Good afternoon!
Tomorrow I will share my monthly updates on my all 3 portfolios. Like always, this update will be available only by email to Premium subscribers.
Thank you,
Sorin
on Shopify
Excerpt from the interview of Ben Thompson with Michael Morton (senior research analyst at MoffettNathanson):
Ben Thomson: Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s talk about the Shopify one. We’ll come back to the report, but since you mentioned it — you upgraded Shopify to buy earlier this year in the face of the software apocalypse. I think the first time you were on, you had just upgraded Shopify as well, Shopify proceeded to get killed by the market right after that. You’ve done better this time — it’s been basically level, but where are you at with Shopify these days?
MM: Stocks are certainly humbling, and Shopify has the ability to be that one for me that gets me a few times.
If you think back to when you and I started doing these a few years ago, the operating thesis was that all roads lead to Amazon when it comes to product discovery. You either started on Amazon, or you went to Google Search and then ended up on Amazon — that was a very reliable thesis for e-commerce, and it made it really hard for merchants — for the sake of this discussion, we’ll just refer to them as brand.com. That’s Shopify’s customer base: these people trying to build direct relationships with you.
When we started doing the work on AI and how it was going to change product discovery, we found a couple of things. When I asked the models, “Who do you prefer the most, and what are the important inputs that help you rank where to send people for the goods?” — they said price, shipping speed, trustworthiness — and the clear favorite there was Amazon, then Walmart number two. But I’ve spent more time than I’d care to share running through product discovery experiences on all of the different AI platforms and I couldn’t help but notice I’m seeing a lot more brand.com in this funnel than I ever have.
..and
MM: I need to be able to show, “Here’s something we measured, and I can prove this is what’s happening”. What we started to do was measure the traffic that’s sent from AI platforms to marketplaces and then to brand.com and compare the growth rates between the two, and also look at them against traditional Google Search. We’ll call traditional Google Search the baseline, because we have to think about the world we’re in and where we’re going.
In traditional Google Search, brand.com would outpace Amazon, Wayfair, Chewy, eBay, Etsy — the marketplaces — sometimes by about 2x, depending on the time of year. And you should expect that, the top 25 Shopify merchants should be growing faster than Amazon, so let’s call it 2x the growth rate of the marketplaces coming from Google Search. When we aggregate the traffic coming from AI platforms — AI Mode, you name it — to the different marketplaces and brand.com, brand.com is outpacing what I’ll call the legacy marketplaces 4-8x.
Wow.
MM: So what you and I have experienced, “Wow, I’m seeing a lot more brand.com here”, is showing up in the data. I’ve loved Shopify’s market position for a while, and I think they’re only going to get stronger, but that’s not enough of a thesis. When I could actually see with data that the product discovery shift truly is favoring their base, it gave me the confidence behind the view that GMV is going to grow higher for longer than most people think.
In my post from 1st of March 2026 - Shopify - from store builder to commerce protocol - I concluded with the verdict of Buy.
It remains unchanged.
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