The Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) is one of the most powerful wealth-building tools available to Canadians. Every dollar of growth inside the registered account is sheltered from tax forever. That makes the stocks you choose matter enormously.
The best TFSA investments tend to share a common trait: they’re businesses positioned to grow for years, even decades. Growth stocks that compound steadily over time can turn a modest $7,000 contribution into something far more meaningful. The key is getting into the right companies early and before the full opportunity is priced in.
Right now, one TSX tech stock stands out above the rest: Shopify (TSX: SHOP). Valued at a market cap of $214 billion, SHOP stock is down over 33% from all-time highs. Despite the ongoing pullback, $7,000 invested in the tech stock shortly after its 2015 IPO would be worth nearly $370,000 today.
The Ottawa-based company is quietly building the foundational infrastructure for the next era of retail, making it a top buy right now.
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Shopify is the backbone of e-commerce
Shopify enables merchants to build online stores, manage inventory, process payments, fulfill orders, and sell across every major channel — from their own website to social media platforms, physical retail locations, and global marketplaces. Its payments platform, Shopify Payments, lets merchants accept cards online and offline without a third party.
- In the U.S., Shopify handles roughly 14% of all e-commerce, and the only checkout bigger than Shopify’s in America is Amazon’s.
- Last year, merchants on Shopify collectively moved about US$380 billion in gross merchandise value.
- Notably, the company generated approximately US$2 billion in free cash flow while growing top-line revenue by around 30%.
Agentic AI could be a massive tailwind for the TSX stock
E-commerce currently accounts for less than 20% of total retail. That number has been climbing steadily, but a new wave of technology could accelerate it sharply: agentic artificial intelligence (AI).
AI agents are software tools that browse, research, compare, and increasingly purchase on behalf of consumers. Think of it as a personal shopper that works 24/7. When someone asks an AI assistant to “find me the best running shoes under $150,” that agent needs to search product catalogues, compare options, and process a transaction, all without the customer visiting a traditional store.
Shopify has already launched several products aimed at the agentic era. Its product catalogue syndicates merchant inventory directly to AI platforms, including Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
It has also developed the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open-source standard designed to enable every AI agent to execute rich, nuanced commerce transactions, including subscriptions, bundles, loyalty rewards, and discounts.
According to Finkelstein, traffic to Shopify stores from agentic applications grew roughly 15 times between January 2025 and January 2026. That’s off a small base, but the direction is unmistakable.
The bull case for Shopify stock
Shopify’s transaction infrastructure: checkout, payments, inventory, shipping, and taxes, is what every major AI partner actually needs to power seamless commerce.
Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout, is widely trusted by consumers and has the highest conversion rates in the industry. That trust wasn’t built overnight.
Shopify also sits on billions of transactions and trillions of data points across millions of merchants. That proprietary data makes its AI tools, including Sidekick, its merchant-facing AI co-pilot, smarter over time. The more merchants use it, the better it gets. That’s a compounding advantage that competitors simply can’t replicate quickly.
And then there’s the network effect. More merchants bring more buyers. More buyers attract more merchants. More GMV means more investment back into the product. The flywheel has been spinning for years, and agentic AI could cause it to spin much faster.
The Foolish takeaway
For Canadians deploying their $7,000 TFSA contribution, the goal is to find companies that will be worth meaningfully more in five or 10 years than they are today.
Shopify checks that box. It’s a Canadian company, listed on the TSX, with a global footprint, a durable business model, and a front-row seat to one of the biggest shifts in consumer behaviour in a generation.
