Wells Fargo Predicts Double-Digit Upside for Shopify Stock
The stock of e-commerce company Shopify (SHOP) jumped over 6% higher after Wells Fargo (WFC) raised its target price to $125 from $107 on Friday. This new target suggests about 12% upside potential from current levels. The bank believes Shopify could quietly become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom.
Confident Investing Starts Here:
Wells Fargo Sees Big AI Opportunity for Shopify
Wells Fargo called Shopify a 'thematic AI story.' The firm said that though SHOP is not usually seen as an AI stock, there are clear signs the company is heading that way. It pointed to Shopify's growing use of AI within its operations, new AI tools for merchants, and partnerships with major players like OpenAI, Meta (META), and Perplexity. The analyst believes that these initiatives could help Shopify make the shopping experience better for users and help sellers manage their stores with more ease.
Building on that view, Wells Fargo expects AI to bring major changes to e-commerce going forward. The firm believes AI will allow online stores to offer more personalized shopping, automate customer service, and better manage pricing and inventory. The analyst thinks Shopify is well-positioned to benefit from these changes.
Looking ahead, the firm sees strong growth in what it calls 'agentic commerce,' where AI acts like a personal shopping assistant. Wells Fargo expects this space to expand quickly and reach $505 billion in sales by 2030. The analyst believes Shopify is in a good spot to capture a solid share of this market.
Overall, Wells Fargo sees Shopify as more than just an e-commerce company. With the company's strong focus on AI, the firm views it as a smart, long-term bet in the AI space.
Is SHOP a Good Stock to Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on SHOP stock based on 26 Buys, 11 Holds, and zero Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average SHOP price target of $113.44 per share implies 1.82% upside potential.
See more SHOP analyst ratings
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
30 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Meta invests in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for ‘superintelligence' team
Meta said Thursday it is making a large investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing 'superintelligence' at the tech giant. The move reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from competitors such as Google and OpenAI. Meta announced what it called a 'strategic partnership and investment' with Scale late Thursday but didn't disclose the financial terms of the deal. Scale said the added investment puts its market value at over $29 billion. It won't be the first time a big tech company has gobbled up talent and products at innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them. Microsoft hired key staff from startup Inflection AI, including co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who now runs Microsoft's AI division. Google pulled in the leaders of AI chatbot company while Amazon made a deal with San Francisco-based Adept that sent its CEO and key employees to the e-commerce giant. Amazon also got a license to Adept's AI systems and datasets. Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016. They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier. Scale's pitch was to supply the human labor needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them. General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers. What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs. More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models — the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama — brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to service 'every leading large language model,' including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers. Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration. The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government. Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs. It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as 'one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet.' Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed skepticism about the tech industry's current focus on large language models. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. 'How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?' LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year. These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models 'basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way,' LeCun said. Instead, he emphasized Meta's interest in 'tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman.' LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau. Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research 'remains unwavering' and described the work as 'building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology.'
CBC
42 minutes ago
- CBC
Yukon Chamber of Commerce closing shop, calling it a 'refresh'
The Yukon Chamber of Commerce is going out of business. Members of the advocacy group unanimously voted at its annual general meeting on Wednesday to dissolve the 40-year-old organization. However, the chamber's executive director Patti Balsillie characterizes it as a "refresh," suggesting that a new organization could be formed to take its place as the voice of Yukon's business community. "Maybe this is the phoenix coming out of the ashes. But we needed to create a crisis perhaps, to instigate what could be a better formula," Balsillie said. "The motion was, 'yes, let's dissolve,' and the ancillary was, 'and let's get back to the original intent.'" Balsillie says the chamber as it is right now is "no longer financially sustainable," with less revenue coming in. She said the COVID-19 pandemic changed how many businesses spend their money, and the chamber suffered as a result. A significant portion of the chamber's money comes from its members. She also described a changing landscape for non-profit business advocacy groups in the Yukon, with more and more of them doing similar work. "The lane is very congested," Balsillie said. "[The chamber's] relevancy was eroded by apathy, by people thinking somebody else will do the work, there are other volunteers that have my back — but no, you have to show up." She said the organization will remain open at least through the summer, to sell assets, pay bills, and plan its formal dissolution. Still, she described the end of the chamber as akin to a "pause," before something else forms to take its place. She believes there's still a role for an organization that represents businesses across the territory. "To be a part of a conversation about the end of an era sucks," she said. "More than ever, a voice for business in Yukon really needs to be represented. And the structure that we were doing it under is wasn't sustainable. So this is an opportunity to do a refresh." Community chambers 'exploring collaboration' In a news release on Thursday, three of the organization's members — the Whitehorse, Dawson City, and St. Elias (Haines Junction) chambers of commerce — say they are "saddened" by the Yukon chamber's dissolution, saying it "leaves a significant gap in territorial representation for Yukon's community Chambers and for businesses operating in Yukon communities." The three community organizations also say they are "exploring collaboration across the territory," and will "provide updates as these discussions evolve." Justine Hobbs, interim executive director of the Dawson chamber, said on Thursday that she believes there's now momentum "towards something new and exciting." "So it's sort of a mixed feeling, you know, saddened, but also excited," she said. "We're really interested in building like, a new model that focuses on Yukon-wide advocacy, policy development and just effective communication." Hobbs said there is a need for a group that represents businesses beyond their local communities. For example, she says, a Whitehorse-based business might operate in other communities and be affected by regulations or policies in those places. "I think there's a bit of a worry from business members that if they link up with a community chamber, that they won't actually be represented in the right way," Hobbs said.
CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
Hotel boom in Ottawa
Ottawa Watch Five major international hotel brands are expanding in Ottawa, providing a boost to the city's tourism industry. CTV's Kimberley Fowler reports.
