Shopify Stock Jumps 18% After AI-Fueled Forecast Beats Wall Street Estimates

Shopify shares jumped more than 18% Wednesday after the company reported second-quarter results that beat Wall Street estimates and issued a third-quarter forecast that eased fears AI chatbots would gut its business, according to CNBC.

For much of this year, investors worried that AI search tools and chatbots like ChatGPT would cut merchants out of the equation, routing shoppers straight to products without ever touching a Shopify storefront. Through Tuesday's close, the stock was down 23.4% for the year on those fears, plus concerns about rising AI infrastructure costs eating into margins.

Wednesday's numbers flipped that narrative. Shopify reported second-quarter revenue of $3.58 billion, up 34% year-over-year, beating the analyst estimate of $3.45 billion, according to data from LSEG cited by CNBC. Adjusted earnings came in at 42 cents per share, above the 40-cent estimate. Gross merchandise volume, the total value of goods sold on the platform, rose 32% to $115.57 billion, with growth across merchant sizes, product categories, and geographies.

The forecast is what really moved the stock. Shopify expects third-quarter revenue to grow in the low-thirties percentage range, well above the 26.3% analysts had penciled in. It also projected gross profit growth in the mid-to-high twenties percentage range, again beating market expectations.

AI as a sales channel, not a competitor

The company's pitch to investors is that AI search and chatbots are steering customers toward smaller Shopify-hosted brands rather than replacing them. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said on the earnings call that "AI search has been particularly helpful to some of the smaller brands. These are brands that also happen to make up the majority of Shopify's merchant base."

Shopify said AI-driven customer traffic and orders on its platform both tripled in the second quarter. The company has built partnerships with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft to help merchants get found through AI chatbots and search queries, effectively turning what looked like a threat into a new marketing channel.

Internally, Shopify's own AI tools are getting traction too. Daily active merchants using Sidekick, the company's AI assistant for store owners, surged 3.6 times year-over-year. Small and medium-sized businesses are leaning on it to handle tasks faster and cheaper than hiring extra staff.

Jefferies analyst Samad Samana told CNBC that "Shopify's guidance left no doubt in investors' minds about the durability of growth in the second half of the year, and the commitment to delivering margin expansion even with AI investments."

The margin question isn't fully answered

The bullish story has a real caveat. Rising AI token costs and cloud infrastructure spending have been a persistent worry, and CNBC's reporting notes those costs "sparked worries of prolonged margin disruption." Shopify's forecast for margin expansion alongside continued AI investment is a claim about the future, not a guarantee. Running large language model queries and AI search integrations at scale isn't cheap, and if merchant adoption of AI tools keeps tripling, so does the infrastructure bill behind it.

A company can grow revenue 34% and still see profitability erode if the cost of serving that growth rises faster than the top line. Shopify's own guidance says that won't happen through the third quarter, but guidance is a forecast, not a result.

Investors, for now, are taking the company's word for it. If Wednesday's roughly 18% gain holds, Shopify stock is set to recoup most of its 2026 losses, according to CNBC. The stock's swing from a 23% year-to-date decline to near breakeven in a single trading session shows how much of this reversal is built on the third-quarter forecast actually landing, not just on the June quarter numbers already in the books.

Shopify's next earnings report, covering the third quarter, is the number that will tell investors whether the AI-driven traffic tripling and the promised margin expansion actually showed up in the ledger or stayed a forecast on an earnings call.