Shopify Q2 Earnings Says F*&!@ U to your Agentic Platform Replacement Thesis

Let me break it down for you. In an ever-complex world, merchants value simplicity. Shopify is simple.

You know what is even simpler than Shopify? Continuing to do the same thing you do today. Merchants like that too.

Witness it took Harley years and years of conversations with a merchant in his own backyard that he knows personally - Canada Goose - to even verbally commit to move to Shopify. We are not yet speaking about actually moving, just committing to move!

Add up both of these things, and existing eCommerce platforms are going to be just fine.

You know what is more complex? Asking agents to build you a new platform and then asking them to maintain it.

Many are asking you to believe that each merchant will end up maintaining their own unique software. Logic would dictate these would converge on something, well, simpler than millions of merchants asking the same agents to do the same g-ddamn thing.

But, oh the earnings, you say! Here are some key numbers:

* Shop Pay GMV increased by 65%

* European GMV up 49% (can you say European platforms asleep?)

* Merchant solutions revenue up 33%, Subscription Services up around 19%

* GMV and Revenue both up 31% (Q3 predicted mid-to-high 20s)

* Gross Profit grew 25% (!!)

Why did the stock go up so much? Wall St. believes they are sandbagging.

On tariffs: Crickets. No news (yet).

On Agentic:

My feeling is that digital wallets are still relevant in an agentic era - unless that purchase was not likely to be in a digital wallet anyway, and so this still does advantage Shop Pay and Paypal. But hold tight, it is highly likely that OpenAI will also have a wallet. And when they do, just like Amazon Buy With Prime, they will be forced to reckon with Shopify. Who will be there arms open.

Let's not forget, in the "everything is just a wrapper" world, Shopify is still a payments company masquerading as a platform (Don't believe me? Look at the platform limitations that spring up when you don't choose native Stripe Shop Pay).

Which even if you believe your agentic platform disruption thesis (shorthand for "not gonna need a platform"), you have to:

* eat and tear down all existing digital commerce into agents (gonna be a while)

* and not just any agents, but ones that buy without intervention (gonna be longer)

* and that's before you have to reckon with - oh yeah - pesky physical retail (not gonna happen - shopping is communal not just technical)

Still, agentic commerce is coming, but history will likely show us most of the spoils will go to the big AI powered incumbents who are not sleeping (Google, Amazon, Meta) and one new native entrant (in this case, OpenAI). Each decade seems to produce only one new scaled company - in this case, that name is OpenAI.

Everyone else beware - nichify yourselves.