum. Obviously, there's always some stuff that's going to be done in cash and other forms, but that payments penetration rate is obviously a blended number in the US and in Canada, but most notably in the US, it's much higher. And I think it can go higher in the US and obviously in Europe, it's lower, partly as a function of just, as you know, we just introduced Shopify Payments in kind of the remaining countries in Europe where we didn't have it. Even ignoring kind of all the other geographies for the moment, getting those payment penetration levels up obviously start with us making payments available in each of those geographies. Shop Pay is a strong, as you know, strong consumer brand that continues to help not only get merchant adoption, but also pull up the penetration levels.

And I think in Europe, part of it is going to be integration of more local payment methods and other things that just continue to give us the tailwinds to drive that penetration level up. So people have for a long time wondered how high can it go. We've been asked that question probably for a couple of years now, and it continues to march up. So as you know, this past year, because of the PayPal integration, we had a little bit of a bump just kind of just on an optics level for payments penetration. But you look at a multi-year trend, I don't see a change in that trend line at this point, Keith, in terms of what we're continuing to do, just kind of add to the payments penetration level.

And you'll see more from us in terms of rollout of payments. Again, we pretty much have Europe covered now. The last few quarters ago, when I talked about this on the earnings call, I talked about the 16 countries where we introduced payments, 15 were in Europe, the other was Mexico. You should assume that we'll do more in Central and South America. I think we have, by geography, I think we have significant opportunity in Central and South America. I think we have a lot of opportunity in the Middle East. I think we have a lot of opportunity in Southeast Asia, et cetera.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Got it. Got it. So the second most often question that I get is the 'what's next on take rate?'. Payment has been the vast majority of sort of the take rate overall. Where should we be looking in terms of what could emerge as another material kind of take rate driver for Shopify going forward?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

I think I'd point you to three things. Number one, I think some of the products that we've had out for a couple of years now are continuing to ramp some of the success we've had with tax, with installments, with some of the things we're doing on the FX side. Those are all going to continue to add. I think the number two on the advertising side, which we won't have a ton of time to talk about, but we're doing more and we have additions coming up, some kind of additions announcements today and tomorrow. You'll see more on the advertising side in terms of what we're doing. I think we in particular have a real opportunity, what I would call 2P, which is where one merchant will advertise on the website of another merchant. And how do we help them do that?

I think there's significant opportunity there, and I think just in general, when you think about kind of the suite of things that we're doing, there's a bunch of little other products that in the aggregate will add up to continue to advancements on the attach rate. I don't look at attach rate and say this is a specific target I have in mind. As you know, for the last couple of years, we've grown kind of 10 to 15 basis points a year. This year, that's not the case because of the headwind that we have and because of the paid trials and Subscription Solutions. Basically, this year, we've seen roughly an equivalent offset between payments penetration and advances on the Merchant Solutions side being offset by some of the headwinds on the Subscription Solutions side. That's temporary.

Next year, we'll get back to growth with kind of more traditional lines in terms of how I think about Subscription Solutions, so without a specific pace I'm going to give you, continued up and to the right in terms of what we're seeing.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. In that kind of rubric, you do a lot enabling your merchants to set up a commerce site to be able to transact commerce. And increasingly, it feels like you're looking to help them sort of attract consumers to the overall platform. One of a big part of attracting consumers to the platform is marketing, right? Marketing to me feels like something that you guys have partnered a lot more with than gone organically, but you do have organic efforts when it comes to marketing. How should we think about that opportunity within Shopify? Is that something that you could build out further, become more of a marketing front office vendor for their customers, for your merchants?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yeah, I think I don't see us, for example, doing the full marketing software suite that you see out of others. I do think that I know that we look at marketing kind of getting to consumers as an obvious pain point for businesses. And the smaller you are, the more help you need there. So we talked about the 2P advertising. You're familiar with campaigns and audiences and all that. And we've done some very interesting things internally in terms of how we use the technology to do some of our own marketing.

And then how do we then take some of that and port it to the platforms that we're offering merchants? So you will see more of that from us. Do I see us building some big kind of marketing software suite that you would see from some of the others out there that you cover? No, I don't see us doing that.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay. So it's going to be more focused, more specific type of marketing aligned to kind of where your infrastructure strengths lies. We got about a minute left. I want to turn to margins and profitability. On one side of the equation, gross margins have seen some headwinds. Some of that comes from the international mix, some of it from enterprise payments. We're all worried about gross margin impacts from more sort of GPU-based computing. How should we fundamentally think about the gross margin directionality going forward for Shopify?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Yeah, well, to your GPU point, obviously we don't. I mean, our CapEx spend is the minimalist, is probably the best word to use. And I would say the vast, vast majority of that all goes into Subscription Solutions for us, which is basically the provision of the core platform to our merchants. And as you know, that has stayed, and we've been doing this for a couple of years now in terms of building agentic commerce. And that gross margin for Subscription Solutions has stayed kind of 80% plus. So even though we've been spending, and we're going to naturally spend more on the core platform as we expand into new geographies and our merchants do higher transaction volumes. That's been the case for a while. So it's reflective in the margins you've seen from us for a while. So, Subscription Solutions has been very stable.

In Merchant Solutions, your point, it's a mix of kind of enterprise and payments and everything that goes in there. As you know, we've had some headwinds this year in particular, and as I kind of look to next year without giving any specific guidance, some of those temporary headwinds will lessen, but I go back to my comment before that in general, we think about gross margins as being neutral to slightly down in any given year. I'm not going to guide you to say, "Oh, I think it's going to turn around." Merchant Solutions, at least next year or two, is going to kind of uplift in the positive.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Got it. And then finally, on the OpEx side of the equation, I think it was two years ago at the Analyst Day, you guys came out and said, "Hey, listen, we're utilizing this technology really effectively. We have the factory, if you will, that's pumping out a lot of innovation. We don't need a lot more people." And you've executed to that. You've been able to grow the business remarkably well with no real headcount expansion. How durable is that? How long can you keep going without having to invest in humans, in human capital and expand out more fundamentally that OpEx?

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

We're really using the tool, as you alluded to, the internally built tools. We don't use much third-party software because we feel like if we do that, then we're going to find ourselves in a position where we're getting limited versus some of the things that we could do if we built a solution which is focused on what we want to accomplish. Without giving exact guidance on headcount number, I don't see us next year needing to increase headcount in any way, that being an impediment to our growth rate and what we've been able to deliver. It's been over two years we've been at this headcount. As I look to next year, I think we can continue to be disciplined on headcount and continue to deliver on the top line. I feel good. I feel very good about what we've been able to accomplish.

Keith Weiss
Head of US Software Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Outstanding. Unfortunately, we are over time, but Jeff, thank you so much for joining us.

Jeff Hoffmeister
CFO, Shopify

Thank you.

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