Is Shopify Stock Halal?

Shopify's core business is commerce software: it sells subscriptions that let merchants run online and in-person stores (Subscription Solutions, 24% of FY2025 revenue) and takes a cut of payment processing, shipping, and related services on transactions those merchants complete (Merchant Solutions, 76% of revenue, $8.8 billion). Both of these are ordinary permissible activities: software-as-a-service subscriptions and payment processing fees are standard commerce infrastructure, comparable to renting point-of-sale equipment or charging a card-processing fee. Shopify does not manufacture or sell goods itself; it provides the platform merchants use to sell their own goods, whatever those may be. The complication is that Merchant Solutions revenue is a single reported line that bundles payment processing fees together with Shopify Capital, the company's merchant financing arm, which does not fit as cleanly into the "payment processing" category.

Shopify disclosed $331 million in interest income for FY2025 (2.86% of revenue), earned on its cash and marketable securities, similar in kind to Meta's or Alphabet's treasury interest income. That figure alone would clear AAOIFI's 5% threshold with room to spare. The open question is Shopify Capital, which provides merchants with cash advances and loans, structured as a purchase of future receivables rather than a conventional interest-bearing loan, growing to $1.78 billion in loans and cash advances outstanding by the end of 2025, up 46% from the year before. Whether structured as a factor-rate cash advance or a fixed-fee loan, the economic substance is financing merchants for a fee tied to the amount and duration of the advance, which sits closer to conventional lending than to a simple transaction fee. Shopify does not break out how much revenue this generates; it is combined inside the $8.8 billion Merchant Solutions figure, which means our 2.86% impure ratio almost certainly understates Shopify's true impure income.

This data gap likely explains why published halal screeners disagree on Shopify in a way that is unusual even by this list's standards: Zoya rates the US-listed SHOP as Shariah-compliant, while Musaffa rates the same US listing as not Shariah-compliant, yet rates the Canadian-listed SHOP.TO shares as compliant. A split verdict on the same underlying company, across the same time period, strongly suggests screeners are weighing Shopify Capital's lending activity differently, some treating it as a disqualifying financial-services business activity regardless of its precise revenue share, others screening only the disclosed interest income line and stopping there. Given that Shopify Capital's outstanding balance grew 46% in a single year and Shopify has not disclosed the revenue it generates, PureInvest treats 2.86% as a floor rather than a confirmed final number, and classifies Shopify as questionable rather than comfortably compliant until better disclosure is available.

Shopify's core software and payments business is permissible, and its disclosed impure income is modest. The uncertainty comes entirely from Shopify Capital, a fast-growing merchant lending program whose revenue Shopify does not separately report. Investors comfortable with that ambiguity, and willing to purify at a rate somewhat above the disclosed 2.86% as a conservative buffer, may choose to hold Shopify. Investors who prefer only stocks with fully transparent revenue composition, or who weight Musaffa's non-compliant rating on the US listing heavily, may prefer to wait for clearer disclosure or avoid the position. As Shopify Capital continues to scale, this is a stock worth revisiting each year rather than assuming today's 2.86% figure holds indefinitely. Consult a qualified Shariah advisor for guidance on how to treat merchant cash advance revenue specifically.