SHOPIFY Q2 FY26 earnings call SHOP

Shopify is actively building foundational infrastructure to enable 'commerce everywhere' in the agentic era. Key initiatives include Catalog, an authoritative source for AI product discovery, which structures merchant product data for AI partners, leading to 2x conversion rates compared to scraped data. The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), introduced in early 2026, has seen adoption by dozens of retailers and platforms, making every Shopify merchant UCP ready and allowing builders to access product data, create carts, and check out using the protocol.

Agentic commerce is showing impressive growth trends, with AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripling year-over-year in Q2. New buyer orders from AI channels are arriving at nearly twice the rate of other channels. This growth disproportionately benefits smaller, specialized brands, with 75% of AI attributed orders in Q2 coming from outside Shopify's top 100 categories, indicating a structural advantage for the long tail of commerce.

Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, is seeing significant adoption and driving real value for merchants. Daily active merchants using Sidekick were up 3.6x year-on-year, and daily sessions increased 4.8x in Q2. It handled nearly 34 million conversations and was used to create over 36,000 custom apps. Sidekick's personalized onboarding guidance led to an 8% increase in new merchants reaching 5 orders within 15 days, demonstrating its effectiveness in accelerating early merchant success.

As commerce becomes more fragmented, Shopify's best-in-class checkout and buyer identity solutions are increasingly critical. Shop Pay surpassed $400 billion in lifetime accelerated GMV in June, serving as a trusted payment layer across new surfaces. The Shop App's native GMV grew over 70% in Q2, with features like Cartzinc contributing significantly, highlighting the value of known buyers and seamless shopping experiences.

Shopify continues to expand its reach internationally and in offline retail. International GMV grew 37% in Q2, supported by the launch of local payment methods in Mexico and the expansion of Managed Markets to Canada and the U.K. Offline point-of-sale (POS) GMV grew 32% year-over-year, showing strong momentum with large, complex retailers and delivering enhanced unified commerce capabilities.

Larger brands, including Guess, Fred Segal, Avon, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Claire's, Burton, and Suit Supply, are increasingly choosing Shopify to modernize their operations. The company emphasizes its unified commerce offering, exemplified by its expanded relationship with Arhaus, which now leverages Shopify for online, offline, B2B, and Shopify Payments, demonstrating the platform's ability to manage diverse customer groups and channels through a single backend.