Investing.com -- Bank of America reinstated coverage of Shopify with a Buy rating and a $150 price objective, arguing the company is positioned to benefit from the shift toward AI-driven agentic commerce.

The price target implies a 22 times 2027E enterprise value to gross profit multiple, a premium to the software peer group average of 18.1x. But analyst Tal Liani said the premium is justified by Shopify’s faster revenue growth expectations, with the bank modeling 28.3% revenue growth in 2026 and 24% in 2027, both above peer averages.

Shopify shares climbed 2.4% in U.S. premarket trading.

The main debate, the analysts argue, focuses on whether AI threatens the company’s role in the commerce stack by shifting discovery and transactions toward AI-native interfaces. Concerns about this kind of "platform bypass" have driven Shopify shares down 25% year-to-date, which analysts said has created "an attractive entry point."

"As discovery shifts to agentic interfaces, value accrues to the transaction and infrastructure layers, where Shopify is deeply embedded," they continued, pointing to Shopify’s checkout, payments and product-catalog infrastructure as increasingly central to AI-native transactions. Gartner estimates agentic commerce could account for roughly 20% of global e-commerce transactions by 2030.

As of the first quarter of 2026, AI-driven traffic to Shopify merchants rose eightfold year-over-year, while orders from AI-powered searches climbed roughly 13-fold. Weekly active users of Shopify’s Sidekick AI assistant increased 385% year-over-year over the same period.

Beyond AI, analysts also highlighted international expansion and enterprise adoption as additional growth drivers. International gross merchandise volume grew 45% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, with Shop Pay volume, excluding the U.S., rising more than 70%. Shopify Plus, the company’s enterprise offering, saw monthly recurring revenue (MRR) grow 20% year-over-year, outpacing overall MRR growth of 16.5%.

BofA models operating margin expanding from 17.1% in 2025 to 20.5% in 2028, and free cash flow margin rising from 17.4% to 20.3% over the same period, even as gross margins are expected to decline modestly due to the payments-heavy nature of the business.