Thank you everyone for joining us this morning. I'm Keith Weiss. I run the U.S. Software Research franchise here at Morgan Stanley, and really pleased to have with us from Shopify, both President Harley Finkelstein and CFO Jeff Hoffmeister. Jeff and Harley, thank you so much for joining us. Always great to be here.
Yeah. Thank you.
Excellent. A lot to talk about in Shopify. You guys came off an astounding quarter, an astounding year really in terms of overall GMV growth, overall revenue growth, and good profitability. There's one topic that everybody really wants to dig into, and it's Agentic Commerce. It makes sense, right? In that Shopify has led in a lot of commerce transitions in the past, and has benefited from commerce transitions in the past. We see a big pace of change on a go-forward basis, investors are trying to understand how that change is gonna evolve.
Harley, maybe we could start out at a high level and just give us the Shopify perspective, like maybe the Agentic Commerce one-on-one of how the e-commerce experience is gonna change, how Agentic Commerce is gonna roll out over the next couple of years. What should we be expecting to see in the marketplace?
Yeah. Thanks, Keith, and thanks everyone for being here. Maybe I'll start kinda a really high level, and I'll go kinda get down to the ground level. I think at a really high level, first of all, just to level set for those in the room that are not as familiar with Shopify, we power about, at least last year, we powered about $380 billion of GMV. We're about, just in the U.S. market, we're about 14% of e-com in the U.S. market. We see things, I think commerce is sort of a terrestrial level and an atmospheric level, I should say. I think the business model of Shopify is actually very simple. We make money when merchants make money. The more they sell, the more we make.
That business model has worked really well for us for almost two decades. From a product perspective, the product actually, we do a lot of different things, but the product in itself at its core is very simple. We make it really easy to build, to sell, to manage all of your retail, all of your commerce operations, regardless of whatever channel you're selling on, whether that's online or offline or, you know, on social media platforms, on marketplaces. We think Agentic actually could be one of the most exciting, you know, new trends or new paradigms for commerce maybe since the Internet. The way we see Agentic Commerce is that we think we see it as sort of this new front door to commerce, that for consumers, it's gonna act as sort of this personal shopper.
It also has actually the opportunity potentially to increase the TAM of e-commerce by bringing some of those laggards who typically don't buy online into kind of the digital realm. Ultimately, Agentic Commerce at its core is like having, some sort of, you know, personal shopper, and it's gonna help you do research, it's gonna help you compare, it's gonna help you potentially even transact. Whenever there's a new kind of front door, a new surface area for commerce, that's actually when Shopify's value increases. You know, 11 years ago, Jeff was actually our banker at Morgan Stanley when we did the IPO. We talked about what we were trying to build with Shopify is this retail operating system. This idea that there's going to be all these different, you know, spokes where commerce can happen.
The more spokes that exist, again, online, offline, social media, everywhere else, the more the value of a centralized back office system of record matters. The more front doors, the more the house actually matters. Ultimately, that's how we see Agentic. We see it as being a really, you know, potentially really wonderful new front door. That being said, we think that for anyone who's going to lead in kind of this Agentic Commerce era, three moats are gonna be really, really important to do this really well and to be at the epicenter of it. The first moat that is gonna be really important is going to be the transaction layer. That is not just the, you know, just the payment.
That is the checkout itself, that is subscriptions, that is the inventory, that is shipping taxes, all the different merchandising options that come with any type of transaction. We do that really, really well. The second moat that we think is really important in sort of this Agentic Commerce era is having the data layer, this proprietary data layer. The way that Shopify is set up, we have millions of stores, millions of merchants. We also have billions of transactions and trillions of data points, which means that over time, our system actually gets smarter, and it sort of creates this flywheel effect. The third moat that we think is really important for the Agentic sort of era is this network effect layer. Meaning, the more that happens, the smarter the system becomes.
For us, again, back to the, you know, the business model, more checkouts mean more merchants come on, means more customers are buying, mean more merchants decide to come to Shopify. It means we're able to make more GMV, we're able to invest more in our product, and this flywheel really starts to spin. In all three cases, we think Shopify has an unfair advantage around these three moats. If you take it actually down to the Shopify layer itself, the business of Shopify is actually, and many of you in the room, you especially Keith know Toby, we've sort of always been looking towards the future of where things are going. I mentioned on the roadshow, we didn't describe Shopify as an e-commerce provider.
We called ourselves a retail operating system. Some of you in the room gave us a weird look to say, "Well, what exactly does that mean?" We were anticipating that commerce was going to be done everywhere, and the company and product that brings it all together, that organizes it, will be the most valuable company in commerce. In many ways, we've sort of been planning for this for probably a decade. In terms of the actual financials of Shopify, the fact that we can grow 30% top-line revenue and have, you know, free cash flow, which was about $2 billion of last year, means we actually can see this out for not just five years, but for decades.
Now at the ground level, I will say that in the last two years or so, you've seen us create a couple different products which on their own may not have seemed profound, but when you aggregate them, you begin to really see the picture of what we're building with Agentic. The first one was this idea of Agentic storefronts, that directly from Shopify's admin, any of our merchants can click a button and say, "Push our products to..." We have 3 main partners now. The first one being Gemini, Google, and AI mode. The second one being OpenAI with ChatGPT. More recently with Microsoft and Copilot, that with a single click, our merchants can push their products and syndicate them to every Agentic surface. The second thing we built, we announced about 5 weeks ago at NRF, was UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol.
What we're trying to build with UCP is a way, an open source language for every Agentic tool to speak to every one of our merchants or every merchant in general, so that the experience on an Agentic application feels just as good as it does buying from an online store. The other one we built was this thing called the Agentic Plan, which in a similar vein to Shop Pay Off Platform, this allows non-Shopify users to actually begin to use Shopify. There's some really other cool stuff which we can get into like Sidekick and SimGym , which we think is the greatest co-founder ever created for every one of our merchants that knows everything about Shopify, knows everything about your business, that can help you make better decisions.
When you kind of zoom out from all those things, starting with the Agentic kind of the meta store and then exactly what we're doing at the ground level, I think you begin to see that we've really been building the rails for Agentic now for a number of years, and we are really well-positioned to take advantage of it. Whatever permutation may actually be the one that ends up being, you know, the go forward. In many ways, this is kind of what Shopify has been built for, and I think it's probably. I mean, anyone who's been studying it is one of the most exciting times of retail of the last couple of decades.
Excellent. We have this framework, in more recently, not more recently, on the team software we call our best athletes framework, and Shopify was our first best athlete. One of the attributes that we align to is speed and speed of innovation. You sort of talk a little bit about that with some of these new products. From a fundamental perspective, Shopify's always been about enabling these new channels for your end merchants. Merchants need some offline capabilities. You develop that for your merchants. Social commerce becomes a thing. You develop that. Can you dig in a little bit into the initial innovations, like the new product innovation that enables Agentic Commerce, product catalog you talked about, the universal checkout that you talked about?
Where are we in terms of like, are these products ready for prime time today? Two, are they being adopted? How broadly are they being adopted by your end customers?
I mean, the products are ready. The products are out there. We probably have about a dozen merchants that are already using it. The only reason it's gated is we're just waiting for the Agentic applications to continue to open the doors. I would say in the next couple of weeks, you will see thousands more merchants end up being live on these Agentic applications. Then over the next couple of years, maybe the next year or so even, you'll see millions. The products are out there, they're ready. If you look at companies like SKIMS or look companies like Gymshark or companies like what's another good example? Fashion Nova, for example. We probably have about a dozen stores on Shopify that are already live on these Agentic applications and effectively running all of the things UCP, their.
The Shopify Catalog has been fully built, which again, provides an aggregated every single SKU on Shopify, provides an aggregated collection and delivers them to all these Agentic tools. This thing is ready. I think what you'll probably see in the next 1 to 2 years from a Shopify perspective is you'll see more Agentic source GMV happen. I mentioned this on the earnings call, but maybe it's worth repeating. If you look at traffic to Shopify stores coming from Agentic applications, if you compare January 2025 to January 2026, it's about 15x. It's on a very small base, but you're already starting to see this thing begin to grow quite a bit. I think the next year or 2 you'll see more Agentic source GMV.
You'll see tighter integrations from Shopify to all the Agentic players. You'll see our own products develop even further back to that moat that I was talking about, that proprietary data moat. Things like Sidekick will get even better. It'll be able to predict the first thing that a merchant should do and the tenth thing they should do. It will predict where they should advertise. It's gonna predict what the next product you should sell to any given customer. I think while it's still very, very early days, the ramp-up of this is unlike what you described with social commerce, which I think took a little bit longer. Social commerce ended up becoming more of a discovery engine rather than a checkout tool.
What we're trying to build is this real for, you know, this anti-fragility in that whatever permutation ends up becoming the standard for Agentic Commerce, Shopify and our merchants are best positioned.
Got it.
Yeah. Keith, the only two points I'd add to Harley's comment, part of what we're doing as Agentic is enabled by catalog, right? We set catalog in motion more than two years ago. It's also enabled by Sidekick, which we set in motion more than two years ago. I think that's one of the things that we've done for a very long time, is be able to kind of look around two, three, four corners, see what merchants are going to need, and then start building that before people even realize they need it. Everything that we're going to merchants right now in terms of the Agentic Plan is a combination of all these things.
It also helps on the Agentic side. The fact that I think we've become the core partner for so many of these, so many of the most important Agentic application companies is because rather than showing up with, you know, a presentation or some sort of document, we show up with a working prototype. We showed them Catalog years ago. We showed them Agentic storefronts years ago. We started building UCP last year, and we announced it on stage with Sundar at Google, in, you know, January 8th at NRF. A lot of the things you're seeing now, yeah, we're only starting to talk about it now, but we've been building these rails for, you know, 2 to 3 years.
Right. Product catalog I think is relatively easy for us to understand. You guys are presenting the products of your merchants in a way that agents can well discover and kind of utilize in their algorithms. UCP is a little bit more complex. Can I start with a dumb question in terms of 15x increase in overall Agentic Commerce, UCP only rolled out in January of this year. How was the transaction taking place last year, right? That you're 15x-ing against, what does UCP change in that? How does that evolve that Agentic transaction for the end customer?
If you go back six months ago and you, and any of you using any Agentic application typed in looking for sneakers, you would effectively see a photo, which would then click into the online store. It was very rudimentary. It didn't talk about any of the attributes of it. You know, one of my favorite stores on Shopify is AG1, Athletic Greens, or another good example may be ButcherBox. These are incredible businesses on Shopify that have been built. They're category leaders. If you actually look behind the curtain of these businesses, the subscription side of it is incredibly sophisticated. Some people wanna double their subscription one month, or if they're on vacation, they may wanna pause it. They may decide that they wanna purchase in a loyalty program. In other cases, there's bundling, for example.
If you bought this particular product, you may also wanna buy these products. The original iteration of Agentic Commerce didn't anticipate any of those nuances. Actually, commerce on the Agentic application has to feel as rich as the, on the online store. We built this protocol with Google because we felt that what was missing from the discussion was the experience. It's not just about a checkout or a credit card off transaction. It's actually about all the other attributes of it. Another example would be discounting. If there are merchants who feel a particular time of year they wanna add a coupon code, or, I mean, loyalty is massive for a merchant.
Think about Alo or Vuori or On Running or, you know, some of these great Mattel, for example, some of these great Shopify stores, their loyalty programs are a huge part of their business. Without a proper protocol that anticipates the actual nuances of commerce, it becomes just a dumb transaction. We feel like our positioning, again, we have 14% market share in U.S. e-com. The only checkout larger than Shopify in America is Amazon. We feel like we had a position to go ahead and build a protocol to better anticipate what commerce will become when it's fully fledged on Agentic.
Got it. UCP enables you to really take the richness of the commerce transaction that you've already enabled on the merchant's site and bring that into an Agentic-
Open source it, so even if you're not on Shopify, it can be used there.
Right.
Actually part of, you know, that's the position we've always taken. Even when it came, you know, years ago, when we were beginning to see what was happening with things like Stablecoins, for example, or some of the new payment transactions that were happening, we've tended to always been at the forefront of it because we simply understand commerce in a deeper way, and I think that gives us the right to at least go to the table and say, "We think this is the way it should be done.
Got it. OpenAI and Stripe came out with a ACP or Agentic Commerce Protocol. Can you help us understand UCP? Is it a competing standard versus ACP? Can the two work together? How should we think about that dynamic? I'm old school. I'm thinking back to VHS, Betamax. Not very many people in the room understand what that is. Like, is there a potential for competing standard to potentially freeze the market and as we understand how, like, these are gonna be built in the future?
You take it.
Okay. No, no.
Simple one, actually.
Yeah, no, from our vantage point, UCP is, they're not competing standards. I think to a large degree, in terms of where commerce is going to go or Agentic Commerce is going to go, there's gonna be essentially an evolution of morphing of kind of where these are headed. Like, as you know, one of the things that Shopify has always done a really good job, and Harley just touched on it, is anticipating where commerce is gonna go, anticipating what merchants are going to need, and we wanna make sure it's as easy as possible for them to do this, so they don't have to, for example, deal with a bunch of different competing technologies. If I'm getting a lead from this channel or a lead from that channel, that's not what we want.
We want it to be easy as possible for the merchant to get on the Shopify admin, their dashboard, run all these transactions, see side by side all the analytics, and make commerce, Agentic Commerce, as easy as possible.
These things are gonna converge. I mean, that's the simple way to put it. You know, there's gonna be a bunch of protocols that come out, and they will eventually all converge, and eventually they'll be open source, and this way, that will be the new language for every Agentic service to talk to every single merchant. What we're bringing to the table is we think a much richer version of that. Like the ACP, UCP, and if there's another protocol that's gonna eventually be created, these things will converge and very, very soon.
Got it. Are you currently having those conversations with your customers? Do they understand the progression of these protocols?
Merchants don't care about that.
Okay.
They don't wanna hear about open source protocols. They don't even nobody even know what ACP might be or UCP might be. What they want from us, what they're hiring, what these millions of stores are hiring Shopify to do is to simplify all these things.
Mm-hmm.
You know, if this was 30 years ago, it would be brick and mortar. That's what the business would be, and we would help with that. Now, online store, e-commerce, it's still sub 20%, but it's obviously growing very, very fast. It's now a big part of all retail. You add social commerce. You add the ability to cross-sell in marketplaces. We integrate with Amazon and Target to make it really easy to push products to different surface areas. The idea should be, over time, depending on your particular brand and your particular business, you should sell on every single surface area where your consumer is spending their time. We have a Roblox channel where, which most of our merchants are not actually using.
Some of our merchants are seeing a ton of growth on the Roblox channel because their particular consumer is spending time there. How do they access it? In the Shopify admin, they go to the list of channels, they click Roblox, now they get to push products there. When a product is sold on Roblox, it's fed back to the admin. We are in the simplicity. The business is simplifying all these things, and that's what we're trying to do with Agentic, excuse me, with the Agentic storefronts, with UCP. We want to make it so that the merchants don't have to think about that. I think that puts Shopify in a position.
I, you know, I mentioned last earnings call that we brought in some really big brands lately, you know, brands like Estée Lauder, for example, or Birkenstock, for example, or Starbucks and Burton. When I meet with these CEOs of these companies, when I met with Stéphane, who's CEO of Estée Lauder, the main question that they ask of us is, "Will you future-proof our business?" Meaning, I don't wanna have to migrate ever again. The answer to these incredible merchants and retailers, from me and from Shopify, is unequivocally, "We got you." Whatever happens, whatever permutation happens, you are better off with Shopify than anywhere else.
Got it.
The only point I'd add, Keith, too, is just think about from a when you think about a macro investment thesis or kinda higher level investment thesis, Shopify's always had its strength in online commerce, and everything that's happening with UCP, everything that's happening with Agentic Commerce, probably at a minimum continues to help drive the percentage of commerce which is online from 20% to some higher number. To the extent we can help merchants do this, and there's a bend in the slope of the curve in terms of how quickly we see online commerce happen, that plays right to our strengths.
Yeah. we did a, in conjunction with our retail analysts and our internet analysts, we did this big deep dive on Agentic commerce, and we came to the same conclusion, right? T hat Agentic commerce is going to shift more commerce into online channels. In addition to that, we did a deep dive on Shopify and Shopify's role in that, and that's what kind of we came away with. Like, this is a positive for Shopify in terms of GMV growth, right? This is going to inflect the opportunity, inflect the TAM in terms of online retail, but also Shopify tends to gain more share when we get to these, like, kinks in the curve. I think investors are still worried about the economics of these transactions when it comes to Shopify. two questions in there. Like, one, is there more to the economics for Shopify on the upside in terms of stuff like take rate that we're not thinking about in our analysis?
2, are there risks on the other side of the equation? Specifically, I think the risk people are most worried about, is there a potential that the transaction comes up into the agent layer, right? That you guys no longer are conducting the payments behind that, because that's been a big part of the take rate story for the past decade for Shopify. Yeah, I think it's all taken 2 pieces. 1 is the attach rate, and 2 is just kinda how we fit within the transaction overall. We still are fundamentally the only ones really building the commerce stack for the merchants. Commerce, by definition, still needs to involve a transaction. We as consumers are going to buy something. We're gonna buy it from a merchant.
In whatever form we do that with the merchant, we are providing the tech stack for the merchant. Whether you're going to the website, whether you're going through an agent, however you may do it, we're still the ones that are providing them everything in terms of all their transaction history, their payments, their inventory, their shipping, Shop Pay. All that context is something where we have essentially built through the combination of all these things. Harley alluded to the three moats earlier. It kind of comes back to this in terms of how we think about everything that we can do for the merchant, and therefore capture the economics, which we think are deserving of kind of what we're doing.
Part of the reason also that I think a lot of these Agentic applications wanna work with us is, yes, they wanna work with us because of the catalog, because we have the products that every consumer wants from every one of your favorite brands. Pretty much everyone who's wearing sneakers here, those brands are being sold on Shopify. That's part of it. The other part of it is the trust factor. Part of why Shop Pay is so popular, it's so well penetrated, is not because we force it or default it on. It's because it is fundamentally the highest converting checkout, the highest trusted by consumers, if you look at unaided awareness. We have, like, Shop Pay is successful based on merit.
We actually think part of why these Agentic applications wanna work with us is for things like our checkout, is for things like Shop Pay, is for the catalog as well. To answer your question directly, the economics, whether something is sold on a marketplace or in the online store or even on something like an Agentic application, the exact same thing to Shopify. In fact, we think, as Jeff mentioned, we can see a higher increase in GMV because now this new surface area exists. In terms of checkout on directly in chat, you know, the way that social commerce actually happened was everyone anticipated that the checkout would happen directly in Instagram, which we were powering. In the end, it turned out that social commerce was a great discovery tool, but the checkout still happened in the online store.
Mm-hmm.
We were indifferent to where that was gonna happen because we powered the checkout. The same thing on Agentic. We're agnostic to whether they check out directly in the Agentic tool, we're powering that. It doesn't bypass Shopify checkout. It flows through our checkout. If they just use it as a way to find a new brand, and then they go to the online store afterwards, and they use Shopify checkout natively in the online store, it's agnostic to us.
Got it. I wanna shift gears and talk a little bit about Agentic Plan. This is for brands that aren't currently on Shopify. You enable them to syndicate their product to these AI surfaces. It feels a little bit like a top-of-funnel marketing initiative for Shopify, that you're getting people into your ecosystem, enabling them to sell, or potentially you to sell to them eventually. What's the go-to-market strategy for Agentic Plan? How do you get this into the marketplace? How difficult it is for particularly larger brands to engage with something like Agentic Plan.
Part of the reason that we created Commerce Components, which I think, you know, fortunately, you invited us on stage here a couple years ago to talk about that, Keith. There are some brands in the world who very large retailers, traditional retailers, a Hunter Douglas, which, you know, 1919, Mattel 1945, Birkenstock 1776, plus or minus a few years, who wanna sort of come to Shopify. They wanna migrate to us, but maybe they're not ready for a full migration yet.
Okay.
Years ago, we did this experiment where we did this thing called Shopify Commerce Components, where we took all the different parts of Shopify, checkout, our inventory engine, Shop Pay, all these different sort of tools and modules inside of Shopify, and we said, "We actually You can pick any of them on their own." What we noticed was it was a really wonderful, from a go-to-market perspective, it was a great way for us to start conversations with brands who may not otherwise have been ready to move to Shopify. We're doing the exact same thing here with Agentic Plan. We think that now there are almost every retailer large I'm on the board of NRF with the largest retailers in the world.
Every one of them has told me that their board, their executive team, is asking them what is their vision, what is their strategy for Agentic when it comes. We wanted to basically show up to the market and say, "Even if you're not ready entirely to move to Shopify, just start with the Agentic Plan now. We can help you syndicate your products right away, right now, with all the merchandising information and all the attributes of the product you require to these Agentic tools." Ultimately, what we hope will happen in a similar vein to the Commerce Components is that starts a commercial relationship, and ultimately they do a full migration to Shopify. That's where we're going with the Agentic Plan. It's being rolled out right now.
The go-to-market strategy is that we're being very loud about it, but we also have this massive funnel of merchants that we know have wanted to talk to us about agentic but weren't ready for maybe an entire forklift upgrade. We think the idea is to help them get started early and fast, but eventually, how do we help them fully migrate to Shopify, which has been incredibly effective on the commerce component strategy.
Got it.
The only thing I'd add is it's in their self-interest that make sure that they use Catalog because why would you rather have someone go and search and find something which is maybe a screen scrape versus they actually go, they do a search, it connects back into the Shopify Catalog, and everything that the merchant spent time on in terms of the product images, the descriptions, the specifications, all that stuff is captured in the way it was intended to by the merchant, is just a better solution for them.
Got it. Got it. Can we look to any historical analogs, like perhaps Shop Pay, right? Like, it's something that you push out to either even non, Shopify merchants as a potential indicator of conversion rates or what we should expect on conversion rates of taking these Agentic plan, customers and making them full Shopify customers.
I mean, I think ultimately Agentic will operate similar to the Shop Pay commerce component or the checkout component as well, whereby in some cases there was an era of retail and commerce, and Keith, you studied this as much as I think anyone in this room has, where they believe their unfair advantage was building their own stack. That part of the reason they were able to differentiate their multiple or their valuation was they were, we're a technology company and a cosmetics company. That era is over.
Yeah.
There is no cosmetic company, most of them are on Shopify, the ones that are not, we're in talks to, who believe that their unfair advantage is having their own homegrown commerce stack. I think we're past that point where people believe they have to build it themselves. To be honest with you, a lot of the enterprise, the traditional legacy enterprise software companies are not doing a very good job keeping up.
Yeah.
That's an opportunity for us. We see this wedge, we're taking it. Part of the way we're able to take it is to say, you know, the migration might take in some cases, you know, 6-12 months if they have a lot of, you know, ERP integrations and supply chain integrations to do. What if we can get you up and running within 3-4 weeks, simply getting you syndicated right now across every Agentic application? That is a very compelling pitch to make.
Over time, we, you know, over-deliver for them, and now we get to go back to them and say, "If you like what we did with your Agentic Plan, wait till you see what we can do with point-of-sale or helping you know, build a much faster online store or helping you with the, you know, Shop app, for example. You're not in there, you should be." I think the way that you're talking about it in terms of, you know, the metaphor of Shop Pay to Agentic Plan, that's the way we think about it also.
Got it. Let me just like double click there for a second.
Please.
A broader investor concern right now is code generation tools, right? The ability to use these solutions to develop much more quickly, much more customized to your specifications and exactly what you want. Why isn't this the easiest time for these brands to say, "Hey, listen, we could create exactly the front page that we want. We could create exactly the experience that we want because we have these code generation tools, and it's now just so easy for us to develop this ourselves rather than having to rely on a partner and pay rents to a partner like Shopify.
It's a good question. Look, for years, basically since the beginning of the company, since I've been at the company for almost two decades, you could replace Shopify with an open source e-commerce widget, plus some sort of payment provider, plus some sort of point-of-sale, you know, instance, plus some sort of cross-sell marketplace tool. You are asking merchants to do the thing that is the opposite of what they're all looking for. You are pushing complexity to them. At the enterprise level, no enterprise wants to vibe code a checkout. They wanna actually have the greatest checkout, highest converting, most secure on the planet. They want to be able to do, you know, we power flash sales for Supreme or for, you know, Taylor Swift or for the largest brands on the planet.
They don't want to vibe code a checkout that falls apart within the first 5 minutes. The enterprise, they're just not, they're not looking to cobble together a bunch of single-point solutions and create their own version of it. Even at the small business side of it, you know, you could have very easily, probably for the last decade and a half, used any of the CMS tools, any of the content management tools to create your own version of an e-commerce widget. It has no concept of inventory, it has no concept of loyalty or email marketing or supply chain or taxes or any of the things that you actually need. The reason that no one has actually built a large-scale store on any of these CMSs, because that's not what anyone's looking for.
Could you replace Shopify with a bunch of vibe-coded tools? You could, but that then you're pushing exactly the opposite of what everyone wants. You're asking them to effectively become human synchronization tools. They don't get into the right Agentic tools. It means they can't fully integrate into, you know, Spotify or Roblox or, you know, Pinterest or Snap or any of the channels that we power. It also means you don't get things like Sidekick. You don't get things like SimGym. For $39 a month, you get everything you need, and you don't have to vibe code it yourself.
I think from a value proposition, that is very, very compelling, and that's the reason why I think, you know, even well into this kind of Vibe coding era, you're not gonna see people cobble together five different systems and effectively become that human synchronization tool.
Got it. I opened up the conversation talking about the majority of the investor conversation or the investor concern coming out of the most recent quarter was on Agentic Commerce. There was a little bit of conversation on margins. To bring that into the conversation as well, Jeff.
Finally, something for Jeff. There we go.
Finally something for Jeff. You guys delivered $2 billion in free cash flow in 2025.
Yeah.
17% free cash flow margins. How should investors be thinking about free cash flow margins into 2026? How are you guys thinking about that trade-off between the potential of driving more margin expansion versus this big nascent opportunity that you're seeing with Agentic Commerce and the expansion of the business?
Well, I guess in reverse order. I mean, our financials, this has been for 3 years now, where we basically have been delivering this top-line growth and these free cash flow margins in any given quarter have kind of been in the mid-to-high 10s or low 20s, which is obviously what we've seen in Q4 and a lot of quarters. What you'll see from us as that continues, as we think about the balancing of the two, right? We've not suffered in any way, shape, or form in terms of our ability to invest in the future. You see this in Editions, which we do twice a year, and all the great products we've continued. Even as headcount has come down.
Stayed flat to come down. We still been able to crank out this many products, deliver this top line. There is not I talked about this a little bit on call. There's nothing in terms of how we think about it this year that's any different from last year or the year before. We fundamentally think we've got a very good balance between delivering these margins and continuing to deliver this GMV growth rate, this revenue growth rate, this gross profit growth rate that we've talked about. In Q1, I mentioned a little bit that there were some tax dynamics in Q1, but for the year, and I was very explicit about saying that's an inter-quarter dynamic.
There's nothing for the year that we look at and say, "This is any different than the excellence we've been able to put forth, the last few years.
I'd also say, you know, just on the headcount thing, I know that that's sort of the I don't know if that's a topic of the Morgan Stanley conference or not, the whole headcount thing. I know there's a talk happening around the corner from here on a company that's making some big changes. Shopify has not been growing headcount. In fact, just to Jeff's point, for the last 8 or 10 quarters or so, headcount's actually come down. I will also say at the same time the headcount's coming down, this is, and I say this with, like, with reference for the fact that I've been around for so long at Shopify, this is the highest quality talent team we've had.
The talent density of this company is as high as it's ever been. We think we can continue to do this really incredible top-line growth and provide $2 billion of free cash flow and invest in all the right places. I mean, for anyone that follows our Editions releases, which is our product releases, which we do twice a year, these big events, if you look at the pace and just the velocity of product releases on a biannual basis, it's unbelievable, and we're doing that on a team that is, you know, that's gone, we're below 8,000 now.
We've taken our medicine over the years. I think the iteration that we're in right now is very strong, super high talent team, grow top line, you know, 30% or so, $2 billion of free cash flow. That allows us to invest for the next 10 or 20 years and really not just take part in this Agentic new era, but actually lead this Agentic era.
Got it. We focused a lot of the conversation on the Agentic Commerce part, but there's a lot of other innovations. What are the other two or three kind of product innovations, Harley, that we should be focusing on in 2026 that you think could start to really move the needle?
I mean, I think, you know, we talk about Agentic, but we really talk about it from the consumer side generally, at least in the last 30 minutes or so, which is really the consumer side of how they purchase. I mean, anyone who's not paying attention, what Sidekick has built is truly unbelievable from an entrepreneur perspective, from an enterprise perspective. I was in L.A. this past week meeting our largest merchants and just showing them, like, on their own, tell me, you know, ask a question. like, ask Sidekick, "Who is your largest customer, your individual customer?" Now ask Sidekick what you should sell them next.
The ability to get this data at this incredible pace, not just that, it makes so that when we have a new feature that we think they should adopt, Sidekick is this amazing tool to push product to them. I think Sidekick is one of those things that doesn't get a lot of attention but is incredibly important. I think what we're doing right now around point-of-sale, we still have a lot of merchants on Shopify who don't use point-of-sale who should. Most stores, if all of you walk into physical stores, when you look at their cash register and you look at their point-of-sale system, it is like, it's terrible. We think that's a huge opportunity.
The stuff we're building internationally, this idea that when you sign up for Shopify, you are default global, you should sell across every country, we think is a really big opportunity. Maybe the last one, some of the stuff that we're doing around Shop, the Shop app itself. If you know, if any of you that have been tracking it, you know, for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend of the 4-day weekend of 2025, you know, not just in the shopping category, across every category, you know, the number 2 app was a Shop app. The Shop app is not getting a little bit better, it's getting way better. It's becoming a lot more consumers' favorite place to purchase, and it's an owned property of ours.
Those are some of the things I think that are, we still have not fully recognized the opportunity there, and that's what the teams are focused on.
Outstanding. Amazing pace of innovation coming from Shopify, amazing execution, which makes Shopify a best athlete for Morgan Stanley Research. Appreciate you guys coming in, sharing the story.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thanks, Keith.
Okay, bro.