Shopify ($SHOP) isn’t a retail stock. It’s a commerce operating system and that changes how it should be valued.

I keep seeing Shopify discussed in news and by investors as a leveraged bet on consumer spending or small business health. IMO, that framing misses what the company actually is.

Disclosure: I run a Shopify-focused software development and app agency, so I see the platform from the merchant and implementation side every day. That obviously gives me some bias, but it also gives me direct exposure to how Shopify actually behaves at scale, where it breaks, and where it’s genuinely strong. Also I’m not a financial professional. This is not financial advice. I’m sharing a product and systems-level perspective, not telling anyone what to buy or sell.

Shopify is not a retailer. It doesn’t own inventory, demand, or customer relationships. What it sells is abstraction.

For merchants, Shopify replaces a messy stack of infrastructure:
payments, tax logic, hosting, fraud, checkout, integrations, cross-border compliance. Most of this only becomes painful once you try to scale.

From a systems perspective, Shopify looks less like a store platform and more like an operating system for commerce.

A few points that often get misunderstood:

1. Merchant churn at the low end is expected
   Shopify targets a fragmented, long-tail market. Many merchants fail. That’s not a weakness. The platform monetizes experimentation at scale. One merchant failing doesn’t matter. Millions trying does.

2. Payments matter more than subscriptions
   Subscriptions get attention, but payments drive the economics. Usage-based revenue tied to GMV creates natural monetization expansion without sales teams or upsells. When merchants grow, Shopify makes more.

3. Comparing Shopify to Amazon is misleading
   Amazon is centralized. It owns discovery, fulfillment, pricing, and customer data. Shopify is decentralized infrastructure. Merchants own the brand and customer relationship. Shopify stays in the background.

This difference caps near-term monetization but reduces regulatory risk and platform conflict.

1. Fulfillment was a misstep
   Trying to build a first-party logistics network conflicted with Shopify’s software DNA. Exiting it was the right move in my opinion. Merchants want integration and orchestration, not Shopify owning warehouses.

2. Margins look worse than they are
   Shopify isn’t pure SaaS. Payments and services delay operating leverage. Profitability shows up later, not sooner. The real question is long-term unit economics, not quarterly margins.

None of this makes Shopify “cheap” or risk-free. It’s cyclical, sensitive to GMV, and downstream from ad platforms like Meta and Google. But from a product and incentive standpoint, it’s one of the more interesting platforms in public markets.

Curious how others here think about Shopify. Retail proxy, SaaS platform, infrastructure play, or something else entirely?