Shopify hits $101B GMV quarter as agentic commerce orders surge 13x year-over-year

Shopify hits $101B GMV quarter as agentic commerce orders surge 13x

Shopify's Q1 marked back-to-back quarters above $100B in GMV — the first time that's happened in the company's history. Revenue came in at $3.2B, up 34% year-over-year, with free cash flow of $476M. Harley Finkelstein says the company beat across all metrics.

Enterprise traction

The merchant mix is shifting upmarket. Brands including LVMH, Balmain, Bevmo, Orvis, and Land's End came onto the platform in the quarter. The number of merchants selling more than $100M annually on Shopify has nearly doubled in the last two years. Shopify now accounts for 14% of all U.S. e-commerce, making it the second-largest online retailer in North America.

Bevmo is a useful illustration of how enterprise entry points have multiplied. The company came to Shopify specifically for point-of-sale across its physical store network — not as a DTC brand, not for e-commerce. Finkelstein uses it to make a broader point: the number of reasons a large company might choose Shopify has expanded well beyond the original small-business e-commerce pitch.

On the small-business side, Grüns — introduced on this show roughly a year ago — started on Shopify in 2023, scaled to nine figures in revenue, and was acquired by Unilever for $1B. A new entrepreneur makes their first sale on the platform every 26 seconds.

“We've seen in Q1 of this year orders from AI searches are up nearly 13x year on year, and new buyer orders from AI searches are occurring at twice the rates of traditional organic search. We are currently the only platform that is selling inside of ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google. We now have about a billion products in the catalog.”

Agentic commerce

The sharper story in Q1 is the early data on AI-driven commerce. Orders from AI searches were up 13x year-over-year in Q1. New buyer orders from AI searches are occurring at twice the rate of traditional organic search, which Finkelstein reads as evidence that agentic surfaces are pulling people into digital commerce who weren't already buying online — e-commerce is still under 20% of total U.S. retail.

Shopify says it is currently the only platform selling inside ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google. AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores has grown 8x year-over-year. ChatGPT's in-app browser checkout now runs on Shopify's checkout infrastructure directly.

Finkelstein's structural argument on agentic commerce is worth taking seriously: unlike search, where ad dollars can tilt results toward incumbents, AI-driven discovery is more merit-based. A user who has spent months discussing running shoes in ChatGPT conversations is more likely to surface a DTC brand the algorithm judges as the best fit than to land on Foot Locker. That's a meaningful potential tailwind for smaller Shopify merchants competing against heavily advertised legacy retailers.

Universal Commerce Protocol

Shopify co-developed UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) with Google. Last week Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe all joined the UCP Tech Council, effectively confirming it as the emerging open standard for agentic commerce infrastructure. Finkelstein announced UCP earlier this year; the coalition that formed around it last week is the validation.

Shopify now has roughly 1 billion products fully syndicated across these AI surfaces through its merchant catalog.

The near-term bet: Finkelstein expects the next wave of breakout brands — companies going from zero to billion-dollar outcomes in two or three years — to emerge through agentic discovery. The infrastructure is in place; the proof cases are just starting to accumulate.