Good morning, and thank you for joining Shopify's third quarter 2026 conference call. I am Shane Kleinstein, Director of Investor Relations, and joining us today are Harley Finkelstein, Shopify's President, and Jeff Hoffmeister, our CFO. After their prepared remarks, we will open it up for your questions. Today's call will include certain forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements except as required by law. You can read about these assumptions, risks, and uncertainties in our press release this morning, as well as in our filings with U.S. and Canadian regulators. We will also speak to adjusted financial measures and other non-GAAP measures, which are not a substitute for GAAP financial measures.
Reconciliations between the two are provided in our press release. Finally, we are reporting U.S. dollars, so all amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. With that, I will turn the call over to Harley.
Good morning, everyone, and as always, thank you for joining this call. It has been an incredible quarter for commerce. The velocity of development we are seeing across the entire industry is nothing short of remarkable. From the adoption of personal agents to the start of delegated purchasing to new tools that help entrepreneurs turn any idea into a business overnight, we have seen an avalanche of new interfaces, but it is all powered by the same load-bearing commerce operating system, and that is Shopify. I will get into the numbers shortly, but I want to take a moment at the top of the call to really land the significance of all of this and why it matters so much for merchants. Imagine for a moment that you are a retail business owner in 2026. Here are just a few things that might be on your mind today.
How is your online store performing? Is ChatGPT surfacing your products correctly? How can you drive up conversion in your physical retail stores? Is it time to start thinking about expanding into new markets? Do not get me wrong, these are all very good problems to have. This is truly the greatest time in history to be a founder. There is opportunity everywhere, and the more opportunity there is, the more complexity there is. The more complexity there is, the more our value goes up. The value of one unified commerce operating system connected to every surface area that customers want to shop on and every tool that teams want to build with, that is the real story behind this moment. For Shopify, that is what matters most.
As the world is finding its feet in this new era, there is simply no better place to be than where we are, and that is everywhere. Let's talk about the numbers. Q3 was another signature Shopify quarter. GMV was up 29.5% to $119 billion. Revenue was up 32% to $3.7 billion, and our free cash flow margin was 22%. We saw more of the biggest names in retail, from Balmain to MAC to Clinique to lululemon, all go live on Shopify. We delivered exactly what we said we would, consistent, durable growth yet again. The real story is hiding in between the numbers, and it is this. Shopify is uncommonly good at operating in two realities at the same time.
The agentic future we're building towards, and that everyone on this call is excited about, and the current reality for most of our merchants today. Here's what that looks like in practice. Since our last earnings call, personal agents hit the mainstream. Muse, Instinct, Claude Duet, Grok Bot, all partner with Shopify. Our merchants' checkouts are supported, and buyers can use Shop Pay as their wallet. We're powering product discovery across all major AI channels, from ChatGPT to Microsoft to Muse. These are the things that could drive real merchant success in the future. At the same time, we also rolled out an incredible range of new products and features across Shopify, growing our presence internationally, strengthening our offline business, and making our online store builder even more powerful. Those are the things that drive merchant success today.
Importantly, we balance both of these realities while running an exceptionally strong business. 32% revenue growth, 22% free cash flow margin at our scale. That is not common, and yet I get to repeat numbers like this every quarter. I mentioned merchant success in the future and merchant success today. Let's start by talking about the future first, specifically agentic shopping. While the volume is still small here, adoption is growing, and the early signals show that this has the potential to become a very powerful surface area. Here's what we're seeing. AI traffic is up 2.6x year-over-year. Orders are growing even faster at 3.3x. AI channels are sending shoppers straight to product pages at 3x the rate of organic search, and shoppers are converting 64% more often.
The numbers are certainly encouraging, but what's even more interesting is what products are being surfaced, and it's not the obvious categories. AI channels are surfacing highly specific products that fit specific customers with a specific need. Here is where Shopify Catalog comes in. Catalog-powered searches are converting at 2x the rate of general AI search. That is because Catalog is quite literally written for agents. It turns over 1 billion product pages into structured dataset, translating details like size, color, and material into numerical values that an agent can read and understand. It is not just a linear product feed. It is live, cross-merchant map for what is available across all of Shopify, with current pricing and inventory that helps AI channels make more accurate recommendations, and that makes it insanely powerful. Here's what is really exciting. AI is no longer just a discovery channel.
As I mentioned earlier, Q3 was the first time we saw shoppers experimenting with delegated purchasing through personal agents, who can also act on behalf of their users with their permission. In order to do that, they must earn their trust. Does it know what I like? Will it get my size right? Can I trust it with my personal information? For Muse, Instinct, Claude Duet, and Grok Bot, the answer is yes, thanks to Shop. Through your Shop account, the agent knows your preferences and shopping history. Through the Shop app, you can track all your orders placed by your agent listed right next to your other orders. With Shop Pay as your wallet, your payment details are already saved. You stay in control of your purchases, and your agent never sees your card details.
With Claude Duet, Instinct, and Grok Bot, that reach even extends beyond stores built on Shopify. Shoppers can now use Shop Pay as their chosen wallet for any merchant, no extra setup required. It just works. For merchants, this means reach, a huge new pool of customers with zero lift for them. For buyers, this means trust, a familiar way to buy in an unfamiliar channel. For developers and AI companies, this means access to world-class infrastructure. Now all the tools they need to build a shopping experience, including catalog, checkout, and the Shop network are in one place. We call it shop.dev, one stop, all commerce complexity handled. Okay, switching gears. Now let's talk about how we're helping merchants to build and operate more effectively with AI. As we predicted in previous quarters, commerce is fragmenting.
AI is not just creating new ways for buyers to shop, it is also creating new ways for merchants to operate, and that is what Shopify was built for. We have always been an open ecosystem, and that now extends to agentic tools. We have connectors with agents like Muse, ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, giving merchants complete optionality over how and where they run their business. This doesn't just give our current merchants optionality, it is also becoming an on-ramp for new merchants. Imagine an aspiring entrepreneur talking to ChatGPT or Claude or Muse about starting a retail business. The agent suggests they start building with Shopify, and then it helps them build their store inside the chat. Once they're ready to start selling, they sign up for a Shopify account.
Agents can effectively become ambassadors for Shopify, connecting new entrepreneurs to the platform at precisely the right moment. Of course, this is still a small source of new merchants today relative to our scale, but as more people use more tools to turn ideas into businesses, Shopify is part of that journey right from the start. Talking about turning ideas into businesses, this quarter, we launched the biggest update to our online store builder in our 20-year history. It's called Canvas. Canvas lets merchants build a fully bespoke online store simply by describing what they want to Sidekick. No coding or design expertise required. The store you can picture is the store you can build. It's only been live for about a month, but here is what we are seeing. Merchants are launching stores that are more personalized, and they're doing it 20% faster.
Anecdotally, this has been one of the most exciting things for me to watch roll out in a while. I asked merchants to tag me on X with what they built using Canvas, and the quality and the sheer variety has been truly remarkable, from handmade pottery to pet treats to band merch to vintage comic books. This is the Shopify that Tobi and I imagined almost two decades ago. Anyone selling anything from anywhere gets their own beautiful, functional home on the internet. I want to talk a bit more about Sidekick, which is still overwhelmingly the most widely used tool for our merchants to run their business, and usage continues to grow at an even faster clip in Q3. Daily active merchants are up 3.7x year over year, and daily sessions are up 4.2x.
There is an even more important story here than adoption, and it is just how capable Sidekick is becoming. In Q3, Sidekick created around two-thirds of all Shopify Flow. Remember, flows are those automations merchants use to take repetitive tasks off of their plates. Here is how that shows up in practice. I recently met a large furniture retailer who has built custom Sidekick flows for everything from warehouse inventory snapshots to delivery fee analysis to regional pricing checks. This is what makes Sidekick so powerful. It can be completely tailored to power a merchant's particular business. Now these flows extend beyond the admin into supported apps that merchants use to run their business. Sidekick is the only AI tool that can connect to them without the merchant having to set up manual integrations.
We want merchants getting the benefits of AI, not spending their time figuring out how to get those benefits. This is what makes Sidekick truly feel like an extension of their team. There are obviously a lot of tools in the market, and there is a lot of noise about which ones will come up on top. Here is what really matters. Shopify's critical advantage is that we do not have to choose, because all of them connect back to our platform, and that is what makes our incredible growth durable in the long term. I want to bring us right back to what merchants are focused on today. I recently hosted a forum for some of our largest and most active merchants alongside some of Shopify's leadership team. Guess what?
The merchants did not spend much time talking about personal agents or even AI-powered discovery or even delegating purchasing. They talked about the fundamentals: trust, growth, and simplicity, and we never lose sight of that. Let's first talk about how we are building trust. I mentioned earlier that Shop Pay is bringing trust to an unfamiliar surface with agentic shopping. That trust is built on 20 years of commerce experience, and it is also why we continue to see incredible brands bringing Shop Pay into their ecosystem, including one of my favorite brands, as I mentioned earlier, lululemon, who just selected Shop Pay for their North American online store. As history has proven, once we have a toe in the door, the upside is clear. More broadly, in Q3, GMV accelerated with Shop Pay grew over 50% year over year.
Both the number of buyers and the number of purchases per buyer keeps growing with Shop Pay, and Shop Pay Installments expanded beyond the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. into Australia. Now, trust also comes from the work we do in enhancing fraud detection. It is not sexy, but it is the stuff that really matters to merchants. We draw on signals across millions of businesses to help merchants spot risks, and in Q3, we added tools to automatically cancel high-risk orders even before checkout and explain why an order looks suspicious, helping merchants protect their inventory and their revenue. Of course, trust comes from the connected shopping experience that Shop has become known for.
Whether you are shopping on a merchant's website, the Shop app, or the newly announced shop.com, your preferences, your payment and shipping information, and even carts and viewed items all come together to make the shopping experience feel seamless and personalized. Speaking of Shop, GMV in Q3 more than doubled year-on-year. This is Shop's network effect at play. More Shop buyers, more seamless shopping experiences, more benefits for merchants. We continue to invest to make the experience even better. The second thing I mentioned that our merchants really care about is growth. These merchants are growing across channels, and as they grow, so do we. Let's start with our offline business. We hit a key milestone, crossing $200 billion in lifetime offline GMV this quarter. In this past quarter alone, Canada Goose, The Body Shop, BevMo! all launched retail locations powered by Shopify.
SKIMS launched its first international flagship in London with us, and MAC Cosmetics launched 84 locations just 120 days after signing with us. That is remarkable speed. In Q3, we made real progress on one of the oldest problems for physical retailers: not knowing their customers. We are changing that. Now, when a customer taps their card in a Shopify-powered store and opts in to receive a digital receipt, a customer profile is then created, so the merchant has a record of the shopper and their purchase history. They can get to know them, understand what they like, and they can even reach out to eligible customers to bring them back. The payoff is real. In fact, a known in-store customer has a meaningfully higher lifetime value than an unknown one.
This is Shopify turning point of sale from a sales channel into a growth engine, and that is a very powerful advantage for merchants. Let's talk about growth internationally. Our goal there is simple: to make global and cross-border selling possible, simple, and localized. The impact is clear. International GMV grew 32% in the quarter, and the work here continues. In Q3, we launched mobile-first solutions like Sign in with WhatsApp and WhatsApp Marketing and Messaging, which will be huge unlocks globally. We also launched a localized version of the Shop app in Japan, which became the number one shopping app in the Japan App Store the week after full rollout, which I think is really cool.
We launched new payment offerings globally that reflect important global nuances, like the rollout of OXXO as another local payment method across Mexico, allowing shoppers to place an order online and pay for it in cash at an OXXO convenience store. There will be a lot more of this to come in 2027. The last point I will make on growth is about discovery. As I talked about at the top of the call, shopping is spreading across more channels, more opportunity, more complexity, more ways for Shopify to help our merchants. Shopify Campaigns offers a risk-free way to reach customers across 10 channels, from Shop to Instagram to ChatGPT. That means full optionality for merchants. We are not biased towards any one particular channel, and they only pay when a sale happens. The momentum there is really building.
Year-to-date orders through Shop Campaigns more than doubled year-over-year, accelerating in the third quarter. That means more merchants getting discovered without needing to become advertising experts. It also means more traffic coming to the Shop app. Finally, I said our merchants really care about simplicity. Whether you are looking at the present reality of most merchants or the direction of travel we are heading in both cases, one thing becomes very clear. Our simple, connected, unified operating system is the moat. No one merchant can manage the increasing volume of surface areas to build and sell across, and nor should they. That is true for merchants of all sizes, including larger merchants. These businesses want their online stores and their physical locations to work together. They want their team spending more time improving the customer experience and less time maintaining the technology behind it.
As AI creates new ways to shop, they want a platform that keeps them ready for what comes next. That is why we continue to see large merchants join and scale across the platform, like Balmain, Givenchy, Jacquemus, Chaumet, and Acne Studios, these iconic names in luxury retail that all chose Shopify in Q3. Or Alice + Olivia, who scaled from a single founder to a globally recognized fashion label and who just decided to fully replatform onto Shopify after starting with Shop Pay and seeing it become their most used payment method. Or Omaha Steaks. I love this story. This is a 109-year-old company that was running on a custom stack built by their own CEO. They wanted a platform that can keep up with the pace of technology and allow them to focus on their business.
Of course, Omaha Steaks is coming to us as well. I will end on this note. There is a very special energy inside of Shopify right now. Tobi talks about it openly. We are giving people the tools and the room to tinker, to try an idea, to turn it into something useful for merchants. AI is changing what our teams can build and how quickly they can get an idea into someone's hands. Small teams can try more things, learn from what works, and build again. That makes taste and judgment even more valuable, seeing a problem we are solving, knowing what a great solution looks like, and then having the curiosity to go after it. That mindset extends well beyond engineering. All across Shopify, our team is rethinking how they work and what they can accomplish with these amazing tools.
Tobi put it this way in a recent note, "The early answer to how we make commerce common turned out to be simple. Just build great products for them." This is what we continue to do every damn day. With that, I will turn the call over to Jeff.
Thanks, Harley. Q3 was another quarter of strong, consistent execution. Before turning to the results, I am going to step back and provide some perspectives on our addressable market, as we have not discussed that in a while, and I believe that agentic commerce will expand our market. Commerce continues to grow globally, but in addition to that, there are two important things to keep in mind regarding Shopify's role and our future opportunity. First, we continue to power a larger share of commerce overall, and second, we are expanding commerce itself by helping more merchants survive and thrive, helping them discover new buyers, and lowering barriers to entrepreneurship. To my first point, the quality and capabilities of our solutions help our merchants drive a disproportionate share of global commerce growth.
Over the last three years, our U.S. merchants' online sales grew at a compound annual growth rate of 23%, compared to 8% for U.S. e-commerce overall. In Europe, we saw a similar pattern. Our merchants grew online GMV at a compound annual growth rate of 37%, compared to a market growth of 8%, doubling their share of e-commerce in just three years. These trends have accelerated. three years ago, Shopify merchants drove nearly a fifth of incremental e-commerce sales in the U.S. and nearly a quarter in Europe. Since the start of 2025, they now capture nearly half in the U.S. and more than 40% in Europe. To illustrate the platform scale today, in the third quarter alone, our merchants sold over $119 billion through Shopify, almost as much as they sold in all of 2020, the year everything went online due to COVID.
An entire year of Shopify GMV has now become a single quarter, and not even the holiday shopping quarter. To my second point, measuring our opportunity against the market potential that exists today misses a critical component. Our products do more than help merchants compete for existing commerce. We help create new commerce. AI is an accelerant for our market, simultaneously making entrepreneurship easier to try, but also raising the stakes for what success requires. In that context, Shopify is a merchant's not-so-secret weapon. We make the complex simple so that our merchants can focus on what matters, building strong businesses. We have always and will continue to change the economics of entrepreneurship. When your niche passion products can more easily find the customers they are meant for, you are more likely to build that business. Smaller niche markets are now not only addressable, they are not so small anymore.
With Shopify Catalog and how it is optimized for LLMs, more long-tail merchants succeed by matching buyers' specific needs, however unique, with our merchants' tailored solutions. Extending the long tail of commerce is helping create new commerce. in Q3, three-quarters of AI-referred sales yet again came from product categories outside our top 100. As entrepreneurship has become more accessible, that access has manifested inside our platform. Since 2018, the number of first-time sellers on Shopify has increased seven times. Moreover, we help new entrepreneurs reach that milestone faster than ever before. Last year, compared to just three years ago, 43% more stores made their first sale within a single day of signing up. We're not just finding high-intent entrepreneurs. We're bending the curve for how quickly they reach early success. AI and the AI products that we build are a rising tide lifting all boats.
We saw that wave coming a long time ago. It's why we started building Catalog three years ago, before agentic was ever in the lexicon of commerce, to make our merchants' product data reachable across all AI channels with high fidelity and high consistency. It's why we co-led the creation of the Universal Commerce Protocol, because we knew that in order for our merchants to take advantage of the opportunities inside agentic commerce, agentic commerce needed a shared language across the internet. It's also why we're actively driving other standards, like the Personal Agent Protocol, alongside other technology and retail partners, and why we have embedded Shopify into personal agents like Instinct, Muse, and more. We also recently released shop.dev and the Shop MCP, giving developers one easy connection to add Shopify's AI tooling, sign-ins, and checkout into their apps or agents.
We are embedding commerce across more channels and more surfaces. Our growing buyer network extends this leadership. With Shop Pay, customers can explore new merchants through new channels while maintaining the safety of the wallet they already know and trust. Businesses of all sizes benefit from the complex commerce ecosystem Shopify has built at scale. You may have seen our latest Editions themes was Exponential, apt when you reflect on the compounding return of our massive network of both merchants and buyers. These examples are all different expressions of the same underlying business model. We build more of what merchants need, expand what they can accomplish with Shopify, and participate in their success alongside them. Wherever commerce happens, however complex it becomes, we will continue to be the force behind it. Ultimately, the thesis is simple. To believe in Shopify, you really just need to believe in commerce.
Now let's take a closer look at our third quarter results. Q3 GMV was $119 billion, up 30% in constant currency, our sixth consecutive quarter at these levels of growth. The trends across all vantage points are very consistent with recent quarters. Growth was broad-based across merchant sizes and geographies, and remained evenly split among new and same-store sales. Starting with merchant size, the $2 million - $25 million cohort contributed the most incremental GMV and is the largest slice. Growth in this band was mostly from existing shops growing into this size. The $25 million and greater band is the fastest growing, albeit off of a smaller base. North America continues to deliver strong growth at scale, with GMV growing 28% in constant currency for the third consecutive quarter.
GMV in Europe grew 33% in constant currency, aided by our continued addition of local payment offerings across several markets. Similarly, we continue to build our presence in Asia and Latin America, with more tailored local offerings like those Harley mentioned. We also launched local currency billing in 10 new countries over the past few months. Merchants in these markets can now pay for their Shopify subscription in their local currency, making it easier for merchants to get started on our platform. Finally, looking by channel, beyond just online. Offline GMV grew 30% year-over-year, consistent with last quarter's constant currency growth. Large, complex, multi-location merchants continue to be our fastest-growing segment, with their total locations on Shopify up 52% year-over-year. Importantly, we are having greater success expanding our point-of-sale merchant base beyond just those merchants that started with us online and then adopted our offline solutions.
In Q3, 55% of merchants that added our point of sale were new to Shopify, and of those already selling, half are selling only in-store. B2B GMV grew 74%. We consider B2B a significant opportunity to expand the verticals that Shopify addresses. Interestingly, B2B GMV is much more distributed by industry vertical than online, and the fastest-growing verticals include home improvement and hardware, electronics, and business supplies for verticals such as retail stores, laboratories and medical, food service, and agriculture. These are categories that take us beyond our most prevalent online categories. Turning to revenue. Q3 revenue grew 32%, both reported and in constant currency, delivering on the expectations we laid out and accelerating on top of last year's strong 31% constant currency growth rate. Merchant solutions revenue grew 35%, driven substantially by the strength in GMV and increased payments penetration.
Our FX revenue contributed nicely this quarter again, commensurate with our increasing international scale, and has consistently been a source of growth within payments. Payments penetration surpassed 68%, up three points year-over-year, and Shop Pay GMV grew 50% year-over-year. We also saw growth in the broader set of services merchants use on Shopify, most notably this quarter in advertising. Subscription solutions revenue grew 20%, led by standard plan subscriptions. Equivalent size increases in Plus subscriptions and variable platform fees rounded out the growth in subscription solutions, with the variable platform fees growth balanced between more merchants exceeding their minimum volume thresholds and continued sales growth among merchants already above them. Q3 MRR grew 19% year-over-year. Plus MRR represented 34% of MRR, growing 18% year-over-year. As a reminder, MRR comparatively underrepresents the impact we're seeing from larger GMV merchants. Turning to profitability.
Gross profit grew 28%, in line with our guidance, and gross margins came in at 47.6%, consistent with the second quarter. Merchant solutions gross profit grew 37%, with gross margins expanding year-over-year for the third consecutive quarter. Our year-over-year and sequential margin improvements were driven by margin expansion in Shopify Payments from savings negotiated with partners across the full payments ecosystem. We also saw a margin uplift from increased FX activity and our advertising products. Subscription solutions gross profit grew 16%. Gross margins were 79%. On a year-over-year basis, subscription solutions gross margins compressed primarily from incremental AI spend on Sidekick, partially offset by efficiencies in support. On a sequential basis, our margins declined mainly due to higher hosting costs as we added capacity ahead of BFCM and some enhancements to our storefront resiliency and global search capabilities.
Although Sidekick drove year-over-year pressure in margins, on a sequential basis, we have been able to offset that pressure with efficiencies we built into how we deliver Sidekick. We have made improvements in model selection, distillation, and caching to support more usage at a lower cost. From Q2 to Q3, merchant conversations increased 14%, while cost per conversation declined 28%, and total Sidekick cost fell 18%. Cost is only one part of the Sidekick story. The more important measure is what merchants accomplish with it. That is our focus, but that, of course, also translates into our financials. Sidekick attracts more merchants to Shopify, which manifests in the financials and subscription solutions, and it propels more merchant success, which materializes in merchant solutions. Last quarter, we shared that using Sidekick's onboarding guide results in an 8% lift in merchants reaching five sales within 15 days.
This quarter, we can demonstrate benefits beyond that. After their first sales, Sidekick offers merchants a dynamic conversion guide to prompt additional conversion tactics in those critical early months as a business is launching. Examples include help with answering customers' questions, reaching out to customers with abandoned carts, and more. This resulted in a 3% lift in merchants reaching their next five orders in 60 days after using the guide. Incrementally small, but off large cohorts. That benefit makes a difference and shows the value Sidekick can bring in targeted, proactive merchant communication. Our gross margins in the third quarter reflect our deliberate work. We maintain discipline in the quality of our spend and discipline in the long-term value that we believe will accrue to Shopify. Now turning to operating expenses.
We continue to deliver operating leverage with operating expenses at 32% of revenue in the third quarter, down from 37% last year. Throughout the year, gross profit growth has outpaced operating expense growth by approximately 12 points each quarter. That consistency reflects our ability to scale efficiently while continuing to invest in the platform. The year-over-year dollar increase in R&D expenses quarter reflects continued investment in AI and our infrastructure and employee costs. Sales and marketing grew 14% year over year. The slightly slower Q3 growth rate resulted from testing that we did in the U.S. We paused spending for a couple of weeks in some channels and geographies in order to test the incrementality of our marketing efforts, which allows us to drive even greater precision into how we deploy the spend.
Some of the reduced spend will effectively shift to Q4, but nothing has changed about our marketing approach. Our free cash flow was $816 million, a 22% margin. I should point out that approximately 150 basis points of the year-over-year improvement in free cash flow margins stems from the structural operating discipline and expense leverage that we have been delivering. The remainder of the improvement results from items that are more temporary. The marketing tests that we did this past quarter, the timing of certain tax receivables, and the accounting change to merchant cash advances, with each of these three being roughly equally sized. The point remains, a very strong quarter of profitability. With that, let's move to our fourth quarter outlook. We expect Q4 revenue growth in the low 30s year over year. Our guidance reflects less than a point of FX headwind.
This outlook compares to a 29% constant currency growth rate last year. We expect gross profit dollars to grow in the high 20s. We expect Q4 operating expenses to be 29%-30% of revenue, reflecting higher marketing expenses, including some initiatives in advance of BFCM. Finally, we expect free cash flow margin for Q4 to be in line with Q4 of last year. Our free cash flow performance in the fourth quarter primarily reflects a continuation of the trends we saw in Q3, but with higher taxes from the timing of payments in certain jurisdictions that get paid in the fourth quarter. We do not expect any meaningful impact from the accounting change in merchant cash advances in Q4. A few thoughts in closing. Our opportunity remains substantial. We are serving more merchants and building more of what they need to grow.
We continue to drive a larger share of commerce. We continue to expand commerce itself. We continue delivering top-line results with proven consistency. Consistency of GMV growth, consistency of revenue growth, and consistency in the breadth of strength across regions, merchant sizes, and channels. Lastly, we continue to demonstrate strong discipline in our expenses. Our profitability is a combination of that discipline and the thoughtful planned investment as we build for the future. It took Shopify 18 years to reach our first trillion dollars in cumulative GMV. We expect to pass the second trillion by the end of this year, less than two and a half years later. That gives you a sense of how the scale of our merchants' businesses have compounded. With that, I will turn the call back to Shane for your questions.
Thanks, Jeff. We will now take your questions before turning the call back to Harley for some final words. Please use the raise hand feature in Zoom to ask your question. If you are dialing in by phone, you will need to press star nine to join the queue and star six to unmute yourself. Please limit yourself to one question so we can get to as many questions as possible. Our first question will come from Samad Samana from Jefferies. Samad, your line is open.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. Congrats on another strong quarter from the team. I wanted to see, Harley, if we could dig into the relationship with Meta and Muse. It has been a key investor focus. How is Shop working with Meta on development? How does it impact the payment economics depending on whether they use Shop Pay or Meta Pay or another option? Any early signals on what merchants are seeing from this channel in terms of conversion? We think it is a big focus and it would be very helpful. Thank you for taking my question.
Yeah, thanks for the question. Specifically on personal agents, I mean, as I mentioned in my remarks, certainly the last quarter you have seen a lot of them, whether it is Muse or Instinct or Claude Duet. I think one of the things we are most excited about is that this feels like a brand new channel for merchants. It feels like a new place where they can actually find new customers. The fact that Shop Pay is integrated as a wallet means that the agent knows your size, knows your style, it knows your shopping history, and then all orders get tracked by the Shop app as well. I would say it is still quite early. Momentum is certainly strong. The quality of traffic is really, really quite high, and that we think is really, really important. The agent is really just this new front door here.
We are everything beyond that. Every new interface needs this commerce infrastructure running underneath it, and that is what we are doing. I think the value is in the enormous complexity of commerce. The millions of lines of code that give the platform its power allows these agents to provide the best experience to the new consumer, and I think that will only continue as well. In terms of just agentic in general, not just the agents, I think what you are seeing is that every week or two, you are seeing a new agent or a new personal agent show up, and hopefully you are noticing that Shopify is the commerce infrastructure behind all of them. We are partnering with all of them. Volume, again, is small, but traffic we saw in the last quarter was 2.6x year-on-year.
Orders were up 3.3x, and then Shopify Catalog is powering discovery in almost every single major AI channel. The other thing that is really cool is conversion from Catalog is actually 2x the rate of general AI search, sort of what people call scraping. Maybe the last point I will sort of end on here is that we are seeing that these AI channels are really rewarding specificity, which is really, really important for the long tail of commerce, which is most of our merchant base. As we said, 74% of AI-attributed purchases in Q3 were from outside our top 100 categories. We are really seeing that these more nuanced niche products are getting found, and we have a ton of those on Shopify. The way that we see it is, Q3 saw personal agents hit the mainstream, and all the major ones are partnering with Shopify.
Our merchant checkouts are supported, and the fact that buyers can use a very familiar paying opportunity with Shop Pay as their wallet on an uncommon surface or a new surface, we think is going to be a huge advantage to both merchants and consumers.
Our next question will be from Andrew Boone at Citizens. Andrew, your line is open.
Harley, I wanted to stay on the agentic topic. As I think about the potential, and you talked about the potential of agents at large, of moving towards what is a headless version of commerce, can you talk about how that changes maybe the moat of Shopify? What happens to Shop Pay or the infrastructure and how you guys prioritize the roadmap? Thanks so much.
Thanks for the question on that. Here's Let me be really clear about that, because I think one thing that maybe is getting missed here is that with this entrance of these personal agents and the beginning of delegated purchasing, this is where agents don't just recommend products, but they're also buying on behalf of some of the users. Again, I said this in the last answer, but this is really the newest front door into commerce. This is very new behavior. Volume is, of course, small, but it's growing. In the new world of personal agents, Shop is not just a wallet. It is your complete buyer profile. When you connect Shop to Muse or Instinct or Claude or Grok Bot, the agent gets three things.
First of all, it gets your entire shopping history across any Shopify merchant so it can deliver these incredibly personalized recommendations. Second, with Shop Pay, it gets saved payment details, so you can pay the way you want with confidence the agent doesn't get that information. The connection to the Shop app means even afterwards, you're able to track everything you purchased. The fact that we have 400 million shoppers already trusting Shop and Shop Pay, now that trust goes with them into every single agent. We think that's really, really important.
So we actually think in a world of agents, in a world of agentic shopping, these tools, specifically the Shop tool and the toolkit that comes with Shop Pay, the Shop app, even UCP, so your checkout is exactly what you want it to be, what it is on your website, we think these become even more important. The one thing I want to zoom up just for a sec, because I suspect I am going to get a lot of great questions about agentic on this call. The way we think about this is that agentic ultimately is this incredible new opportunity for merchants. It is a new surface area that otherwise did not exist. As Jeff mentioned earlier, this is, we think, going to be an incremental increase to commerce.
He mentioned on the call, on his remarks, but since the start of 2025, we have seen an average, we have captured nearly half of all incremental e-comm in the U.S., despite only being 14%. Part of what you are seeing is a strategy to make sure that wherever consumers are purchasing, whether online or offline, on agents, on social, Shopify helps merchants connect to it. So with more opportunity comes more complexity, and actually, that is where Shopify's value goes up. By simplifying more complexity where there is more front doors, that allows us to play a larger role in the lives of the merchants that use Shopify. So we think actually with more of these channels and more of these front doors, we will actually play a larger role in the lives of the merchants that use Shopify.
Great. Our next question will come from Mike Morton from MoffettNathanson. Mike, your line is open.
Good morning. Thanks for the question. Maybe just a little bit of follow-up, Jeff, on the Sidekick costs. You talked about doing a good job, getting some leverage there on your token expenses. It is something that comes up a fair amount in the investor base, so just would love to maybe have some kind of guidance, not in like the financial way, but just you have talked in the past about subscription solution trend line at 80% gross margins. It is kind of two quarters in a row it has been below that and trending down. When you look forward and you think about your ability to serve merchants with Sidekick, but also get leverage on the token expenses, has your philosophy on that 80% gross margin trend line changed at all?
No. Mike, from my vantage point, what I would point, and I said this a little bit in my prepared remarks, I would go back to a couple of things. Number one, on subscription solutions, I talked about what we saw in Sidekick costs as well as also that being a blend of some of the other things we're doing from a hosting perspective. I feel really good in terms of what we're doing on subscription solutions. Again, I gave some detail in terms of some of the impact we're seeing on Sidekick. I really think we're doing some interesting things, and I reflect back to my comments in terms of essentially what we're doing in cost per additional inquiry versus usage.
We're really trying to drive usage on Sidekick because we see significant benefit, not only Sidekick may be one of these few products, not the only product, but it's just from a pure accounting perspective, obviously, the costs sit within subscription solutions, but the impact is really felt on both sides of our business, both the merchant solutions as well as on subscription solutions. I tried to do some of this in my remarks earlier in the call to just speak to kind of the benefit we're seeing and how that value is going to accrue more and more over time in terms of the success of the business.
You also saw from the outlook I gave, when you look at the gross margin implications for Q4 of this year, and you think about what that trend looked like both on a quarter-over-quarter basis as well as a year-over-year basis, we feel really good about what we're doing here on the core elements of the business. Some of what we're seeing in Q4 is going to be, I also alluded to this earlier as well, some of what we're going to see in Q4 is some infrastructure spend, which really speaks to us making sure in this super important quarter, the Q4 quarter, where obviously the big holiday shopping season, that we have extreme resiliency. We're ready to do everything our merchants need. So some of that's factored into the margins as well.
I think we feel really good about where we're heading on all this.
Great. Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney at Evercore ISI. Mark, your line's open.
Okay. You may have just answered a question I wanted to ask, which is your guidance implies this-
Mark, you might-
I think we lost you.
I think your line just cut out. Mark, if you come back in the queue, we will get you back in. Mark, you should be able to
Yeah, I am back. Can you hear me now?
Yes.
Yes. Sorry about that. Hey, just a little bit more on the free cash flow margin for Q4. You typically have free cash flow margins up sequentially, and maybe you just answered it with the last question about a little bit of extra infrastructure spend in Q4, and I know you had some small one-time items in the free cash flow margin in Q3. But just any more clarification on why you would not have your normal sequentially up free cash flow margin in Q4? Thank you.
Yeah, I think there is a couple things, Mark. I alluded to this in my comments earlier, that there is some marketing spend that has shifted effectively from Q3 to Q4 in terms of some of the testing we did. But more importantly, when you look what we are doing on the performance marketing side, the returns have been very, very good. There are some opportunities just going into holiday shopping season, what we have already seen in terms of putting some marketing dollars to work in a highly effective way, and that is Shopify. We are going to lean into opportunities like that, and I think that is exactly what you would want us to do. And even with that opportunity on the marketing side and some of the things I alluded to on the infrastructure side, we are still getting to these margins.
So again, there's a little bit of timing differential between the two, but between some of the investments on the infrastructure side and some of the investments on the marketing side, we're still delivering these margins. And when you look what that implies for where we will end for the full year, again, I think from an overall expense perspective, from a profitability perspective, nothing's fundamentally changed. I feel very good about where we are with this business right now.
Great. Our next question is coming from Ken Gawrelski from Wells Fargo. Ken, your line's open.
Thank you. If I could ask just two quick, please. First is just on the industry side, there's a fair amount of debate between horizontal kind of general purpose agents and vertical agents. With the full acknowledgment that Shop remains largely agnostic here, you have a unique vantage point and would appreciate your perspective, maybe Harley, on that one. And very quickly, just one more on the subscription solutions revenue. Could you talk a little bit about kind of the disconnect between subscriptions revenues decelerating while GMV remains so robust? Could you talk about the outlook as you think Q4 into next year for that line item? Thank you.
Maybe I'll take the first question. Look, I mean, I think you sort of answered the question yourself, which is our job is to be channel agnostic. The fact, I mentioned this in my early remarks, but while we're all talking and excited about Agentic and what's to come, there's so much white space here. At the same time, our merchants are still selling online, they're selling offline. Our job is not necessarily to predict exactly what channel will be the next big channel. Our responsibility to the merchant of Shopify is to make sure they're everywhere. So obviously, when there are some very large new agents that come out from some of the largest companies, we want to make sure we're front and center. That's the Muse and Instinct and Claude Duet style. But beyond that, I mean, we're also building WebMCP, which enables Agentic checkout.
Any agent can complete a checkout with any store. We also built shop.dev and shop.md, in fact, which are these are specifically for developers, one file that can turn any surface area into a commerce experience. shop.md on the shopper side is one prompt that turns your agent into your personal shopper. So, you are seeing us ensure that whatever comes out, if there is commerce integration or there is a commerce component, that Shopify is either directly integrated at day one, or we are creating these tooling like shop.dev and shop.md so that any third-party developer who wants to bring commerce into their application, whether it is a vertical agent or it is a horizontal agent, is able to do so very easily. The idea really here is to be too good to ignore.
Whether it is UCP or it is Catalog or it is the Shop app or Shop Pay, make it so that any type of Agentic tooling that wants to incorporate commerce comes to Shopify first and foremost.
Yeah, I would just add to your question on the subscription solutions piece versus GMV. Obviously, most of the GMV gets manifested in the payments revenue, which ends up on the merchant solution side. As I alluded to in my comments earlier, we do not try, and from a pure accounting perspective, manage to one piece of the business versus the other. The subscription solutions generally captures, again, the merchants which are being added to the platform, as well as variable platform fees, and then everything from a payments, tax, shipping, capital, et cetera, all that ends up in merchant solutions. So, you see this in the MRR growth. I mentioned in my comments, and you see in the press release, MRR was up 19% year over year. We talked a little bit about the marketing element of this too.
From a merchant ads perspective, we feel really good about what we are seeing there. This is, when you look at the revenue growth in terms of what we delivered in Q3, it being 32%, the guidance we talked about low 30s, that would mark the seventh consecutive quarter of revenue in the low 30s. We feel really good about where we are. The only other thing I would add is, as we get some of the larger merchants, the ones who just do more GMV, there is even a larger disproportionate share of value that comes on the payment side versus on the subscription solution side. So, we think about these two together, and we want to add great merchants to the platform, and then obviously over time, and we have talked about cohorts in the past, over time, they continues to generate more and more revenues for us.
So, we feel really good about where it is.
Great. Our next question will come from Jim Callahan from Piper Sandler. Jim, your line's open.
Hi, thanks for taking the question. Just curious on the marketing tests. Understand some of this will reverse in Q4, but curious what the conclusion of the test was, and maybe could this have had any top line impact in the quarter? Thank you.
No, no top line impact. This is- This was testing in some channels, in some geographies, and I would just say what we're always trying to do, Jim, is just get smarter and hone even further the accuracy of our analysis, and it gives us a lot of confidence in the returns we're seeing. No change in marketing philosophy, no change in terms of how we lean on performance marketing. We just want to always be smarter and better at what we're doing. And again, the returns have been very compelling. So, every now and then, you make sure you're doing your best to analyze returns and make sure that next incremental dollar of marketing spend is employed very wisely.
One of the things that I think is most remarkable about the business model here is that our model has this breadth of growth levers. It is not a single bet on one growth curve. We have sort of this portfolio of core commerce and payments, international, agentic enterprise. In any given quarter, some will be stronger than the others, but the durability, I think, of the story is the compounding strength across that set. International GMV was up 32%, B2B saw 74% growth. Offline GMV was up 30%. We crossed the $200 billion mark for offline GMV, and then you have enterprise as well.
What we try to think about is sort of this portfolio of bets and making sure that whatever is to come, we are front and center, but also making sure that we are able to Shopify ultimately is a growth company, and we want to stay focused on driving merchants' growth. In turn, that fuels our growth. There is never necessarily one particular place we put all our eggs in because we have this portfolio of opportunities, and I think that actually talks to the durability of this business model.
Our next question is from Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Thank you for taking my question. Could I please follow up on agentic commerce? When we think about the economics and how economics will evolve, how will it work in your view? Will the merchants be paying a certain take rate, or will you be sharing the economics with these agents? How does this evolve in the near term and maybe mid to long term? How do the agents choose Shop Pay? If I, as a consumer, have set up Shop Pay and other forms of payment, how do these agents default to Shop Pay as the option? Thank you.
Yeah, maybe I'll take the second part of the question, and Jeff can do the first part on monetization. That's the best part of Shop Pay. Because we have 400 million consumers that are using it constantly across all their favorite brands, we want to make sure that when the consumer is using any agent that they want and Shop Pay is available, that's the one they select. Ultimately, this is about ensuring that consumers have an amazing experience, that they're able to get the right credit card information, the right sizing, the right merchandising of the product they want and able to purchase it.
Part of the reason why we're beginning to talk more about Shop as this suite of products with Shop Pay, with your preferences, with your order tracking, is that ultimately, we think that when consumers are given a number of different options, they're going to pick the option that is best for them, that results with the best experience, high security, it is fast, but it also knows the details of their purchase history, and that's what they get with Shop Pay. So, this is about merit, and we believe that we can compete on merit to get more consumers to use it.
Yeah, and to Harley's point, on that very point he just made, what we're trying to do is make sure, of course, more and more merchants use Shopify as their core platform. If you start, to your question, Shweta, if you start, for example, on Muse, and if you as a consumer then do a search which leads to a merchant which is using Shopify, then the economics to us are exactly the same. Essentially, this is another form of discovery. They're sending you to the merchant's website, and everything else that you would have done in any other form of discovery ends up to the same economics back to Shopify. Then to Harley's point, what we're trying to make sure we do is get Shop Pay out there more and more in terms of a wallet perspective and continue to expand the economics on that front as well.
Our next question is from Paul Treiber with RBC Capital Markets. Your line's open.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Shopify, during the quarter, bought shop.com for about $100 million. It is a fairly sizable amount. How do you think about shop.com coexisting with merchant websites and other channels? The second question is, why now, particularly in light of the rise of AI agents? What is the importance of having a centralized location?
Yeah. Look, in the physical retail world, location, location matters. We think the same thing applies on the internet as well, and we think shop.com is an incredible prime address for us. I think the way you should view this is this is a declaration that we are ready for a more ambitious posture for Shop. We wanted to make a deliberate investment to Shop's credibility and discoverability as a consumer shopping destination, not just a tracking utility. We think this is a really convenient, very easy entry point for shoppers to discover incredible brands and products. The transition required no action from merchants, and shopper traffic to Shop is growing even faster on the web than in the app. So, this was us moving basically the Shop. We were at shop.app previously. We are moving to shop.com.
We think this is one of the most important locations on the internet, and that really matters to us. I think you can sort of glean from this what our ambition is with Shop.
Our next question is from Colin Sebastian with Baird. Your line is open.
Thanks. Good morning, and I appreciate the questions. Harley, what is helping Shopify win more of these point-of-sale merchants that did not start with you online, and is that changing your approach to acquiring those? Then maybe a follow-up on all the questions around variable economics with Agentic. As Sidekick takes on more merchant workflows and the product catalog is now really critical for powering Agentic, are you thinking about translating that value into higher monetization, or is it more about expanding Shopify's share of overall retail? Thank you.
On the point of sale and the retail side, this certainly was an incredible quarter for offline. I mentioned that lifetime POS GMV crossed $300 billion in Q3. GMV was up 30%. We had Canada Goose, who brought on dozens of locations. BevMo! brought over 150 locations. The Body Shop, MAC Cosmetics added 83 locations in under 90 days. So, what we are seeing is that offline is not a separate business. It is the same platform, the same catalog, the same buyer relationships. It is just extended into the physical world. I think we are seeing more businesses with very established brick-and-mortar businesses of their own come into Shopify for this unified commerce capability. It is great when we get a point-of-sale-only merchant to come on first and foremost, then expand.
What is also happening is the fact that new features, we just announced something recently at our Editions, but point of sale now automatically recognizes customers at checkout by using Shopify Payment Network in the actual physical store. That is something that never happened before. So, this brings sort of this digital-style customer context to physical retail, which frankly has never been the case. I think ultimately, whether it is expanding customer recognition and point of sale or it is expanding locations, we are now becoming one of the default places that modern retail goes, not just for online, but also for offline as well. I think, generally around enterprise, just because a lot of these very large point-of-sale installations are coming from enterprise is getting some incredible momentum here.
We are able to not only get some of the up-and-comers that are expanding, sort of the homegrown success stories are staying with us, but the fact that we are bringing on the lululemons of the world, for example, or Burton or Balmain or Canada Goose, who all went live in Q3. The pace of that, again, it takes longer to bring an enterprise merchant to migrate on, but we have really figured out how to get them on as quickly as possible, given the context and all their integrations. So, I think both point of sale and enterprise is going really, really well. What is the second part of your question? I think I missed that.
I think you got it, Harley. I think you got it.
Okay.
We're now going to go to Bryan Smilek at JP Morgan for our final question. Bryan, your line's open.
Great. Thanks for taking the question. Just curious on Sidekick, very good to see it continue to gain efficacy. Can you just talk about the product roadmap into 2027, across analytics, code generation, and Canvas more broadly? Jeff, just more near term, can you just elaborate on where you're going to allocate the incremental infrastructure spend into Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Will that be more across Sidekick or just broader platform volume? Thank you.
Yeah, it is amazing. For new merchants, Sidekick is helping get the first sale much faster, continue to grow. In Q3, we saw a 3% lift in the number of merchants reaching five orders within 60 days after using the guide. That's on a very, very large base. It is becoming obviously incredibly powerful for new merchants, but also for complex tasks inside the flow of running a business, whether it's these third-party apps that are now able to integrate. Merchants on average use eight apps to help them run their day-to-day business. That all integrates into Sidekick. Beyond that, you're seeing these incredible examples of power users who are pushing into this advanced design, doing SEO, product creation.
I think generally, you're just going to see Sidekick continue to provide more value over time, both for new merchants, but also, two-thirds of all Shopify Flow were created by Sidekick in this past quarter. The pattern should be very clear. More merchants are using it, and each merchant is finding more ways to use it, and over time, that value will only compound. Again, it's powered by 20 years of commerce experience, so there's that intelligence, and it also knows the full context of everything about your particular store.
Yeah, Brian, to your question about the source of the spend, some of it is Sidekick. There's also some interesting things we're doing on search capabilities. We've had search capabilities for merchants for a while. We're continuing to enhance that, make that even stronger. Storefront resiliency, again, as I alluded to, as you go into the big holiday shopping season, we want to make sure we are extremely ready to let merchants do everything they can in terms of sell as much as possible. There's some things on the storefront infrastructure that we're doing.
Great. Thank you.
Now we'll go to Harley for some closing comments.
Thanks, Shane. Maybe before we close, just want to leave you all with something. First and foremost, I think today's results reflect decisions that we've made, I don't know, probably three years ago. The work that we're doing right now, the new projects, new products, the new enhancements you're seeing coming out with things like Editions, that's going to show over the next three, six, maybe even nine years. Retail is obviously changing completely. New channels seem to keep emerging. Old channels are becoming big again. I think, I can appreciate from the outside, it may be hard to sort of keep pace of this. But through it all, I hope it is very clear that Shopify is unequivocally at the epicenter of all of this. We deeply believe this is one of the most exciting times in retail and commerce in a very long time.
As you see new companies or new technologies or even new models launch, where commerce is involved, Shopify will be integrated. That is not by accident. We work really, really hard to be the de facto partner for commerce on the internet, whether that means partnering or building it ourselves or collaboration. For those listening, if you're a shareholder, this is what you should want from us, to be the company not just betting on commerce, but also helping to architect for what is coming and executing on that vision, and the one that is constantly doing things, hopefully, that surprise you, which is how we stay ahead. I said in the press release this morning that Shopify is uncommonly good at operating in two realities at the same time, the world that our merchants exist in today and the ones that they are moving towards.
We do it for both new entrepreneurs making their very first sale, you heard the call from Dell at the top of this call, who just had his first sale, or the biggest brands in the world. I think commerce of all shapes and all sizes are coming to Shopify. There is no floor, no ceiling, and the products we're building is not just to help them right now, but also to future-proof them long into the future. Many of you have been betting on Shopify for almost 12 years now, since the IPO, and I think in that time, I believe we've earned the right to be considered a highly trusted public company because we do what we say we're going to do, and we do that reliably, and I think we do that durably, and we will absolutely keep doing that.
Thanks for joining us on this call, and we will talk to you all next quarter.
Great. Thanks, Harley. Thanks, Jeff. This wraps our third quarter 2026 conference call. Thanks to everyone for joining, and we look forward to speaking to you all soon. Have a great day.