- SHOP
- ^GSPC
- NVDA
On Sept. 15, 2016, Shopify (NASDAQ:SHOP) stock closed at a split-adjusted $4.18 per share. As of this writing, shares trade around $130. That comes out to about 31 times the initial <a href="https://bitcomme.com/7201-cheap-after-its-sunderland-ev-<a href="https://bitcomme.com/ai-drives-cybersecurity-investment-as-security-budgets-remain-nearly-flat/” title=”AI Drives Cybersecurity Investment as Security Budgets Remain Nearly Flat”>investment/” title=”7201) Cheap After Its Sunderland EV Investment?”>investment — enough to make a $10,000 stake bought that day worth about $311,000 today.
And because Shopify does not pay a dividend, the share price did all the work.
Missed AI’s “Act 1”? Act 2 Could Be 15x Bigger.Most investors think they missed the AI boat because they didn’t buy Nvidia in 2005. But according to our analysts, we’re only at the end of “Act 1″—the R&D phase. “Act 2” is the global rollout.Continue »
For comparison, the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) had an outstanding decade of its own. The same $10,000 in an index fund that tracks the benchmark, with dividends reinvested, would have become about $41,000 during that period.
Most investors would be delighted with that outcome. Shopify’s was more than seven times better.
But the return is not the most interesting part of this story. The most interesting part is what generated it. Shopify’s business grew almost as much as its stock did.
The business grew almost as much as the stock
When Shopify closed the books on 2016, around 377,500 merchants were using its platform. In total, they sold $15.4 billion of goods that year (a number the company calls gross merchandise volume, or GMV), and Shopify brought in about $389 million of revenue, up 90% from 2015. Today, millions of merchants in more than 175 countries operate their businesses on Shopify. GMV hit $378 billion in 2025, nearly 25 times the 2016 figure. And revenue came to $11.6 billion, almost 30 times what it was in 2016.
Put another way, the stock’s roughly 31-fold rise has mostly mirrored the growth of the business beneath it.
The growth keeps accelerating
Notably, the growth has not slowed down as the numbers have gotten bigger. GMV growth has accelerated for three years running, increasing from 12% in 2022 to 20% in 2023, 24% in 2024, and 29% in 2025. And the expansion is broad: offline revenue rose 27% in 2025, while international revenue rose 36%.
This year is off to an even faster start. In the second quarter, GMV rose 32% year over year to $115.6 billion. For perspective, merchants sold more than seven times as much on Shopify in one quarter this year as they did in all of 2016. Revenue grew 34% year over year to $3.6 billion. Free cash flow surged 55% year over year to $654 million.
GMV growth “accelerated on top of last year’s already strong Q2 with solid results across all merchant sizes, channels, and geographies,” chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister said in Shopify’s August earnings release.
