Why 2025 was Shopify’s best year yet

After a bruising pullback in 2022, when Shopify’s shares sank amid slowing e-commerce growth, the company has spent the last several years reshaping its business. It pulled back from capital-intensive bets like owning warehouses, tightened costs with multiple rounds of layoffs and refocused on software — while beefing up its platform to appeal not just to small businesses, but also to some of the world’s largest retailers.

That reset is now showing up in the numbers. Shopify reported nearly $92 billion in gross merchandise volume in the third quarter, up 32% year over year. It was the company’s ninth consecutive quarter of 20% or more growth. Shopify has also reported positive operating income for nine quarters in a row. Over the recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, Shopify merchants generated a record-breaking $14.6 billion in sales, a 27% increase from 2024.

“Shopify has done a much better job of controlling operating expenses while still growing its core businesses,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co. “They continue to build more and more capabilities for their merchants, which means that not only do they grow with their merchants, but they can also add a lot more merchants. The more merchants they have, the faster they grow.”

Now, Shopify is under pressure to keep its momentum going. 

Shopify’s enterprise push

Shopify’s rebound has coincided with a push to make the platform more useful to larger, more complex merchants, without abandoning the mom-and-pop businesses that helped build its brand. For years, Shopify was best known as the default starting point for entrepreneurs launching online stores. But over time, the company quietly added the capabilities required by bigger retailers: support for multiple currencies and geographies, more sophisticated catalogs, offline selling tools and business-to-business features.

“Think about the complexities of bigger companies,” Luria said. “They have more geographies, more products, more complicated products, more tax restrictions. Shopify has added all those capabilities over the years.”

That expansion has helped Shopify attract enterprise brands that once relied on custom-built systems or heavyweight software providers. The result has been a growing roster of well-known names joining Shopify in 2025, boosting not just the company’s credibility with large retailers, but also the total volume of transactions flowing through its platform.

Shopify doesn’t disclose how many of its merchant clients are large retailers. But in the third quarter alone, the e-commerce technology provider said it won a number of major new customers: E.l.f. Cosmetics, Welch’s and Estée Lauder, which houses 20 big-name brands such as Clinique, La Mer and Bobbi Brown. Shopify said in its most recent earnings report that its subscription revenue grew 15% year over year, driven by a larger percentage of subscriptions coming from higher-priced plans; enterprise clients tend to use higher-tier, more expensive plans like Shopify Plus or Enterprise Commerce, which start at significantly higher price points of around $2,300 per month, according to Shopify’s pricing page. 

Josh Rice, who leads Shopify’s enterprise business globally, said large retailers are increasingly frustrated by how long it takes to make even basic changes on traditional commerce platforms. “We often hear from customers that it takes months just to deploy a new payment method,” Rice said. “On the Shopify side, it’s just a click of a button.”

Those time-saving gains have become more important as commerce grows more fragmented, spanning direct-to-consumer sites, social platforms and physical retail. Shopify’s pitch to enterprise clients is that the same features used to power a traditional online store can extend naturally across channels.

“Regardless of whether you’re in e-commerce, social or retail, the way the platform is built is that features and functionality show up across those channels,” Rice said. 

Bark, the company behind the dog toy subscription box BarkBox, recently migrated to Shopify after years on a custom-built system. Its decision rested on the need to focus on its “core value proposition” and minimize time spent “fussing with a checkout button,” according to Meghan Knoll, Bark’s chief experience officer. 

Previously, Bark’s engineers devoted considerable resources to site maintenance and bug fixes. Switching to Shopify freed up the company’s time to focus on launching new products, like Bark’s recent launch of a dog perks program and subscriber-exclusive benefits. These were ideas that “were talked about for years, and we didn’t launch them because of the level of difficulty it would take to integrate on the old platform.”

Shop Pay, in particular, has emerged as a selling point for enterprise clients. Knoll said roughly 42% of BarkBox’s new customers now check out using Shop Pay, which stores payment details across Shopify-powered sites and offers incentives like Shop Cash.

Integrating AI

Alongside its enterprise push, Shopify has spent 2025 positioning itself for AI-fueled shopping. On its third-quarter earnings call, the company said AI-driven traffic to its online stores increased sevenfold since January this year, and purchases attributed to AI-powered search increased 11 times over the same period. 

Shopify has been quick to embrace AI as part of its business model. The company partnered with OpenAI in September, enabling purchases from Shopify merchants directly within ChatGPT. Shopify has also partnered with other AI companies like Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot for in-chat shopping experiences. 

“We want to make sure that we become the best partner for these AI companies to work with and these agents to work with,” Shopify’s president, Harley Finkelstein, told analysts during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

Shopify has been keen to gain a first-mover advantage through its various AI partnerships, but the e-commerce giant still wants to retain tight control over how automated agents interact with its merchants, particularly when it comes to transactions. Modern Retail previously reported that Shopify added a “Robots & Agent” policy to the code that powers its merchant storefronts, directing “legitimate integrators” to use its official Checkout Kit.

For Shopify, maintaining control over checkout is crucial, as roughly 73% of the company’s total revenue comes from its merchant solutions business. This includes transaction fees and payment processing via Shopify Payments. The rest comes from monthly subscription revenue.

For BarkBox, the possibility of selling through AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT is still more of a longer-term opportunity than an immediate sales channel. Knoll described the opportunity as “really exciting,” even though shopping via AI chatbots is “still on the early edge of customers actually using that to shop.” She added, “We believe the world is going that way, and it’s really important to us to be able to future-proof our setup against those changes.” 

Inside Shopify, Rice said his team is harnessing artificial intelligence to enhance research on prospective clients, streamline technical assessments and provide more insightful support to clients. It’s “difficult to quantify” how much these AI partnerships are helping to onboard more customers, including enterprise ones, but “pretty much every customer wants to talk about this,” he said. They’re also asking Shopify, ‘How are you going to enable me to tap into and integrate with all the different LLMs that are out there?’ And that’s really part of the architecture approach we’re taking,” Rice said.

That’s why, in August, Shopify released new tools designed to more easily power commerce through AI agents. For example, the company introduced Catalog, which “simplifies the process for apps and AI agents to search and pull product data so the results are clear, accurate and up to date,” according to Finkelstein. Earlier this month, Shopify also released more than 150 updates centered on AI-driven tools; its AI assistant, Sidekick, has evolved from a support chatbot into a system that can proactively suggest changes, build automations and analyze performance. 

Still, it remains an open question whether consumers will shop within AI interfaces like ChatGPT on a widespread scale. While ChatGPT drives substantial traffic, it has yet to prove itself as a sales channel. A working paper from researchers at the University of Hamburg and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management found that referral traffic from ChatGPT converts far worse than traditional marketing channels like Google Search, email and affiliate links.

“The jury is still out on where consumer behavior will settle,” said Rick Watson, CEO of RMW Commerce.

Analysts are also divided on how much Shopify’s sandbox of AI tools will aid its enterprise client push. “I can’t imagine that the store that’s doing millions is going to just trust asking an AI to do the changes,” Mark William Lewis, founder of development agency Netalico Commerce, previously told Modern Retail.

But Watson said Shopify’s AI tools could be valuable for a range of customer sizes, particularly in a year of heavy layoffs for the retail industry when organizations must do more with less. Features like Shopify’s merchant assistant, Sidekick, can potentially save both large and small businesses time by reducing manual data searches and IT requests. “If you’re an individual contributor at a brand or retailer, it’s harder to do the job today than it used to be,” Watson said. “Having used them myself on some pretty big clients, it’s useful for anybody.”