Shopify reported third-quarter revenue of $3.74 billion, up 32% year over year, on GMV of $119.1 billion (up 29%). Operating income rose to $568 million, the free cash flow margin reached 22%, and Shopify guided Q4 revenue growth to the low thirties.
On the earnings call, President Harley Finkelstein said AI traffic to Shopify stores grew 2.6x year over year and orders from AI channels grew 3.3x. He said AI referrals send shoppers to product pages at three times the rate of organic search and convert 64% more often. Searches powered by Shopify Catalog, which structures more than a billion product pages for agents to read, convert at twice the rate of general AI search. Shop Pay now acts as the wallet inside several personal agents, including Anthropic's Claude Duet, and Catalog powers product discovery in ChatGPT, Microsoft's assistants and Meta's Muse.
Finkelstein admitted the volume is still small, and Shopify did not disclose the order base behind the multiplier. The cost of its Sidekick merchant assistant pulled subscription gross margin down to 79% from about 82% a year earlier.
