Shopify stock price is on fire today after an ‘outstanding’ quarter, boosted by AI tools and a bright holiday sales forecast

Shares of Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) are skyrocketing in early-morning trading after the company announced its Q3 2024 results, which beat expectations. As of the time of this writing, SHOP stock is up an impressive 23% to above $110 per share.

However, Shopify’s stock isn’t on fire only because of its good Q3. There are some other reasons why Shopify is exciting investors this morning. Here’s what to know:

Shopify’s “outstanding” results

Shopify would probably disagree with the statement that the company had a good Q3. As the company’s president, Harley Finkelstein, said in a press release, the results were “outstanding.”

Why was the quarter so outstanding? A big part of it was the company’s Q3 revenue, which came in at $2.16 billion. That represents a whopping 26% year-over-year growth rate from Q3 2023.

As Reuters notes, it even surpassed many analysts’ lofty expectations of $2.11 billion in revenue, leading to the ninth time in a row that the company has beat analyst expectations on sales.

Not only did Shopify beat analyst expectations again, but its 26% revenue growth for this quarter marked “our sixth consecutive quarter of greater than 25% revenue growth excluding logistics,” Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said.

In a slide deck, Shopify also announced that as of Q3 2024, the company had facilitated $1 trillion in global sales since the platform’s inception and that it now has a 10% share of the U.S. e-commerce market.

Okay, but why did Shopify have such a good Q3?

As also noted by Reuters, Shopify attracted more merchants to its online e-commerce platform this quarter. One of the attractions for the merchants seems to be a new artificial intelligence tool Shopify started rolling out in June called Sidekick.

Sidekick is an artificial intelligence assistant currently in early access for some merchants. Shopify says the AI bot “will act as your very own advisor, guiding you with tailored, skilled advice to make your business stronger.”

It does this by shouldering some of the mundane but necessary tasks that any businessperson needs to do to manage their business. Sidekick can help easily keep track of a merchant’s inventory, generate myriad reports that reveal new insights about your business, and even suggest ways to attract more customers to a storefront.

Sidekick is in addition to another AI tool Shopify offers, this one called Shopify Magic, which helps merchants create product images for their wares, write product descriptions, and even help them generate FAQs for their stores.

These AI tools are making it easier than ever for customers to manage their storefronts, and their availability is clearly a draw for some merchants.

The future looks promising, too

But Shopify’s stock isn’t only surging because the company had a terrific Q3. If anything, investors seem most excited about what the company has predicted will happen next.

Shopify’s current quarter, Q4, is arguably the most important of the year for the company and its merchants. This is the all-important holiday shopping quarter—and Shopify has anounced it has strong hopes for the period.

The key metric that Shopify has forecast is its revenue expectations for Q4, which the company says it expects will “grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.”

That’s music to investors’ ears, as it means Shopify expects it may do even better in Q4 than its just-completed outstanding Q3. That revenue growth estimate is also more than the 22.7% revenue growth many analysts were expecting, noted Reuters.

A resurgent stock

Shopify’s stock started 2024 with prices hovering in the high seventies before dropping to the low sixties over the summer. But since the beginning of the fall, SHOP shares have been on an upswing. Today’s 23% surge means SHOP shares are actually up over 38% year-to-date.

However, despite the resurgent stock, SHOP shares are nowhere near their all-time high of above $152 per share. Those highs were achieved in mid- to late-2021 when e-commerce was enjoying a pandemic boom as more people preferred online shopping over brick-and-mortar stores.