Payments used to be the thing that happened after the sale. In today’s commerce landscape — spanning multiple geographies, currencies, channels and now AI-driven touchpoints — it increasingly decides whether the sale happens at all, shaping conversion, customer experience and how far a merchant can expand.

That is the thesis of Rohit Mishra, Shopify’s VP of Product for Payments, Tax and Cross-Border, who has spent more than nine years building out the company’s payments stack as part of a wider effort to unify commerce infrastructure. In his view, embedded finance, localised payment methods and real-time rails are simultaneously raising customer expectations and multiplying the complexity hidden underneath — and the platforms gaining ground are the ones that absorb that complexity while converting payments into an edge.

A full-funnel view, not a transaction layer

Mishra’s starting point is that payments treated purely as the moment of transaction inevitably becomes a commodity. Shopify’s counter-framing looks at the entire journey around the pay button — checkout, fraud prevention, international expansion and retention — woven through the whole merchant lifecycle.

That framing connects to the company’s founding ambition of producing more entrepreneurs, with a platform designed to carry a business from side project to global enterprise without switching infrastructure along the way.

Viewed only as the transaction, payments is a commodity. Viewed as the full funnel, it becomes the growth engine. — On Shopify’s framing of payments strategy

Three layers of value

Mishra breaks Shopify’s payments value creation into a three-tier stack: performance optimisation at the base, capability expansion in the middle, and network effects on top.

The foundation is scale. Processing hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions gives Shopify the data mass to push authorisation rates up and fraud down. The second layer is localisation — currencies, payment methods and pricing tuned to buyers in each market rather than exported wholesale from one.

The top layer is where payments stops being a cost line and starts generating growth. Shop Pay lifts conversion and offers instalment options, and its fraud guarantees mean merchants don’t have to second-guess transactions — Shopify’s depth of buyer data lets it carry that risk itself. Shopify Collective, meanwhile, lets merchants sell one another’s inventory while the platform quietly handles payouts, tax and reconciliation in the background.

Preparing for shopping by agent

With AI reshaping how consumers find and buy products, Shopify is investing aggressively in agentic commerce — and Mishra reports strong growth in both orders and traffic arriving through AI-driven channels.

What the channel ultimately looks like is still open, he concedes: it may stay chatbot-shaped, or evolve into consumers delegating whole tasks to AI agents. Rather than betting on one interface, Shopify is working with partners including Google on the Universal Commerce Protocol so merchants stay visible and differentiated inside AI-led environments, while internally restructuring product catalogues into structured data to sharpen discoverability.

The through-line, Mishra insists, is abstraction: merchants shouldn’t need to track the payment industry’s latest acronym. The platform’s job is to strip that complexity away and hand merchants the power and flexibility to pursue their ambitions without payments getting in the road.

Cross-border friction, absorbed by the platform

Global selling remains harder than it should be — and Mishra points out that the pace of change has accelerated sharply, with regulations and tariffs that once shifted occasionally now moving on a weekly news cycle.

Local nuance compounds the problem, from country-specific payment preferences such as Poland’s BLIK to differing conventions on how tax should be displayed. Shopify’s answer is to bake cross-border capability directly into the platform: at its Spring ’26 Editions release, the company announced the UK expansion of Managed Markets, built with Global-e, which automates duties, taxes, compliance and logistics so merchants can sell internationally with minimal operational lift.

The numbers explain the urgency. Shopify posted US$101bn in Gross Merchandise Volume in Q1, around 16% of it cross-border. European GMV climbed 48% year-on-year, and 17% of UK merchant orders over the Black Friday–Cyber Monday 2025 weekend came from abroad.

Stablecoins: early as a method, serious as infrastructure

Shopify is pursuing stablecoins on two fronts — as a checkout option merchants can switch on easily, and as underlying rails for moving money.

On the consumer side, Mishra acknowledges adoption is still in its infancy, so the company’s focus is on making acceptance frictionless for merchants while working to grow end-user uptake. The infrastructure story is further along: he sees a high probability that stablecoins become the plumbing for cross-border money movement, where their speed and cost advantages are hardest to ignore.

The groundwork is already laid. Shopify has partnered with Coinbase and Stripe on the Commerce Payments Protocol, letting merchants accept stablecoins through the same authorisation and capture flows they already know.

Picking partners for what payments becomes next

Mishra’s closing counsel to merchants is to choose partners on trajectory, not just current capability — evaluating what payments looks like today and what it is likely to look like tomorrow.

For Shopify, that trajectory means continuing to fuse payments, AI and global commerce into one seamless platform, so merchants can spend their energy on the thing no infrastructure provider can do for them: building the brand.