The Zhitong Finance App learned that Morgan Stanley said in the latest research report that the rapid spread of consumer-grade AI agents such as Meta (META.US) Muse and Instinct has once again sparked market discussions on AI reshaping the e-commerce landscape, but the bank's views on Shopify (SHOP.US) have not changed. Morgan Stanley believes that the core advantage of Shopify is that it mainly monetizes from transactions themselves rather than traffic exposure, so whether consumers eventually discover products through AI agents, social platforms, or the merchant's own online store, as long as the transaction is still completed within the Shopify ecosystem, the impact on its business model is relatively limited.
Morgan Stanley believes that as channels for consumers to discover products become more scattered, the strategic value of Shopify as an underlying platform connecting merchants, product catalogs, checkout, orders, inventory, and returns may increase. The bank maintains Shopify's “Overweight” rating, with a target price of $192.
The explosion of AI agents has once again sparked e-commerce “disruptive” discussions, and Shopify may benefit
The rapid development of Meta Muse and Instinct has enabled “AI smart e-commerce”, which previously remained more at the theoretical level, to actually enter the consumer market. Morgan Stanley pointed out that these two products are the first batch of AI agents to actually receive large-scale consumer distribution, and this has become an important turning point in smart e-commerce discussions. At the same time, a series of events such as Amazon blocking Muse from directly completing transactions on its platform, and Shop Pay and Muse announcing access to all Shopify stores have also sparked market discussions on how future AI agents will connect with merchants, payment systems, and consumers.
However, Morgan Stanley believes that Shopify is probably one of the companies best able to manage, support, and monetize this trend. First, Shopify has a huge library of tradable products. Its Catalog already indexes over 1 billion products and provides real-time pricing and inventory information. Second, the company has advanced rapidly in terms of AI e-commerce infrastructure in recent years, including co-developing UCP with Google (GOOG.US, GOOGL.US), and starting Agentic Storefronts by default before most consumer-grade AI agents were launched.
More importantly, Shopify doesn't just master a single link in the e-commerce chain, but has a complete system covering product catalogs, checkout, orders, inventory, and returns. This makes it not only a participant in the AI agent era, but also an opportunity to become an infrastructure provider that supports intelligent transactions.
Making money without “selling traffic” is an advantage It doesn't matter where AI brings in orders
In particular, Morgan Stanley emphasized that Shopify lacks large-scale retail media business, and may instead be an advantage in the age of AI agents. Unlike platforms that rely on ad impressions and search rankings for monetization, Shopify mainly makes money from transactions. Therefore, for Shopify, whether an order comes from Muse, other cutting-edge AI models, or the merchant's own online store, it won't fundamentally change its revenue model.
In other words, AI agents may change where consumers find products, but as long as the final order is still completed through the Shopify merchant, Shopify can still earn revenue from transactions.
Morgan Stanley further pointed out that this “neutrality” also helps Shopify become a platform AI agents are willing to connect to. For AI agents, the real limitation may not be their ability to find products, but rather whether they can connect to enough merchants willing to accept intelligent transactions.
Through a single integration, Shopify can provide AI agents with real-time inventory and price information on millions of merchants. At the same time, from a merchant's perspective, the future needs to simultaneously handle more and more sales channels such as Muse, Instinct, Gemini, Copilot, social media, online marketplaces, physical POS, and own online stores. The more fragmented the channel, the higher the value of being able to manage product catalogs, orders, and settlements through a single platform.
The use of other wallets by AI agents does not mean that Shopify lost payment revenue
Payments are also one of the most hotly debated issues in the market recently. Morgan Stanley believes that there is an important misunderstanding in the market: if consumers shop through Muse and use third-party wallets such as Stripe's Link to complete payments, this does not mean that Shopify will be excluded from the transaction as a result.
The reason is that digital wallets and payment processors are two different levels of choice. The consumer, or AI agent operating on behalf of the consumer, decides which wallet to use; however, the merchant has already decided which payment processor to use when joining Shopify. The AI agent enters the checkout process and does not automatically change the merchant's underlying payment processing system. For example, if Muse generates a one-time virtual card via Link and submits it to a Shopify merchant's regular checkout page, and that merchant uses Shopify Payments, then Shopify can still receive full payment processing revenue.
As of Q2 2026, Shopify Payments already covered around 68% of GMV. Even if a consumer uses a third-party wallet, the financial benefits of payment processing remain essentially the same as long as the underlying payment processing is still done by Shopify Payments.
As a result, Morgan Stanley believes that Shopify's payment processing revenue is safer than the risk reflected by recent stock price fluctuations. However, it is the consumer “identity layer” that is really likely to compete. If consumers use third-party wallets such as Link or Meta Pay, which may appear in the future, the relevant wallet provider may hold consumer data and customer relationships rather than Shop Pay. Therefore, in the future, wallet portals in AI intelligence may still be the focus of competition among major platforms.
The actual revenue contribution from AI is still limited and should not be overestimated in the short term
Despite being optimistic about Shopify's strategic position in the AI smart era, Morgan Stanley did not significantly raise the company's short-term performance expectations as a result. According to the report, in the first 12 days of Muse's launch, the cumulative number of downloads in the US and Canada was about 2.8 million, and download users are not equal to actual buyers; Instinct still uses an invitation system, and the number of users is about 100,000.
In contrast, about 875 million independent consumers purchased products from Shopify merchants in 2024, and the market expects Shopify's GMV to reach about 500 billion US dollars in 2026. There is still a huge size gap between the two.
As a result, Morgan Stanley believes that it is still too early to directly translate the popularity of AI agents into Shopify's recent revenue or GMV predictions. The bank also hopes to see more evidence that consumers are willing to use AI agents to independently purchase general optional consumer goods, not just specific scenarios such as “monitoring when a product is restocked and automatically purchased”.
However, the data currently disclosed by Shopify has sent some positive signals. As of the second quarter, new customer orders from AI channels were generated nearly twice as fast as other channels; about three-quarters of AI channel orders came from product categories outside of Shopify's top 100, which means AI agents may help consumers discover “long-tail products” that are difficult to present with traditional keyword searches.
At the same time, traffic and orders from AI channels have both tripled, or about tripled before, which is in line with Shopify management's judgment that AI traffic brings new demand outside of traditional search.
Therefore, Morgan Stanley believes that the impact of AI agents on Shopify is at least neutral at this stage, and is expected to bring incremental growth to the company in the future as the scale of applications expands.
AI agents still have four major problems to be solved for a long time
However, Morgan Stanley believes that after AI robots actually become mainstream shopping channels, there are still some long-term issues that need to be observed. The first is whether AI smart platforms will charge “traffic fees” to Shopify in the future. Currently, the commercial terms between Shopify and Muse, Copilot, Google, and other AI platforms are not disclosed, and Shopify currently receives distribution from these channels almost free of charge.
If consumer traffic is gradually concentrated on a few large-scale AI smart platforms in the future, the party that grasps consumer demand may gain greater bargaining power and then charge product supply platforms such as Shopify.
Second, AI agents may reduce customer acquisition costs for merchants, but they may also weaken the direct relationship between merchants and consumers. If consumers complete all shopping through AI, merchants may not be able to obtain consumer emails, and it may be more difficult to form repeat purchasing relationships, which may have an impact on the customer's lifetime value.
Third, there is still no answer as to whether AI agents will help long-tail products gain more exposure or whether they will eventually concentrate traffic on a few leading products like traditional search engines. The fourth one is brand premiums. AI agents can instantly compare prices, features, and reviews of different products, and there is almost no “brand loyalty” in the traditional sense. For the numerous clothing, beauty, and lifestyle brands on the Shopify platform, this could be both a risk and protection due to brand perception and social attributes.
Damo maintains Shopify's “Overweight” rating with a target price of $192
In terms of valuation, Morgan Stanley acknowledged that Shopify is currently not cheap, and its valuation is about 50 times the expected free cash flow in 2027. However, after considering growth factors, the bank believes that Shopify's valuation is roughly comparable to that of large software companies, and lower than some infrastructure and cybersecurity companies with similar free cash flow growth prospects.
Morgan Stanley predicts that under the basic scenario, Shopify's revenue will grow at a compound annual rate of 23% to US$87 billion by 2035; as operational efficiency increases, the operating profit margin is expected to reach 30% and generate about US$23 billion in free cash flow. Based on 30 times the 2035 corporate value/free cash flow ratio and a weighted average cost of capital of 10.3%, the bank gave Shopify a target price of $192.