How Agentic Commerce Can Fuel Shopify’s (SHOP) Market Renaissance

Shopify (SHOP) surged last year, so jumping in today feels like you’re too late to the party. The stock ripped higher on a wave of AI optimism, and the multiple now sits in a valuation stretch most investors usually avoid.

Yet when you dig into what the company is actually shipping and where AI-driven commerce is heading, you see it quietly laying the groundwork for high-quality infrastructure. This is not the Shopify of 2019, arguing about themes and plug-ins. It is more like an operating system for the next era of online retail. For this reason, I am bullish on the stock despite its seemingly elevated share price and expensive valuation.

From Storefronts to Agents

Shopify’s Winter ’26 release—branded “The Renaissance Edition”—is its clearest signal yet that the company wants to be an AI-native platform, not just a merchant toolkit. The drop includes 150+ updates, with most centered on AI, automation, and what Shopify bluntly calls “agentic commerce.”

Sidekick, once essentially a smarter help-bot, is now positioned as a proactive collaborator: it can suggest improvements, make workflow changes, and even generate code directly inside a merchant’s store. More importantly, it shifts the experience from “ask me a question” to “tell me what you’re trying to accomplish”—a leap that ultimately points toward higher conversion and stronger sales outcomes.

The bigger shift, though, happens outside the merchant’s own storefront. Over the past year, Shopify has integrated its catalog and checkout into OpenAI’s ecosystem, enabling consumers to discover and purchase products directly within ChatGPT. Winter ’26 extends that idea through an open Universal Commerce Protocol co-developed with Alphabet (GOOGL). Shoppers can now complete purchases inside Gemini and Microsoft (MSFT) Copilot. In November last year, Shopify reported that AI-driven visits to its merchants were up about 7x since January of last year. The company also noted that AI-attributed orders rose roughly 11x — a sign that agentic commerce is working.

Lastly, Tinker, Shopify’s upcoming mobile AI app, rounds out this picture from the creator side. Instead of forcing small merchants to juggle separate tools for design, photo editing, and product mock-ups, Tinker compresses much of that workflow into a single, low-cost app, enabling them to turn ideas from “in your head” into “live in your store” as quickly as possible. This sits on top of steady, unglamorous improvements, such as better inventory logic, multilingual and B2B tooling, and faster point-of-sale, that may not matter to the average plug-in developer but certainly do to an Estée Lauder (EL) or an e.l.f. (ELF).

Given these strong developments, it’s puzzling to see Shopify’s analyst coverage decline, including the loss of many strong bulls.

Macro Winds Turning in Shopify’s Favour

The macro landscape over the past couple of weeks has also turned into a quietly supportive backdrop for exactly this kind of business. Last month’s jobs report showed U.S. unemployment dipping to about 4.4% while the economy added roughly 50,000 jobs. Sure, that’s sluggish hiring, but not a collapse. That mix of cooler job creation and continued employment points to a labour market that is stabilising, which hints at strong gross merchandise value. Households still have paycheques, even if the bargaining power has shifted a little back toward employers.

Monetary policy, meanwhile, has gone from an outright headwind to a soft tailwind. Futures markets and the big Wall Street houses now expect the Fed to hold rates at its January meeting and to delay any cuts into mid-to-late 2026, after three reductions in 2025.

It looks like the Fed no longer feels compelled to slam the brakes because inflation is cooling and the labour market, while slower, is still functioning. For Shopify’s merchants, that translates into borrowing costs that have stopped rising and in some cases are already easing, which matters when you are financing inventory or a new storefront.

In the background, meanwhile, the consumer and their wealth picture remains surprisingly robust. Real U.S. GDP grew at an annualised 4.3% in Q3, with consumer spending doing much of the heavy lifting, and Federal Reserve data show household wealth at a record of roughly $181.6 trillion, driven by rising equity and home prices. I believe Q4 data will come in equally strong, supporting strong spending. Then, as tax refunds and still-positive real incomes filter through in early 2026, it is not hard to imagine discretionary e-commerce holding up well.

Q4 Expectation, and The Valuation Debate

That brings us to the uncomfortable part of any bullish Shopify argument: expectations. After its vigorous Q3, management guided Q4 revenue to grow in the mid-to-high-20 % year-on-year range, implying roughly $3.5–$3.6 billion in sales. Consensus has crept above that, putting Q4 revenue around $3.78 billion and EPS at about $0.51.

On a full-year basis, analysts now expect almost $11 billion of revenue and $1.45 in EPS for 2025, rising to ~$15.2 billion and $1.85 in 2026. At today’s share price, we get a 2025 P/E of over 100x and a 2026 forward P/E of nearly 89x.

To be fair, no one should pretend these are cheap multiples. They are many times above where mature software and payments names tend to trade. If AI traffic orders start lagging, for instance, that multiple could compress fast.

And yet, I still feel the risk-reward leans positive. You are buying a company that is already generating high-teens free cash flow margins while compounding revenue at over 30%. This is all while it has visible operating leverage as it scales. You are also buying what is fast becoming the standard set of rails for AI agents to communicate with retail. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and others can all integrate with Shopify’s catalogue, checkout, and loyalty logic without requiring merchants to rebuild their stack each time. These drivers could sustain superb top and bottom-line growth, justifying today’s premium.

Is SHOP a Good Stock to Buy?

On Wall Street, Shopify stock maintains a Strong Buy consensus rating, based on 18 Buy and 13 Hold ratings. No analyst rates the stock a Sell. In fact, SHOP’s average stock price target of $180.62 implies ~9% upside in 2026 following last year’s surge.

See more SHOP analyst ratings

Shopify’s Next Test: Proving AI-Era Commerce Is Real

Over the next few quarters, Shopify must continue executing. It needs to clear the Q4 bar, retain larger brands, and prove that AI-driven traffic and orders aren’t a temporary boost but a durable, structural channel.

If Shopify can deliver on that, today’s nosebleed valuation may ultimately look like the fair price of owning the backbone of AI-era commerce. In that scenario, I believe the stock can continue to generate strong returns—as long as the flywheel keeps spinning at this pace.