Four letters, a dot and three more letters add up to a record: Shopify paid about $99 million (about €89 million) for the web address shop.com, according to the quarterly report the Canadian e-commerce company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. That makes shop.com the most expensive publicly known domain purchase ever. The previous record holder, ai.com, sold for $70 million.
What Shop.com Is
Shop.com will be the new home of Shop, Shopify’s shopping platform for consumers. Shopify is best known for the software merchants use to run their own online stores. Since 2020, the company has also been building Shop, a destination for shoppers that brings together products from many of those stores. Until now, Shop was available as an app and on the web at shop.app. It is now moving to shop.com.
- Search: Shoppers can browse products from many brands and filter by size, price, color and brand. Signed-in users get results ranked by their past purchases and interests.
- One cart: Products from different brands go into a single cart and can be paid for with one tap through Shop Pay. Shopify says more than 400 million people have a Shop Pay account.
- After checkout: Shop offers order tracking, curated content and interest-based feeds.
- A.I. agents: Through Shop, A.I. assistants like ChatGPT can also find products and pay directly with Shop Pay.
The address itself has a long history. Shop.com started in the late 1990s as a comparison shopping service backed by investors including Bill Gates, Amazon and Yahoo. The domain changed hands for $3.5 million in 2003. At the end of 2010, the U.S. direct seller Market America acquired the company and ran its online store at shop.com for about 15 years. In late September, Market America announced the sale to Shopify and moved to MarketAmerica.com, where its new store runs on Shopify’s technology.
Where the $99 Million Comes From
Shopify has not disclosed a price. In the cash flow statement of its quarterly report, the company lists $99 million spent on the acquisition of intangible assets for July through September. In the first half of the year and in the same quarter a year earlier, that line was zero. The item was spotted by George Kirikos, a Canadian domain name expert. The report does not mention shop.com by name, and part of the amount could reflect transaction costs. But the timing and the accounting point clearly to the domain. Andrew Rosener, a U.S. domain broker who was not involved in the deal, had previously said he heard the price was $100 million.
On the earnings call, Paul Treiber, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said Shopify had bought shop.com “for about $100 million.” Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, did not confirm the figure but defended the purchase. “We think shop.com is an incredible prime address for us,” he said, calling it “a declaration that we’re ready for more ambitious posture for Shop.” He added: “We think this is one of the most important locations on the internet, and that really matters to us.” According to Mr. Finkelstein, traffic to Shop is already growing faster on the web than in the app.
Shopify can easily afford it: Its revenue rose 32 percent to $3.7 billion (about €3.3 billion) in the third quarter.
The Record Falls for the Second Time This Year
The Austrian registrar Domaintechnik has compiled the most expensive publicly known domain purchases:
- Shop.com: $99 million (about €89 million), bought by Shopify
- LasVegas.com: $90 million, but only $12 million was paid in cash in 2005, with the rest due in installments through 2040
- Ai.com: $70 million (about €63 million), bought by Kris Marszalek, the founder of Crypto.com
- Voice.com: $30 million (about €27 million)
Only in February did Mr. Marszalek reveal that he had bought ai.com for $70 million, in a deal that had closed in April 2025. Less than nine months later, ai.com has dropped to second place. Even larger sums, such as for cars.com ($872 million) or business.com ($345 million), covered entire companies along with their addresses, so they do not count as pure domain purchases.
For comparison, the rights to the entire .shop domain extension were auctioned in 2016 for $41.5 million, less than half the price. The most expensive known German domain, kredit.de, sold for €892,500.
Taking On Amazon and Temu
With its new address, Shopify is moving closer to the big shopping platforms. Shoppers who want products from many brands in one place usually end up at Amazon, Temu or Shein today. At the same time, online shopping is shifting toward A.I. assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Meta’s Muse, which compare and buy on their own. That is one reason Shopify has signed on to Meta’s Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how such agents interact with merchants.
What an Address Is Worth in the A.I. Era
Whether $99 million for a domain pays off is a matter of debate. When A.I. agents compare, book and pay on their own, people type fewer addresses into their browsers. Even two domain dealers who make the case for premium domains in Forbes concede that a strong address does not guarantee that A.I. systems will recommend a company. And ai.com has shown that a record-setting domain alone does not make a working product: When the site launched after a Super Bowl ad in February, it buckled under the traffic.
On the other side is Mr. Kirikos, who uncovered the price. He had previously estimated shop.com’s value at about $400 million (about €359 million) and said he was surprised it did not sell for more.
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