Great. Good afternoon, everyone. If everyone can please grab their seats. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are very excited to have Jeff Hoffmeister, CFO of Shopify, and Carrie Gillard, Head of IR, join us at the stage today for the keynote lunch session. Jeff, thank you so much for joining.
Of course.
Carrie, great to have you as well. Yeah.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Awesome. Let's kick it off with perhaps the most important topic of the conversation, right? Like, AI. You know, before we go maybe into the specifics of agentic commerce, talk to us a little bit about Shopify's product strategy with respect to putting more AI in the hands of merchants. We think about, you know, Sidekick probably as one of the most underappreciated, products that Shopify has built. There's a lot of discussion around personal super intelligence, coding assistance, and so on. Sidekick potentially could become the super intelligence software for merchants. Harley, characterized as a co-founder, you know, for merchants and so on. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, how you are empowering merchants with AI, what sort of AI tools do you wanna put, and where Sidekick fits into this.
Yeah. Maybe I'll start with Sidekick itself and then get to your point on kind of broader set of tools that we have. We are very excited about Sidekick, so it's good to hear that it's becoming slightly less underappreciated because we really think that it's very powerful in terms of how merchants are using it. Partly you used the term co-founder. It's also how we think about it internally, that's the derivation of the name Sidekick itself, which is meant to be that person that is really there on the shoulders of the founder, helping them think through all elements of their business. What we really try to do with Sidekick is encapsulate essentially.
I mean, we've been doing this for 20 years, so trying to encapsulate 20 years' worth of data, commerce knowledge, transaction history, pattern recognition, all those things into this source of advice. It's really meant to be much more than just someone, kind of an employee on your team to kinda give you some perspectives here and there. It is really truly meant to be co-founder level of guidance and help. We've, especially over the last six months, seen a real uptick in just kinda the breadth of questions that merchants are asking of Sidekick and the full, the diversity of the size of merchants. It's obviously something we pay very close attention to in terms of the types of questions that merchants are asking Sidekick.
Not surprisingly, as you would suspect, bigger merchants are asking slightly different questions than maybe kinda the one or two-person startup in terms of just how they think about their business. It is really truly meant to address any questions across the full spectrum, whether it's an element of analytics, whether it's marketing, whether it's expansion into a new market, go-to-market in general. All these things are really meant to help capture that. Therefore, from our vantage point, it's one of the pieces in terms of how we think about our product set in agentic. It's one of the important pieces, and it's something. I mean, if you go back to when Toby first put out the video on this, it's over two years ago.
Same is true of Catalog, which is also, and I'm sure we'll spend some time talking about that at some point too, but Catalog is another thing which we think is instrumental in terms of what we're doing for merchants to help them be successful in an agentic world. That's also something that we started two years ago. I think one of the things that we've consistently done is look a year, two years, five years out in terms of where we think this is gonna go and how do we start building the products for that. Both Sidekick and Catalog are demonstrations of that. Also just when you think about agentic in some ways, and there's a bunch of different lenses you can put on it, in some lens, it's a channel.
It's an evolution of some things that maybe historically were done in Google Search or other channels. From our vantage point, we've for a very, very long time, this has been one of the features of Shopify, how do you add as a merchant, how do you add channels? How do you turn off channels? How do you turn on channels? Give the merchant complete flexibility and control over how they think about that. Agentic commerce for us is some new products, but it's also a continuation of everything we've been building because really it's just an evolution of commerce.
Makes a lot of sense. You know, obviously the sentiment on how AI affects software kinda continues to ebb and flow, but there is still some perception that some of the software solutions can be disrupted with AI coding tools. Maybe talk a little bit about the complexities that Shopify helps merchants deal with, and perhaps maybe discuss why it's hard to replicate Shopify services with some of the generic coding tools out there.
Yeah. Well, it would be one thing if Shopify were just a website builder. I mean, I think the thing for us is that it's the full breadth. This is part of why Shopify has been, in our vantage point, helpful as an accelerant to merchant success, is because it is that full breadth of things that we provide, right? It's the payments, it's the website, it's the tracking, it's inventory, it's tax, it's installments, it's all these things. I mean, this audience knows well, I'm sure, our full product suite. It's a collection of things just in terms of the modules, the functionality, and then underneath it is obviously all the data and all the transaction history, all the customer information, all these things that the merchants have there.
It'd be one thing if you said, "Hey, it's one piece," and/or, "We have a bunch of little pieces, and we charge separately for these modules." That's not how we do it. It's this fully encompassed platform. It truly is a platform where I could, in theory, try and write code this or write code that. Sure. Do I, as an entrepreneur, wanna spend the time in theory, I don't know, writing code a couple dozen things, which in and of themselves then still don't have all the transaction history and data and perspective which Shopify has. It's so much more than one little app. That's really from our vantage point why we think we're in a position where we're gonna continue to deliver a lot of value to merchants. That's part of it too.
Like, if you're an entrepreneur and you're paying $39.99 a month, like, do you wanna try and write code a bunch of things? Do you have the economic incentive to do that? Or do you wanna spend your time for $40, or call it $40 a month, to really do everything you wanna do to build your business? Have the most powerful engine and all of that in one spot. It's the from our vantage point, it's a very compelling proposition for merchants.
Yeah. No, it makes sense. The complexities that you solve, particularly for the price point, makes it very unique. Cool. Switching topics a little bit towards agentic commerce, right? OpenAI's recent decision to move from checkouts to prefer apps. Was that surprising to you at all? Thoughts on that shift, and how does it affect Shopify and change maybe competitive position in AI assistance?
Well, I think from our vantage point, we continue, and I kind of alluded to it before, the agentic commerce. It's obviously still very early days, and we'll have to see how this all plays out. If you think of OpenAI as for a moment, just like you would Gemini, as you would all the LLMs, think about this as a way which is the evolution, as I kind of alluded to before, of search as a channel for merchants. We give the merchants the power to kind of access whatever channels they want in terms of how they think about it. OpenAI is obviously doing. I give them a lot of credit. They're doing a lot of great work to make sure, and they built a very strong brand and presence with consumers.
They wanna make sure that if you go in there and you put a search or a query, you're gonna get a very thoughtful, fact-based driven answer back. We actually think that's gonna be one of the things that's gonna help, especially some of our smaller merchants. When you think of some of the SMBs out there that maybe have not had the marketing budget that some other companies have in the past, this gives them a chance to have all their product details captured in a very fact-driven way in maybe a query which is more nuanced, longer question set maybe than they've received in the past.
If you're a small merchant and a consumer goes into an OpenAI search and types in something which says, "This is exactly what I'm looking for," we think there's a greater chance that really high-quality merchants will get their products discovered in that way. OpenAI has been a partner of ours for years, and obviously we continue to work with them on multiple fronts. The other thing that's come up at some point in the past on this, a couple times in the past, Deepak, on this is just kind of the economics, right? As we've talked about, the economics to us are the same, whether you as a consumer start on the OpenAI website and then go to the merchant's website, or if you just go straight to the merchant's website.
From a Shopify perspective, it doesn't matter to us. I do think that OpenAI and the LLMs in general are trying to make sure that they're doing everything they can to advance agentic commerce as a channel. As you think of kind of round numbers, as this group knows, roughly 20% of commerce is online versus 80% which is still offline. If agentic commerce really helps accelerate the percentage of commerce which is online, that obviously plays into our strengths, our powerhouse. Of course, we have point-of-sale and we have offline solutions. Online has historically been the area which, again, as I mentioned, has been our strength. To the extent that OpenAI and Gemini and Perplexity and everyone really continues to have more commerce being online, again, it's still very early days, that helps.
Maybe there's a steepening of the curve, a bend in the curve in terms of the pace of adoption, the pace of commerce, which is online.
Makes sense. Maybe just to play a little bit of a devil's advocate there.
Sure.
Like we're, you know, huge believers in agentic commerce, but if you think about e-commerce, it didn't really manifest in other channels like social media in a direct way, although they became great advertising platform.
Yep.
What sort of like, you know, consumer behavior or signals that you're seeing from the traffic that's landing on Shopify stores from some of these platforms that perhaps supports the thesis that e-commerce can accelerate, you know, and these platforms could become incremental e-commerce channels?
Yeah, you're right. To your social reference, I think social commerce did not play out or maybe didn't have as aggressive adoption as some people thought originally. It obviously still continues to be a source of discovery for consumers. That hasn't changed. From our vantage point on agentic, we partly gave some stats in terms of what we saw in kind of in January versus January in kind of a 15x in terms of consumer searches in an agentic channel. From our vantage point, one, again, it's early days. Two, while we think agentic commerce will have a positive impact on our business, we don't need it to have that impact for us to continue to be successful and to see the growth rates that we've been demonstrating.
We personally are hopeful about it with the early signs from us are very encouraging. If it doesn't materialize, then again, that's, it's a little bit of, from our vantage point, it's a little bit unexpected, but it's still so early. Like, as you think about true agentic commerce and how that looks, you're just not seeing a ton of that. You're seeing a lot of thoughtful discovery on, again, the LLMs in terms of kind of the full agentic commerce transaction. We're still very early.
Makes sense.
I would just add that, right, like our job is to make it easy for merchants to sell wherever their consumer might be. As agentic unfolds, if that's a channel or a way in which consumers want to buy from the brands that Shopify powers, we're gonna do everything we can to make that possible, make it easy, and make it something that they can do, right? If it takes off for a subset of merchants, that's great. If it takes off for all merchants, also great. The reality is that's kind of been our approach always. It's why we have commerce show up wherever the consumer might be. As this thing continues to evolve, like Shopify is very good at adapting and evolving right alongside it. I think we're excited to see where it can go.
I think we hope it'll continue to become a channel that many of our merchants can find new consumers in or build better relationships with existing consumers. But it is still really early days, and as with all of our other partnerships, we'll continue to monitor it and hopefully enable that for more merchants over time.
Yeah. No, it makes sense. Maybe go into a little bit more on the nuances on the payment side. We're starting to see protocols emerge very well to support AI commerce or agentic commerce, right? Like obviously there are two now on the payments, UCP and ACP, you know. Well, do you see meaningful differences between the two? Do you expect potential convergence between them over time? How does it affect Shopify to have two different protocols?
Well, I'll pick up exactly where Carrie left in terms of how we think about doing everything we can to help merchants be successful. To your specific question, Deepak, I do think as they continue to evolve, there will be some convergence here. I think what we are very focused on, as we've been on for years, on essentially all elements of merchant success, what can we do to make this easier on them? Really what we're trying to do with UCP is try to make sure agentic commerce happens in the way which requires the least amount of toil, the least amount of friction for the merchants. That's what we want to accelerate.
Everything from payments to checkout, to what's in the cart, to all elements of this, kind of whatever the LLM may be in terms of where the consumer discovery process starts, how do we help you have this be a channel which makes your business stronger, that gives you more sales, that helps you convert more, consumers that come to your website? That's what we're trying to do with UCP, and that's what we're trying to do with essentially all of our products in agentic. I think in terms of how this plays out, yeah, there's continued to be some evolutions. For us, this is not any, I don't know, sort of religious debate or anything like that. It's let's provide tools for merchants to have some success.
Got it. You mentioned that the economics for you with respect to, you know, payments is exactly the same in the agentic commerce. You know, obviously, I think OpenAI has efforts to build some kinda like a payment infrastructure, which Stripe is providing options for merchants, you know, not necessarily Shopify merchants, perhaps merchants in the future. How do you think about that as a competition for Shopify Payments over time? You know, do you think if that infrastructure takes, how does value prop of Shopify Payments need to evolve for Shopify to, you know, be a Texas sole provider?
Well, from our vantage point, we of course are always trying to make Shopify Payments and the Shop Pay button better and stronger, and that's why the Shop Pay button has the market share that it has. It has the brand pull that it has. It has the consumer appeal that it has. That's why when we go and have conversations with merchants, whether they're from the smallest to the largest, we can have conversations with them about the power of conversion that comes with the Shop Pay button. We're always gonna try and make that better and better. It's got the brand that it has because it is the fastest converting checkout out there. It provides all this amazing context around your purchase, around your transaction history, how quickly it loads, the speed, the ease of use, the conversion.
Again, like all those things. The Shop Pay button has had the success, not because, you know, Carrie and I put some big marketing budget behind it. It's had the success because we've just, from a technology perspective, have built what we consider to be an amazing product. From our vantage point, we're just gonna continue to build and evolve, and it continues. You see in the numbers, we talk about quarter in, quarter out, just in terms of the growth rates that the Shop Pay button and Shopify Payments is delivering. That's how we put it.
I also think, again, it comes back to optionality, right? Our merchants, we wanna give them optionality. Even on their storefront today, they have potentially Shop Pay. They might have other buttons on there as well because again, if there's a consumer out there who wants to use a certain way or a certain type of payment checkout, we wanna try to enable that as much as we can so that our merchants have, again, ultimate chance of getting the sale because the more their success will drive our success. It doesn't change as a channel evolves.
We will continue to try to think about how do we make it available to every merchant possible, the ability to find sales and convert those sales as effectively, as efficiently as possible, and hopefully reducing the burden put on them to make that possible by us building that into our platform and the offerings that we give to them.
Got it. You know, one of the other assets of Shopify, which I don't think gets enough credit is the Shop app. You know, although there are AI assistants that are driving some traffic today, it seems like the field is still pretty wide open for a truly AI-enabled conversational or maybe an agentic shopping app to emerge, you know, and empower customers to search and discover new things from a long tail of merchants. Talk to us a little bit about that opportunity for Shop app.
Yeah.
What product efforts are currently happening to truly bring in conversational and AI-centric experiences to Shop app?
Well, our Shop team would be pleased to hear you say that in terms of how you think about the opportunity because they think very similarly in terms of what we think we can do with the Shop app. I think I'm gonna tie it back to the Shop Pay button here in a second. I think one of the things that we've really seen with the Shop app itself, of course, we started this, as those of you that have tracked us for a while know, we really started this as a way to help merchants on the discovery of the brand for them. That when a consumer goes, when a quote buyer goes to the Shop app, how do they maybe find some things even on the merchant's website that they.
This is some of the merchant feedback we've had, that maybe they know a merchant really well, they go to the website, but there's things that maybe the merchant sells that they didn't really realize until they get to the Shop app. What we've been doing with it, and Harley's talked about this, I've talked about this in terms of building more features, to your point about the search, in terms of what we're doing on search and merchant discovery. Really it's gotten to a point along with the Shop Pay button where we've built a consumer brand and consumer awareness that I think those two will work. I don't wanna say a flywheel, but it's a little bit of an element of what we're doing on the consumer side and what we've obviously been doing on the merchant side.
To be clear, the merchant side remains our core focus, but we're finding a lot of success in terms of kinda how long people are on the web. We obviously look at all the metrics that you would think in terms of daily active users, monthly active users, time on platform, how often they come back, like all those things. Of course, we continue to track all that, and of course, we're continuing to do as much as we can in terms of innovation, in terms of how we fold in new technologies, new feature sets, new ways of discovery. You can assume that we're definitely spending time on how we continue to evolve the Shop app because I do think we have a real opportunity there.
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think the field is still wide open for a truly agentic experience in a lot of verticals, right? Like it feels like there's gonna be a lot of innovation on new experiences coming.
Yep
powering consumers with AI specifically for certain verticals, and you guys are well-positioned in e-commerce right there. Okay. We can keep talking about agentic commerce all day long, maybe switching to other topics. Shopify Plus business has been a strong driver to growth over the last, you know, two years or so, particularly in international markets. Talk to us a little bit more about the primary drivers of strength. What geographical markets are you seeing growth opportunity for the next two to three years?
There's a few in there. There's international, there's Plus, and then there's growth drivers. Maybe let's start with Plus. I mean, obviously just to make sure we're all on the same page, Plus is, I think many of you know, is effectively a billing plan, right? But it's a proxy for us serving kinda mid-sized merchants and larger, quote, "enterprises." You know, there's a question kinda how we've had the success in some of the larger enterprises, larger merchants, and then I'll talk kinda how that evolves in terms of your other questions. I think what we've really done, it's been a couple of things. Number one is. It's really been a few years now that we've made a pretty strong push on the largest, truly multinational, truly global brands, and you've seen that success.
One of the things we do on every earnings call is Harley talks through the brands that we've won, and we've also talked through the brands that are now taking live traffic from us. The implementation's done, and they're up and running with us. As we announce more of these brands, not surprisingly, there's less resistance from other would-be brands in terms of saying, "You know what? I operate in this segment, and Shopify has announced, you know, dozens, hundreds, whatever, in terms of merchants in this space. And so it gives me a lot of confidence as I'm the CEO or the CTO or whomever in terms of knowing that Shopify is going to be a great solution for me." From a technology perspective, the core platform has always been there.
Like, when we do flash sales, again, like the flash sales for some of the biggest brands out there, if we can handle that huge spikes in traffic in an hour, right, in terms of what we see, we can handle the biggest brands on the planet. That's not really been the question. The question's been a little bit more going back a few years and how do we kinda get the go-to-market motion to match that. It's part of the go-to-market motion. It's part of just kind of the snowballing effect of more wins bring more wins, which bring more wins. I think we've gotten to the point now with our successes that a lot of CEOs and CTOs of these big brands, and usually when we're going into these places, it's a displacement of a custom-built solution, right?
More times than not. I think we're giving them something that they've not had historically, which is a third-party stack, which is better, more up to speed in terms of what all the latest developments are, more agile, more flexible than what they've been able to build themselves. It's not an easy decision for a large merchant to shift, right? You know, as we've talked about sometimes, especially at the biggest brands, you may have a few different stacks internally, maybe because you did some acquisitions or maybe you just built it that way in terms of you have a low price, high volume and then a high price or the other way, the inverse.
In terms of how we think about their volumes, their stacks, their brands, what they want to do, what they want the stack to do. Sometimes for us, it's to start with a piece and continue to grow there. The platform demonstrates its capabilities. It's been working really well in that regard. Let's just-
Before you move to international.
Yeah. Fire away.
Which is the next one. The other thing I think that's important to think about on the Plus side of the business, right, and what's really unique about Shopify is this idea that they can start, scale, and grow with us over time, right? Part of what's driving Plus as well is those merchants who actually upgrade, right, or move up in plan because they are getting more complex. The more complex they're getting because they're selling more, right? The beauty of also what drives some of our Plus growth and expansion is that model working, that they can start, scale, grow, stay with us even as they get bigger and become potentially some of these multinational brands.
While we have a pipeline and we're getting more coming on, the cohorts that we have that are older who are just continuing to grow really, really well are also kind of graduating up into these higher kind of GMV bands, which is also very exciting and gives us a lot of kind of a really strong base to grow on for the future.
Sorry, one last thing on the kinda large merchants. As you think about what their needs most likely are, it matches some of the things that we've been introducing over the last few years.
Yeah
We put a push behind. We're doing a lot more in B2B than we were a few years ago. We've always had a element of our business as B2B because you may be a direct consumer business, and 90%, 95% of your business may have been D2C, but maybe you had a piece of your business that you were selling through some channel. We really took that existing merchant need, which we've been solving. In the last couple of years, we've really enhanced a lot what we're doing in B2B. We've enhanced a lot what we're doing in point of sale. We continue, and this will dovetail into international. We've continued to expand the availability of point of sale, and these largest merchants are more likely to have the need for all those things.
As all these other products continue to have success, then it really maps well with what the again, I'll use the term enterprise. I'm not sure it's the perfect term, but I'll use the term enterprise, 'cause it's a term that everyone I think understands and identifies with, that these large enterprises need. It's been a natural evolution side by side. As it relates to international, of course, we've probably talked about Europe the most, every now and then, and I in fact have called this out on a couple of my calls, and sometimes I feel guilty of not talking about the success we've had in the Asia Pacific region. Historically, that's been Australia, Japan, New Zealand.
Broadly, when you think about Shopify, we have merchants in I think probably at this point, essentially pretty much every country on the planet. We disclose our revenue by region, but that's just a concentration of where we have the most merchants, right? When you think about our presence and you think about our brand, it truly is international. For us, Europe was the region where we did the outside of North America, where we did the most new product releases. As you know, we introduced payments in 50 new countries in Europe last year, we essentially have Europe covered in terms of payments. As I just alluded to, we've got point of sale, an integrated point of sale solution in more of Europe now. We rolled out some of our buy now, pay later solutions in Europe last year, installments.
We just continue to make more products available in more countries. That, of course, not surprisingly, raises the attach rate, raises some of the success, and really helps us continue to build on that brand, that early momentum, and just serve more and more merchants. That's a playbook that obviously we can follow in other geographies. From a percentage of revenues, you know, again, North America is the highest, Europe is the second, Asia Pac is the third. You look at the percentage of revenues that we have in Latin America, in the Middle East, in other parts of Asia, we have so much opportunity. That's a multi-year opportunity for us, of course. It's really just for us making sure we get those products available in those markets.
Makes sense. You've diversified the SKUs pretty well, right? Like SMBs plus enterprise. Now you announced a new Agentic plan. Who is the target customer for the new Agentic plan, and what's the go-to-market strategy to bring more merchants?
Yeah. Well, the Agentic Plan is meant for all merchants. It's probably had the most initial early pull from some of the largest merchants that maybe have their own commerce stack, a custom-built solution like I alluded to before, and aren't ready to port their whole solution over to Shopify. Because essentially what the Agentic Plan helps you do is get all your products in the Shopify Catalog and make those discoverable in the most high-quality way by the LLMs. 'Cause if you think about it, if you're a large merchant and you spent all kinds of time, effort, dollars in making sure your products, just in terms of how they appear on your website, they have the right product descriptions, they have the right images, they have the right specs, they have the right details.
You spent a lot of time getting that exactly the way you wanted, and you don't want that subject to screen scrapes. What you want is the full encapsulation of that information in the way you intended, and that's what this plan essentially does. It gives a merchant. Again, we've seen the earliest pull from some of the larger merchants. They're like, "I can keep my existing commerce stack, but then what I'll do is I'll use the Agentic plan to get my products in the Catalog and discoverable, as I mentioned before, in the most high-quality way." Of course, from our vantage point, there is payments revenue attached to that, and of course, it gives us the opportunity to build the relationship with that merchant and continue to demonstrate them.
Especially as you think about the developments in agentic and how the needs of the stack are evolving, if we're the ones that we think are investing the most in this, unveiling the most products, really giving an opportunity for merchants to have this be a really powerful channel for them, this is just another demonstration of it. We're seeing that in some of the conversations we have with would-be, not just because of the Agentic plan, but with would-be customers on the large merchant sides. Because not that agentic is necessarily the thing that's driving the conversations on the sales side, but it's becoming a more and more important conversation in kinda what it looks like in a multi-year roadmap. It's just given us more and more differentiation.
Got it. Just to round out this topic, it's been a few years since you updated pricing for both SMBs and Plus. The value prop has obviously increased a lot. We talked about Sidekick, Catalog, and now merchandising essentially into all the AI assistants. How do you assess both the absolute and relative value for Shopify merchants versus subscription prices and take any pricing actions?
Yeah. We certainly think about, and I'll say that the absolute and kind of relative value. For us, it's a relative value of what we're delivering to you versus the price we're charging, and we're always gonna want that to be heavily in the favor of the value. So again, what we're trying to do is help you be successful, and that's as we think about everything that goes into the platform. That's why we're not charging separately for Sidekick. That's not why, well, it's why we're not charging separately for Catalog. That's why we don't charge separately for a lot of things. 'Cause what we want is a platform where you as an entrepreneur, as a multinational, wherever you fall within that spectrum, something that's gonna help you have a lot of success. Obviously, three years ago, we raised the pricing on Standard.
Two years ago, we raised the pricing on Plus. It had been when we raised Standard, it had been 13 years. When we raised Plus, it had been seven years. Without predicting exactly when we're gonna or if we're gonna raise prices, I do think we are just thinking more holistically around monetization. Of course, monetization can be kind of on the big numbers across the plan overall, or sometimes it can be very tactical small pieces in a specific country where you say, you know, we're gonna adjust pricing a little bit up or down in this geography. There's kinda the macro pricing and kind of the very specific pricing. We're always gonna be focused on delivering as much value as we can. That's just gonna play into it. Yeah, I don't know, Carrie, if there's.
Nope.
Makes sense. Okay. Maybe a few topics on financial metrics. How would you say or what would you say are the key areas of investments in 2026 and 2027 at a high level? You know, you've obviously made a ton of investments on tech infrastructure and marketing last year to build more value prop for the merchants and expand your, you know, capabilities. Should we think of 2026 and 2027 as more of the same? Is there any refinement in strategy? Perhaps talk a little bit more about those in high level.
I would say more of the same, but when I say more of the same, that's both. If you would've gone back a year ago or two years ago, when I say more of the same, that means working on the products that we have in the pipeline that maybe have not been unveiled. We continue, of course, to think about new products that we should be rolling out and constantly improving the products that we have. I think we do a really good job of saying, "All right.
This product, which maybe we built a year ago or five years ago or 10 years ago, as we think the tech stack on which it's built, when we think about how we designed it, how we architect it, is this still, especially with emerging technologies, is this still the best way, the best technology for this platform? If we are gonna make adjustments, updates to that, we do that. Obviously, with Editions, which we do twice a year, we roll out roughly 100 new versions, releases, features, functionality in each of these Editions. We're clearly continuing to crank on the product engine. At any one point in time, we're thinking about that duopoly of new products and always making the existing products better and better and better. I mentioned that when we talked about Shop Pay and we talked about Shopify Payments.
That of course can R&D product development, that pipeline is just one piece of it. I mean, to your question as I suspect you're getting to when you think about what goes into our operating expenses, obviously it's our personnel is a big piece. You alluded to marketing, product development, the infrastructure. We are definitely, and even as we think about all the different technology platforms out there, we're very conscious of, for this product or for this internal use case, what is the best platform? It varies a lot. We'll say for this internal use, we want Platform X, for this other internal use, we want platform Y, et cetera, et cetera, in terms of how we think about it. Will we continue to invest in marketing? We will. I've talked about that a lot on past earnings calls.
I think one of the things, going back to your question, Deepak, about Europe, one of the things that we've seen in Europe is that we get much greater signal now that we're actually spending more dollars there, and we've not changed our guardrails. This remains very heavily performance-based marketing. As we just had more success in Europe, we can support more marketing dollars behind it, and then as you spend more marketing dollars, you can get greater clarity on, for this channel and this geography, how do I get signal versus noise, and how do I have that be even more effective than maybe it was when we have just kind of fewer data points, for lack of a way of saying it. The marketing dollars have grown year-over-year, even though it's a percentage.
I've talked about obviously how we continue to grow that in a way it's sublinear to how we think about growing revenue. The marketing dollars will grow because we have more geographies that we're supporting, we have more products that we're supporting. We don't do a ton of product specific marketing. Obviously, as we have more success in a geography, again, it can with the guardrails in place, defend with the paybacks in place, can defend how we get more and more merchants in those geographies. Of course, from a personnel perspective, we're gonna make sure we always have the best people that we can have. There's been an increasing percentage of the employee base, which is based in R&D, not surprisingly.
We're gonna continue to invest in that, and we're gonna continue to invest in our people. I've talked a bunch of times on past earnings calls about how we think about merit-based pay increases, which we do twice a year, and just in general, how we continue to always make sure we have the best talent out there.
Yeah. Just kinda like a double click on the headcount and personnel.
Yeah.
We're starting to see obviously these AI tools get much better, you know, almost at an exponential rate to enable people do their tasks more efficiently. You guys have always been very efficient with your headcount for the last two years, almost keeping it flat. We're also starting to see many companies, you know, use AI for some of the other tasks and optimize their headcount accordingly, right? How do you think about that? You know, what would you say are some of the opportunities that Shopify has with respect to managing headcount with AI tools in the future?
Yeah. To your point, we've been disciplined with headcount for over a couple years now, right? In fact, if you looked at what we put in our annual, we don't disclose it quarterly, but in each annual report, we talk about the headcount and-
Yeah
... you know, we were down to 25% versus 24%, and 24% was down versus 23%. This is even with all these growth rates we've continued to deliver. A lot of that to date has just been how we've been really thoughtful around some of the internal software systems that we've built. For example, how we do project management, how we essentially do on top of the HR software that we have as a system of record, we built some things on top of that in terms of how we think about kinda personnel and how do we get the absolute most out of the team we have? How do we prioritize the things that they're working on? How do we make sure we're not wasting time?
I think we've done some very interesting things in that category, which has allowed us to keep headcount flat to even slightly down and continue the growth rates, continue everything we're doing and additions. As I alluded to before, there's been a little bit of a mix shift internally, right? We have versus what we've had in the past, yes, we have fewer people in G&A, fewer people in support versus in R&D. That's. I wouldn't say anything drastic, and it's a natural evolution of kinda where we think we can add the most value to the merchants. Are we doing everything? I mean, a lot of you, I'm sure, have seen Toby's memo from-
Yep
a year ago.
Mm-hmm. Almost.
Almost a year ago.
Yeah.
I think that speaks to how we're trying to make sure that everyone.
Yeah
is using the AI tools. I think we have been on the front end of that. We continue to push, we continue to be thoughtful, but we're a product company. We're gonna wanna use the tools at our disposal to help us build more things and make better the things that we have.
Great. Yeah. Maybe just a couple of questions to wrap up this great conversation we're having. The recent Supreme Court changes with respect to, I mean, ruling on tariffs, how does it affect Shopify merchants? You know, are you seeing changes to tariff collections? What is Shop doing to help with potential refunds and also help merchants prepare in this dynamic environment?
Yeah, I mean, I obviously need to stick to what we talked about on our last earnings call, and so there's two pieces to it, right? Right now, to your point, there's kinda refunds coming merchants' way, and the kinda flip side of that, we've talked the last few quarters now, really since April of last year, since our May earnings call, post the kinda April major tariff changes. We haven't seen that much of a change in terms of what we're seeing in our merchants. I have talked about some small price increases that merchants have done. This is across the basket of all of our merchants. Obviously, merchants, some have had to take more price changes than others, some have taken none. I've talked about trade routes. We've not seen much in terms of changes to trade routes.
I've talked about de minimis. I've talked about the various different trade routes in terms of kinda which channels and how that's all moved. It's not been significant. One thing I don't have as much visibility into is kinda the full P&L of our merchants.
Yeah.
Right? We have some sense of where they are in a sales perspective. Clearly, some merchants have had to think about if they're not increasing prices and they have had increases in their supply chain, kinda how do they think about those economics and the impact on their P&L. That I can't speak to as much. From the overall sales perspective, again, it's been relatively consistent. To the extent that, I'm not sure I have—in fact, I know I don't have any more insight than this kinda group as a whole in terms of how this may play out in terms of refunds and timing and all that.
To the extent that puts some additional dollars in the pockets of our merchants, then obviously from our vantage point, we hope they spend it on working capital, on marketing, and all the things that's gonna help their business grow.
Great. We will wrap it there. Jeff and Carrie, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
Yeah.
It was a great discussion. Yeah. We appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thank you.