Tariffs are shifting. De minimis rules are under pressure. And new enforcement could change how retailers operate overnight. If you sell across borders—through ecommerce, marketplaces, or direct—these changes don’t just impact compliance. They impact your pricing, margins, and conversion rates.

Register for our Trade and Tariff webinar series for regular updates.

Home Depot just printed Q1, and the headline reads like a rerun of every other quarter for the past two years. Sales up 4.8% to $41.77B. Comps up 0.6%, a hair under the 0.8% the Street wanted. Adjusted EPS of $3.43 squeaked past the $3.41 consensus. Net income down to $3.29B from $3.43B a year ago.

The narrative? Same as it ever was. CFO Richard McPhail trotted out the usual list: housing affordability, fuel costs, mortgage rates back up after dipping below 6% in February, layoffs ticking higher. Customers, he says, are holding off on big projects.

I want to be careful here, because some of that is genuinely true. Mortgage rates did spike again with the Middle East situation. Existing home sales crawled up 0.2% in April. Housing turnover is the engine for home-improvement retail, and right now that engine is sputtering.

But two years in, the "uncertainty" narrative is doing a lot of work for Home Depot, and I think it's covering up something more interesting.

Look at the category mix. Paint and outdoor are strong. Lumber, flooring, lighting, and millwork are weak. That tells you something specific. Consumers are spending where the ticket is small and skipping where it's big. Paint is therapy. A new floor is a commitment.

Now look at the home equity comment, because this is the line that should make analysts pause. McPhail said homeowners are tapping equity, but it's flowing to lower-credit-score borrowers and going toward debt consolidation, not renovation projects. Read that sentence twice. For years, the story has been that record-high home equity was a coiled spring waiting to fund the next remodeling boom. Turns out the spring is uncoiling, just not where Home Depot benefits. People are using their homes to pay off credit card debt.

This reads like a consumer-stress story presented as a housing-market story. Different problem, different timeline.

The 4.8% sales growth also paints a flatter picture. SRS Distribution, the Pro-focused acquisition, is doing real work in that number. Strip it out and you're looking at a business that's essentially flat. Guidance held at flat-to-2% comps and flat-to-4% adjusted EPS, which is management telling you to expect a hold-the-line year, not a growth year.

Here's what I'd want to hear on the next call. Not more about mortgage rates. Everyone knows about mortgage rates. I want to know what Home Depot is doing in Pro that doesn't depend on housing turnover. I want to know how the SRS integration is performing on its own terms, separate from the comp story. I want to know whether the Pro customer is showing the same hesitation as the DIY customer, or whether that is a different read entirely.

Because at some point "we're waiting for housing to come back" stops being a strategy and starts being a bet.

Home Depot has been selling the same narrative for two years: housing turnover is stalled, home equity is the coiled spring, and demand snaps back when rates ease. This quarter quietly broke that story. The equity is being tapped, just not for projects. It's going to debt consolidation, and the borrowers tapping it have lower credit scores. That's not a housing-cycle problem you wait out. That's a consumer balance sheet problem that gets worse before it gets better.

If you own HD on the thesis that pent-up renovation demand is released when rates drop, you need to ask whether the customer who was going to fund that renovation still has the balance sheet to do so. The answer in this quarter's numbers is: a smaller share of them than you thought.

Here's what the keynotes don't say out loud. Moving to Shopify doesn't fix your business. It gives you a better platform to run your business. Those are different things, and most operators learn the difference the hard way.

While there might be a legitimate debate over whether Mr. Beast is an Enterprise business, there’s absolutely no debate about companies like Reitman’s, LVMH, and Estee Lauder. In the right circumstances, Shopify is absolutely a platform for serious, scaled brands.

The green bag has become shorthand for the whole promise: innovation, speed, and, just maybe, escape from the vendor prison you've been stuck in for a decade. But does that promise rose come with thorns? And if so, how are brands working through any issues they encounter?

The Big Green Bag Of Promise: Enterprise Shopify Webinar Series, sponsored by Avalara, Domaine, and Pattern, attempts to answer all these questions and more.

Scott Lux is VP of Digital Commerce at Stanley 1913. You know the cup. The brand that somehow went from outdoorsy niche to cultural phenomenon. Scott has lived the enterprise Shopify migration from inside a brand that had to grow up fast.

Elara Verret is Chief Digital and Customer Officer at Reitman's — 400 stores across Canada, three brands, real omnichannel complexity. She is three weeks post-launch.

Renee Halvorson is Chief Marketing Officer at Marine Layer, which scaled from $10M to $100M on Shopify and is now confronting the gap between where the platform started and where the business actually is.

Most ecommerce brands are running 50-70% gross margins and squeezing 10-15% EBITDA out of that in a decent year. Tech costs keep climbing. Media isn't cheap. The era when growth covered every operational sin is over. Most brands aren't doubling anymore. Many are up 5-10%, if that.

These webinars are not sponsored by Shopify but contain real talk by operators.

Register for one webinar and be able to join all 3 - if you can’t attend, we will send you a copy to watch on demand.

Date: June 4, 11, 18 2026

Time: 12:30 PM ET

Host: Rick Watson