Shopify

Universal Commerce Protocol is now live for all merchants. Shopping is moving into agents, apps, and platforms across the web. And now, with a single integration, developers building those experiences can access the full Shopify Catalog. Teach your agents to search billions of products, create carts, and check out. Start building → shopify.dev/agents

The fastest-growing area of commerce isn't one category. It's thousands of new ones being created by entrepreneurs. As the barriers to starting a business collapse, founders are turning specific obsessions into entire markets. Here's what the data shows: → Nearly 55% of Shopify sales come from product categories outside the top 100. The mainstream is now the minority. → One product is enough to start. Nearly 54% of new Shopify stores in 2025 launched in a specialized category, and 41% started with a single product. → AI is a matchmaker for specialized products and the people who want them. 71% of AI-attributed orders in 2025 were for products outside the mainstream. Niche no longer means limited. The most specific ideas have the most room to grow. https://lnkd.in/e9-Xifty

Shopify merchants, you can now manage your store inside ChatGPT or Claude. Get insights, add products, and look up orders, all without leaving the chat. Connect to ChatGPT → https://lnkd.in/eUsQiENu Connect to Claude → https://lnkd.in/eGGcHMZu

Outdoor living was top of mind for U.S. consumers in April. We looked at month-over-month sales from thousands of Shopify merchants to see what was trending. Here’s what stood out: → Yard maintenance saw strong growth, with wagons jumping 4,744%. Grass edgers (+697%), sun shades (+254%), plant cages (+242%), and garden hoses (+232%) all saw triple digit increases. → Outdoor pet products surged, led by dog houses (+1,910%), dog kennels and runs (+412%), stuffed toys (+163%), and cooling beds (+33%). → Pool season officially started, with rash guards and swim shirts (+671%), pool maintenance kits (+163%), and water slides (+112%) all in demand. → Golf season teed off too. Club shafts are up 197%, followed by club parts and accessories (+86%), putting mats (+60%), gloves (+37%), and swing trainers (+24%). If April is any indication, summer demand is already building.

Business owners are finding financial control in something a 9-5 can't give them: ownership. We partnered with The Harris Poll to survey business owners across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Spain. One finding stood out: founders aren't just optimistic about the choice they made, they feel in control of it. → In every market surveyed, business owners were more likely to say entrepreneurship feels more financially secure than a traditional job. In the U.S., the margin was roughly 2 to 1 (39% vs. 18%). → In 4 of 5 markets, respondents said a traditional job requires more effort than running a business. In the U.S., nearly twice as many said so (46% vs. 24%). → Across all 5 markets, 61 to 69% of founders said starting a business felt like moving toward something they wanted, not away from something unstable. → In the U.S., 86% of entrepreneurs say ecommerce platforms have made it easier to start a business than a decade ago, and 67% say AI tools are making entrepreneurship more accessible. Most founders would make the same choice again. Not because it's easy. Because it's theirs. https://lnkd.in/ecPPkMtN

Most of the conversation about AI is about execution. How fast you can ship. How many tasks you can automate. How much output one person can produce. But I’ve always thought what’s more interesting is what's underneath it. I've spent most of my career on what I call the “invisible” side of work — decision architecture, information flow, how context gets compressed into something simpler. It doesn't have a name. But as AI extends into the execution layer, it becomes some of the most important work we do. I had a recent conversation with Tobi on Context that went deep on this. A few things I keep coming back to: 1/ Someone still has to design the system. AI can run your critic loop, red team your idea, play devil's advocate. But who decides what gets generated, what you’re solving for, the first principles you’re working from - that's the intentional work. And the outcomes vary enormously based on how carefully it's done. 2/ Context isn't cheap, it's compressed. There's a framing going around that AI makes context "cheap." I don’t think so. What it does is compress it in a way that enables better, faster decisions. That compression still has to be designed. 3/ The ceiling on breadth is now open. Shopify has always hired for T-shaped people: deep craft, broad curiosity. But X-shaped is where I think we're going: two axes instead of one. The vertical doesn't disappear. But the constraint isn't depth anymore. It's judgment: knowing what's worth building, and designing the right conditions to get there. The execution layer is getting a lot better, but the design layer is where the interesting work lives. Watch here: https://lnkd.in/gKRrXWsU

More people are choosing to build, and the data says they're right to. With millions of businesses running on Shopify, we have one of the most comprehensive real-time datasets on entrepreneurship. It all points to one thing: entrepreneurship is accelerating. → More people are starting businesses: 7x more people made their first sale on Shopify in 2025 than in 2018. → Repeat entrepreneurs scale faster: Merchants who have previously launched a business on Shopify and return to build a second earn more than 2x the sales per shop. → Entrepreneurs continue to earn more: Merchants who started between 2017 and 2020 grew revenue 25% over three years. The story is clear. As the traditional 9-to-5 path is contracting, entrepreneurship is expanding. In the age of AI, entrepreneurship may be the more resilient path. https://lnkd.in/eDf4Auv9

The Shopify AI Toolkit is here. Manage your store with agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and VS Code. Try it out → https://lnkd.in/eRFpZ_AH

Tickets are live for DotDev 2026. Get ready for two full days of product demos, deep dives, and connecting with other builders. See you in Toronto → https://lnkd.in/eSCeJyPK