For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. Not only can it impact your investment portfolio, but it can also help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

The fear of missing out, or FOMO, also plays a factor in investing, especially with particular tech giants, as well as popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Shopify (SHOP) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to SHOP for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Shopify's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Shopify's main business drivers.

Ottawa,Canada-based Shopify Inc. is a leading global commerce platform that helps in starting, scaling, marketing, and running a business of any size. Its platform and services are engineered for simplicity and reliability, while delivering a better shopping experience for customers everywhere.

Merchants use the company’s comprehensive, multi-channel commerce platform to run business across various sales channels, including web and mobile storefronts, physical retail locations, social media storefronts, and marketplaces. Shopify offers an integrated back-end system that enables merchants manage products and inventory, process orders and payments, ship orders, build customer relationships and leverage analytics.

As of Dec. 31, 2025, SHOP had millions of merchants from more than 175 countries with 44% in the United States, 31% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 16% in Asia Pacific, Australia and China, 5% in Canada and 5% in Latin America (Mexico and South America).

Shopify’s rich ecosystem of partners helps in extending the functionality of its platform through the development of apps. As of Dec. 31, 2025 more than 21,000 apps were available in the Shopify App Store. 

In 2025, revenues came in at $11.6 billion. Shopify generates revenues from two sources: Subscriptions Solutions (24% of 2025 revenues) and Merchant Solutions (76%). 

Shopify generates subscription revenues through the sale of subscriptions to its platform and from variable platform fees, as well as through the sale of subscriptions to Point of Sale Pro offering, the sale of apps, the registration of domain names and the sale of themes. The majority of its gross merchandise volume (GMV) has been generated from merchants subscribing to Shopify Plus plan and enterprise offerings.

Shopify generates the majority of merchant solutions revenue from fees that it charges merchants on their customer orders processed through Shopify Payments. The company also derives merchant solutions revenue from other product offerings including lending and financial products, referral fees from partners and the sale of shipping labels.

Bottom Line

Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of a few things: research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in Shopify a decade ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.

According to our calculations, a $1000 investment made in July 2016 would be worth $38,205.36, or a gain of 3,720.54%, as of July 28, 2026, and this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.

Compare this to the S&P 500's rally of 242.16% and gold's return of 192.61% over the same time frame.

Going forward, analysts are expecting more upside for SHOP.

Shopify continues to expand its merchant base as new demand channels open up. The Q1'26 results showed revenue and GMV growth above 30% with free cash flow margins holding in the mid-teens, supported by higher Shopify Payments penetration and growing Shop Pay usage. Management is leaning into AI-led commerce through Sidekick, Catalog, and Agentic Storefront integrations that are lifting traffic and orders, while international, offline, and B2B remain key growth vectors. Guidance calls for Q2 2026 revenue growth in the high twenties with disciplined operating expense ratios. At the same time, gross profit growth is expected to trail revenue as payments mix rises and AI-related costs increase. Competition from larger platforms and a normalization in e-commerce growth remain ongoing risks for a Neutral view on the stock.

Over the past four weeks, shares have rallied 11.09%, and there have been 1 higher earnings estimate revisions in the past two months for fiscal 2026 compared to none lower. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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Shopify Inc. (SHOP): Free Stock Analysis Report

This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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