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Shopify Inc. president Harley Finkelstein minimized tariff concerns in a first-quarter 2025 earnings call on Thursday, noting that the company has not seen “any meaningful impact” on gross merchandise volume (GMV) — a company metric that tracks the sales taking place on its platform — in the face of U.S. president Donald Trump’s trade war and cancellation of the de minimis exemption for lower-value goods.
“We’re of course monitoring for slowdowns, but our data through April shows little evidence of that,” Finkelstein said.
The U.S. president’s axing of the de minimis exemption, which allowed goods valued at US$800 and under to enter the U.S. duty-free, came into effect last Friday but the move is not expected to “have a meaningful impact” in the near-term, Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister, said, noting only one per cent of its business would be affected.
When asked about how merchants would be exposed to U.S. tariffs, Finkelstein said that the company’s merchant base was geographically diverse but that it depended on where they made their products.
“Some are impacted more than others,” he acknowledged.
Shopify has also introduced new tools to help merchants navigate the new trade landscape. The platform has rolled out additional features for U.S. merchants to collect and remit duties, such as automatic duties calculation at checkout alongside an artificial intelligence-powered tariff guide that calculates duties based on the product’s country of origin and description. The toolkit will help merchants achieve compliance “within hours” of new duties being announced, according to Finkelstein.
For buyers, Shopify earlier this year launched a tool that allows shoppers to filter products by country.
Despite Shopify’s upbeat assessment, its GMV fell slightly short of analyst expectations, growing nearly 23 per cent to US$74.75 billion. Revenue jumped by 27 per cent to US$2.36 billion from US$1.86 billion while its loss deepened to US$682 million from US$273 million from a year ago.
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