Bobby, welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. 

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

You are probably one of the highest profile guests on this show. You’re the Chief Revenue Officer at Shopify. Shopify is a company I’ve adored. I’ve been in eCommerce since 2014. I was a Magento guy. It took two years for me to transition over to Shopify. It’s an impressive company in terms of what you guys have done. Do you want to introduce yourself and give us a bit of a backstory? You’ve worked at Verizon, Microsoft, and several other companies.

I’ve been a little bit of everywhere. First of all, thank you so much for having me and thank you again for making the move to Shopify. We appreciate your business. I started off in telco. Before that, I was a personal trainer at a health club, which is a cool place to be when you’re young and single. I then realized that, at some point in time, I probably need to grow up.

When I talked to new hires every once in a while, in our new hire classes, I remind them that the way I moved from the health and wellness world to telecommunications was I had friends of mine who would fax me over their pay stubs. Fax machines, back then, was this waxy piece of paper that you’d have to go to one room and peel it off. I realized, “I’m probably in the wrong business. This mobile thing may take off.”

I started working for AirTouch, which was then purchased by Vodafone, which I’m expecting your podcast readers to know very well. We’re a joint venture with some properties in the US. It became Verizon Wireless. I spent nineteen years. It was great to watch the growth of a technology that started off. I remember celebrating our first 1 millionth customer. In North America, that’s now 130 million. To go from 1 million to 130 million is a pretty interesting growth pattern and lots of lessons learned there.

Microsoft came calling and I thought, “Satya is at the helm. He had implemented a bunch of changes.” It looked like and felt like a very different Microsoft. I lived in the Seattle area so I knew people who worked there. After eighteen months of conversations, we finally found a spot that was a good fit. I spent about three years at Microsoft and learned a ton about a partner ecosystem, how to go to market globally, the challenges that customers face in implementing software, and the things they’re looking for. I enjoyed that.

Intuit came calling and said, “We want to do the same thing that you were working on at Microsoft.” Microsoft was going enterprise down to large mid-market and Intuit wanted to come up market. I had a chance to work with some great people there like Alex Chriss, who’s now the CEO at PayPal, Sasan Goodarzi, who’s still the CEO at Intuit, and all great leaders. Scott Cook, the founder, still has his fingerprints on the business. A lot of the principles that he and Bill Campbell put in place are still there.

I learned a ton, especially leading indicators and how to manage and integrate better product roadmaps. Intuit is probably one of the best at doing that. I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to come to Shopify. It’s been amazing. I have found my home. This is, by far, my favorite place I’ve ever been. That’s not saying that cause that’s where I am right now. I really enjoy it.

Tobi is a teacher, by default, to the business. The unorthodoxy of the business, the passion around the customers, and the product-first mentality, it’s probably the first I’ve seen where product leads the company, not commercial, not finance, and not some other business unit. That’s refreshing and that’s an exciting thing and it’s what separates us from maybe many of the others in the market.

You joined Shopify in August of 2022 and this is way past the highs we got in eCommerce. You’re still enjoying the ride. You’ve come in the worst of times and you’re still having a thrill of a ride. Shopify has always championed itself as the company that arms the rebels, small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and growing entrepreneurs.

Now, you’re making a huge foray. You’ve made some huge moves, particularly in the last two years. If you look at the magic quadrant from Gartner and IDC, you’re no longer challengers. You’re leaders in the enterprise space. Do you want to break down the strategy? In August of 2022, you’re in the challenger quadrant. In 2023, you moved in company with Adobe, SAP, Commercetools, and Salesforce. What’s been the strategy and the foray from your point? Do you want to paint a story for the readers, please?

One of the observations coming in in August of ‘22 was that, one, we had some product requirements to enter into the enterprise space that we had to prioritize and get to work on. The second was we had a series of partnerships that would be required both commercial partnerships in how we enter the market as well as partner product partnerships that extend our platform and interoperability.

We got to work pretty early on saying that these were things that if we wanted to be the right fit for enterprise, we needed to go out and make some investments so we did exactly that. I would also add that maybe we weren’t directly engaged and weren’t great storytellers about all of our capabilities and the enterprise was a little bit of the best kept secret.

As more and more brands have come over, to Shopify that that are enterprise brands that are billion-dollar brands like some that are born out of digital native like Gymsharks of the world that have grown into massive companies and have now opened up retail locations or, On Running, we announced in the last earnings has come over to Shopify. Bowden and Westwing across Europe have come to Shopify. I’m naming some for your audience. In North America, that list is times ten.

As a matter of fact, one of the data points that we shared not with Gartner because we didn’t have it ready but we did share it with IDC and IDC released a report that moved Shopify as the loan leader in their similar study among the peers that you talked about. We were the only one in their version of the leader quadrant. A lot of that is because this data point. We measure the number of customers that leave us and go to our competition in the enterprise space and the number of those that come from the competition to us.

That ratio we talked about at investor day is a bulletproof number, 38 to 1. Thirty-eight enterprises come to Shopify for every one that leaves Shopify and goes through the competition. It’s the product build out of OMS interoperability. It’s a strategic partnership with Manhattan and miracle in market. Adyen is now an extended payment gateway for us in our eCommerce.

We’re adding it to our retail point of sale offering as well, bringing multi-currency and local exchange settlement later this 2024. That’s all been publicly announced. These are all the things that enterprises have been asking for and we just needed to prioritize and get it done. That’s where we focused. We have 4,000 engineers that wake up every day thinking about nothing but commerce. There’s a lot more coming down the pipe based on what we’ve heard from our clients.

I didn’t realize On Running was on Shopify. They were like a custom build. What is Shopify’s actual offering? Is it very composable or monolithic? Could you describe it from an architecture standpoint, please?

In ‘23, we launched something called Commerce Components. If you think about Shopify, Shopify is built on a series of components and it’s always been built that way. We’ve combined them together and have offered them in the marketplace for the last fifteen years as a standalone monolith. We then decomponetized that and offered into a headless environment where you can run front end or back end. We can play whatever role you would like us to play.

What we are hearing from the marketplace was a desire for greater composability now. There’s a gradient, there’s a far extreme left and right of what composable means. There’s the 1,000-piece Lego set that comes with no instructions and some people want that level of composability. If you have a very large dev team and you know exactly what you want to build, that is a wonderful way for you to go. There’s the version that we see in the marketplace, which is we run 10% of North America’s commerce, we’re about 8% of Europe, and over 25% of ANZ in Australia and New Zealand.

With that comes a tremendous amount of insight. We put that insight and opinion into the design of our components. On Running, as you brought up a few moments ago, is a custom build. They run their checkout as a component on Shopify. It’s not the full stack. That would have been a heavy lift for On to make that move. For them, composable was the right fit. Instead of the 1,000-piece Lego set of trying to assemble it together, they wanted the best performing checkout in the marketplace. That’s what a third-party study with a big three consulting firm completed for us. In our testing, that’s exactly what they saw.

Components, for us, is our version of composability. Now, our enterprise offer, and we just talked about this in New York in January 2024 and is brand new into the marketplace, has now said, “Instead of having to make a choice between either composable, full stack, or headless, let’s put it all into one suite of services. You, the customer, choose. Do you want to start composable and migrate into headless? Do you want part of your storefronts to be composable and some of them to be full stack monolith? You choose.”

Instead of building a hierarchy of vertical offerings in the marketplace, we now just bundled up everything into one suite of enterprise services, added additional technical support at no cost, we’re the only provider who does that, and you get a technical account manager assigned. Several hundred hours of professional services are included. We don’t believe in tolling our customers to launch our product. Those are differentiators because we make it very easy for customers to make the switch.

What do your top 10% of customers tend to gravitate to in your enterprise commerce offering? 

There are three things that most enterprises are talking to Shopify about. If you’re not in these three, you may or may not be including us. If you have these three, these are the three things that we hear most often and the reason why, normally, we’re the right fit. One is you’re trying to drive better top line performance. The third-party study I referenced was done a billion different data points in this study. We stand behind it in our contract guarantees. We convert 15% better than every other platform in the marketplace, 36% better than Salesforce.

We demoed this at NRF and you can see it in the checkout. Our checkout process has been optimized and honed based on that 10% that we see coming across our platform to be perfectly aligned to seamless and frictionless customer checkout and purchase. When you compare that to the others in market and the one that I mentioned that was the largest delta, It’s four times faster in checkout. It just means you have higher fidelity and higher chance of customers continuing through in your purchase. That’s one. If you’re looking for performance, with Shopify, hands down, there isn’t a question.

If the second one is you’re looking for better total cost of ownership, one of the things we see in the marketplace right now is CTOs, CIOs, and CMOs are trying to figure out how to do more with less. There’s Opex compression in their business. Having a large group of devs behind the scenes with a keep-the-lights-on role in commerce probably isn’t the best use of those resources. Shopify, because of the way we’ve designed the software, is extremely complex behind the scenes but we make it very easy to use and customize. Because of that, you don’t need the same number of resources.

Another third-party study that we’ll be talking about at Shoptalk in Vegas in the second week in March 2024 basically says our TCO is 22% better than everything else in market. If you add the conversion benefit, it’s closer to 32% better. If you’re in the market and you’re trying to figure out a way to do more with less, if you’re trying to figure out a way to reallocate some of your dev resources to higher priority projects across your portfolio, Shopify is normally a pretty good pick.

The last one is innovation. The thing that gets lost in the shuffle is the logistics purchase that we made where we had a lesson learned. No side quest, we want to stay main quest, and the main quest for us is commerce. That’s the only thing we wake up and think about. We’re not a CRM company. We’re not an ERP company. We’re not a marketing company. Many of those that you talked about earlier in Gartner, that’s their primary purpose.

Our primary purpose is nothing but commerce, that’s eCommerce, retail commerce, social commerce, or conversational commerce with the implementation of an advent of AI. At the end of the day, that’s what our 4,000 engineers wake up and think about. Because of that, we have the ability to innovate and implement new product services and capabilities at a scale that no one else can do in the marketplace.

Our 4,000 engineers are about 10X that of any other commerce platform that’s out there. We release about 100 new features every six months publicly and then there’s a series of updates we do behind the scenes of a new product feature capability or a new partner integration work like the add-in work I talked about. These things are what customers want.

Customers like Carrier, the air conditioning unit company, what are they doing on Shopify? They’re a B2B service provider. They sell to HVAC companies all over the world. They chose Shopify, one, because of number 1 and number 2, but more importantly because of number 3. At the end of the day, RFI or RFP, nobody had exactly what they wanted today. There is a bet that’s being made by every CTO that’s out there and that is who is going to innovate with me and ahead of me into the future? We think we’re uniquely positioned to do that.

Performance, TCO, and innovation. I want to speak to performance first because the audience would gravitate towards that. From my understanding on the outside, it appears Shop Pay is at the heart of your checkout experience. Could you give us a quick synopsis on how Shop Pay compares to other options in terms of the percentage of Shop Pay customers versus non-Shop Pay customers?

Everlane announced that they’d moved to Shop Pay. All the other components in their architecture were custom.  Do you want to speak to Shop Pay and its impact on performance? Are there many other key aspects to increase in performance, particularly speed to check out for consumers? You want to bring down that latency. Speed and checkouts are what drives conversions.

There’s a lot in that question. On the last bit you hit, our CEO says, “Latency is pollution.” I love that saying because it is the thing that impacts your SEO, it impacts your customer journeys, your click through rates, and it impacts your checkout. At the end of the day, customers have moved more towards instantaneous gratification than ever before. The level of effort that they have to go through and the level of consideration in the choices that need to be made, that’s friction in the system.

We believe deeply that latency at every stage of the customer journey is pollution. That dovetails well into Shop Pay. The beauty of shop pay is a couple of things. One, it’s the purple button that no one knows is Shopify. My wife constantly reminds me of all the places that don’t have the purple button and puts it on my laundry list of companies to go speak to and Everlane was one of them so I’m glad that Everlane is on board.

There are a few others we’ll talk about at the end of Q1 who’ve done the same. Here’s the beauty of Shop Pay. One, it’s a one click checkout that has ease and elegance built in. Friction latency is removed. The second is the tracking feature functionality of Shop Pay gives customers a vote of confidence of when the goods that they’ve purchased will arrive and it happens with extreme accuracy, which is something that a lot of other apps in the marketplace don’t provide.

The third is the sheer enormity of Shop Pay. Shop Pay is over 150 million shoppers that are using that app today. Only 80 million of those are in North America. It’s a very global set of customers. It has a very unique profile and high-household income. It tends to SKU younger in terms of audience, which is an audience that every single retailer brand, customer, or anybody focused on that marketplace is focused on that audience type. Highly affluent younger audiences, those buyers are gold. They come back and repeat use that app over and over again.

Some of what you saw at Everlane, a 15% improvement in their overall conversion rate is by the implementation of Shop Pay and 8% improvement average order value. We’re very pleased with that performance and Everlane is as well. Historically, Shop Pay was only available to our millions of Shopify users that are on our platform today. We’ve now made Shop Pay composable. It is something you can take and deploy on your custom stack like Everlane has done.

You can get similar benefits as if you were running it on Shopify’s core offering. It does convert even better when combined with Shopify core because it benefits from the checkout and all the other high-performance elements of our headless and full stack offerings. If you wanted it composable and that’s the only thing that you were looking for was a quick hit on your top line performance, deploying Shop Pay on your custom stack is an easy way to go get that.

What are the other components that enterprise commerce shoppers will be looking for? Do they tend to have their head and then they’re looking for more composable commerce components in the middle there? Could you break that down, please?

Prior to Shopify, Intuit, and Microsoft, my last role at Verizon was we didn’t have Chief Digital Officers back then but that was probably as close as you could get running the dot-com running eCommerce.  I’ve watched these hype cycles that have come in and one is moving from on-prem to Cloud. Back then, we were at the bleeding edge. We were one of the first for Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Marketing Cloud Customers, and then headless became the most important thing.

Now, composable is on the radar. We’re on the tail end of composable because, at the end of the day, it sounds amazing and you have a wide range of what composable means in the marketplace. You have the 1,000-piece Lego set version of it. If you have a huge dev team, that is absolutely the right way to go. There’s our version of it. What customers are realizing is they come in with this dream of composability and what they’re asking for is a set of packaged-up services that work for them.

The offerings that we’ve seen resonate most in market, one, is give me the ability to extend Shop Pay as a component. The other one is checkout. A lot of customers want that high-performing checkout experience. We talked a little bit about On Running and that’s what they chose Shopify for. In some cases, it’s the ability to burst and scale. The POD isolation that I talked about is something that we do uniquely for customers that have a very high velocity business.

If you look at customers like Supreme that need upwards of 40,000 checkouts per minute, that’s not something we offer standard in the market. We package it up as a component. If that is a unique use case that’s important to you, we can bring that to bear based on your order volume. You see that in high tech places where the new iPhone gets launched and you have 40,000 or 30,000 checkouts happening per minute at midnight as soon as it’s available.

Constrained limited supply is probably the better way to say it, limited supply offerings like what Supreme does in market. There’s a drop that comes super high demand and everything happens all at once. We have the ability to meet that need. There are several others on the backend that we can put into place.

At the end of the day, it’s up to the customer on what it is that’s most important to them. Traditionally, if it’s driving performance, it’s going to be checkout or Shop Pay. If it’s driving a scalable experience, it’s probably going to be in the POD isolation. If it’s back office, we have the ability to do that. We don’t see a whole lot of back-office composability as a high demand in the market. We offer it but it‘s not what I would say is 1 of the top 3.

One of the reasons from a user perspective that impressed us as users with Shopify in the small and medium size SME space was its ease of use. Does that appeal to enterprise clients or are they more into scale as in with the PODs or performance from a checkout to Shop Pay perspective. Do they care much about that ease of use from a backend perspective?

Ease of use has always been important. Shopify’s growth into the marketplace is similar to AWS. Back in my life, I saw Azure, which is an enterprise offering, working down market. I watched AWS, which was built for developers, working up market. Shopify is similar to that, built for developers, built for entrepreneurs.

As Tobi has reminded me several times, our software isn’t simple. Our software is extremely complex and like any artist, it’s written in a way that removes the complexity of our software for our customers. That takes effort. The easy way would be shipping the more raw version of the Shopify stack to our enterprise clients and letting them figure it out. We believe in making complex things simple.

Simple is so much easier to operate. It is a primary consideration for enterprises. How easy is it for me to customize my storefront? How easy is it for me to integrate into my inventory management or my order management systems? How does Shop Pay enrich my customer data platform, my CDP, and help my loyalty platform with retargeting?

How do things like audiences help me find repeat buyers in the marketplace that I don’t have access to because of the new rules with cookies that Apple has put into market and audiences across those 180 million or 150 million Shop Pay customers? We have the ability to help customers with retargeting and still be adherent to GDPR. Complex things made simple is what we do really well and it’s in high demand.

Simple does it all the time. What about the TCO component? Where do enterprise commerce clients of yours are making the most savings? You did mention overhead, it’s important now in this time and age. Are you seeing them take entire solutions off their existence stack and replacing it with alternatives from Shopify. Is Shopify offering even more cost competitive in that respect or is it due to you not needing the amount of resources to doing the same thing? That efficiency comes into play in the backend performance of Shopify. 

The total cost of ownership that I talked about was another big three consulting firm study, a different one than the checkout study.  We didn’t know what the answer was going to be but we wanted to look across the four stages of a customer journey. What’s the cost to implement the commerce solution? What’s the cost associated with purchasing that commerce solution and all the peripheral costs that come along with it, the app architecture, or any custom work that’s needed behind the scenes to augment that capability to make it work for you.

The actual billing itself, how much does it physically cost just for the software itself? Also, how much does it cost to continue to manage all the software updates and patching? Is there hosting cost involved or no hosting cost involved? What are the amount of resources dedicated to operating that commerce platform?

How much time does it take to make the changes that are required to meet the needs of your customers getting ready for Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Particular drop ships that may be coming in that you want to feature or prioritize your loyalty campaign augmentation. All of that stuff comes with somebody behind the scenes having to interoperate with the software to make it do what you want it to do.

The study was fairly even handed and that was a bit surprising to all of us. One, there’s a benefit and ease of getting launched on Shopify. When Indigo, think of them as like the Barnes and Noble of Canada, had a cyberattack and went down, one of those firms that you mentioned in Magic Quadrant was still two years into their build and it’s still not operational today. In three days, we got a storefront up and running with them. Within a week, they were able to batch pricing.

It wasn’t beautiful the way it all integrated on the backend but we were able to keep Indigo alive in a place where the incumbent was still in launch phase two years later. Buy Buy Baby, up and running in four months. Four and a half to six months is about the average time horizon to launch on Shopify. In comparison and contrast, most others, you’re going to be nine months to a year, if not longer.

If you’re looking composable, I saw a data point, not ours, it was one of our competitors who had shared it, a lot of the 1,000-piece Lego set implementations, close to 50% of those are failing. One of the conversations we have with customers is, “What’s your time horizon to implement and how important is that to your business?”

We document and work backwards on what that implementation plan is to make sure we hit that date and we don’t go longer than that date. The implementation is something we do well. Our pricing constructs and market in general are very favorable to everyone else’s in marketplace. We knew that was going to be the case because we could see the numbers in the bids. The TCO part on the cost of ongoing management, we thought there was a value there but we didn’t have hard data until the study was done and it’s pretty balanced again.

20% to 30% of resources have an opportunity to be redeployed elsewhere and the speed with which they can implement was so much faster that they were getting more done with fewer people. Most CTOs are looking to do that across their entire team. If we can help them with that in the commerce side, it allows them to go spend time on ERP or one of the other places that may need a little more help.

We had the founder of the agency that did the Shopify Plus for Buy Buy Baby on the podcast in January 2023 and his name is Nirav Sheth. He did a predictions episode with us and it was one of the things that they wanted to announce and were quite excited about it. From an innovation standpoint, where are you seeing a lot of activity? We briefly mentioned B2B and there are so many consumer brands coming on Shopify platform every now and then. Are you focusing on specific industries or are you just industry agnostic at this point in time? What are your prospects for B2B?

We’re very excited about B2B. The journeys, historically, at Shopify have been exclusively eCommerce, a little bit of retail, and a little bit of B2B but never shall the three crisscross. Those in our mid-market, we define mid-market as $5 million to $25 million in GMB. About 20% of those that are coming to Shopify are coming to Shopify not just for our eCommerce but for eCommerce and B2B.

We see the same thing up market customers like Carrier, the air conditioning company, coming to Shopify. They were on Legacy Salesforce. They looked at Fusefabric. They looked at Magento. At the end of the day, they chose Shopify. It’s not necessarily because of all the capabilities we have today. What they found was in their RFP, nobody had exactly what they wanted. It was a bet on the future. It was a bet on the innovation and the speed of innovation.

If you talk to Steve, who ran the RFP over at Shopify, he would tell you that the release cycles, the amount of committed engineering resources to the B2B platform, and the roadmap that we shared with them over the next year was compelling that they were comfortable coming to Shopify and choosing us in that regard. There are several others that have come on board since then like Gopuff, BevMo!, and a few others that have selected Shopify for all the same reasons. B2B will continue to be a growth engine.

A part of the customer maturity, depending on how you’ve started your company, if you were a digital-native eCommerce first, the next logical step for you is to enter into the B2B marketplace, become a wholesaler, and get expanded distribution. You also then realize that you probably also need a brick-and-mortar location to feature your brand. Look at Gymshark and what they opened up in London. Digital-native, social-driven, and high-influencer model now has an amazing retail location that’s absolutely fascinating. If you haven’t been there, go take a look, it’s beautiful. That all runs on Shopify.

Our goal is to create integrated experiences across all three of those platforms so that you have one commerce platform of record that extends across your B2B, D2C, and retail experiences. We think things like Shop Pay as an example help that extension happen, especially in your eCommerce and retail environments.

A lot of the activity in B2B will be Net 30 or whatever the terms are. You tend to find, at least from my experience, that the eCommerce component for B2B is more sampling and testing small units. What parts of the spectrum is Shopify playing at in the B2B space? What’s top on the shopping list of a typical B2B customer or potential customer looking to make that transition for whatever platform they are to enterprise to Shopify Plus?

It’s a great question. Our B2B offering services the full go-to market segmentation that we have today. It’s an enterprise offering, it’s a mid-market offering, and it’s for small businesses getting started. There are two things that stand out that I think are shifting and one is an ask that has been around for forever, which is more control. The second is the ability to influence.

Far too long, B2B has been viewed as this ledger-to-ledger interaction. It’s a facilitation of money and inventory transfer. That’s the old way to look at B2B. That is the keep-the-lights-on version. What we’re finding now from some of the largest brands in the world is that they want to have the ability to have greater influence in the wholesale buying behavior of their extended B2B merchants and partners. In order to do that, you need to blur the lines between commerce and B2B. You need to have the ability to showcase offers and discount schedules, not just with those that are in contract but those that are designed to create influence.

You’re seeing B2B start to do more and more loyalty-like offerings in their platform. These are things that if you’re simply looking at facilitating inventory transfer and ledger-to-ledger financial transfers, you probably aren’t in engineering for that. We have a unique perspective that we believe B2B absolutely has the ability to influence their ecosystem’s purchase behavior and we think Shopify uniquely does that well.

We’re running out of time. We’re still at the start of 2024. What are your trends? What are the eCommerce trends you anticipate? Particularly given the subject of this conversation, which is enterprise commerce, where do you see a lot of activity going on?

Depending on whether you think it’s the hard landing or soft landing of the macro environment, we’re going to continue to see people focused on total cost of ownership. How can I do more with less will be a theme. We hear it all over the place. We’re here to help. You’re going to continue to see enterprises that have built up a set of capabilities. Custom is still 50% of the marketplace that are struggling. They don’t know how they can make a material change in either top-line performance or cost without having to do something heavy. Composable is here to help in that regard.

We think we have the components that are the highest impact and lightest lift that you can put into your existing ecosystem and get an immediate rate of return. Deploying Shop Pay on the edge is a 60-day or 90-day implementation. It is fairly easy to get up and running and operating. Take advantage of that conversion benefit. I’d also think there’s a shift. I don’t know if it’ll happen in ‘24 but I am seeing an emergence of a move-away-from-composable-at-all-costs to more a shift back to the customer.

There’s this rising tide of focus on customer experiences. How do you create deep, rich, and meaningful connection with your customer in ways that are hard to do in a traditional Web 2.0 framework or the tile constructs that are out in the marketplace today? I was talking with a high-end fashion retailer, I won’t name them here, but they said, “We’re a little bit different than most places. Our retail stores are designed to create an experience of premium luxury goods.”

How do I make that real in my digital storefront? How does my dot-com emerge as premium in its offering where you can see the stitching and you can interact with the product in a way that you’re custom to in a store that the traditional click and tile approach of most commerce sites doesn’t fit? We’re doing a lot of work there. A lot of our roadmap is around product immersion and extracting out the things that are unique to our customer and trying to make those real in a Web 2 eCommerce way. That’s going to be true.

I’ll give you one last one. Everybody is trying to figure out how to extend their shopping experiences and level of customization that they have in eCommerce into their brick-and-mortar locations. We help in that regard very uniquely because of Shop Pay. Email capture is hard to get. Unless you have a strong loyalty program, grocery is probably done at the best. You don’t know who your customer is.

Worse yet, if they’re not a repeat buyer of yours that you have documented, you are completely blind. You need to find ways to capture that information and build a narrative and build a relationship with those customers. At Shopify, we have a couple of solutions that help enable that and we think that that’s going to be more and more important as we go through ‘24 and ’25.

Thank you. We never talked about Shopify POS, which is your retail offering, particularly in regards to Shop Pay and POS. Does that Shop Pay identity follow the customer into retail environment?

Absolutely. One of the things we see in a lot of the retail stores where we have the one-click checkout enabled, 30% or 35% percent capture. A little more than half of those are not their existing customers and they’re nowhere to be found in their loyalty platform. This is an audience that is brand new to the customer that we’re talking to. There’s an enrichment that comes with being able to go back and re-engage with that customer, either through the Shop app because you can do it directly through the Shop app.

Your products and services now become top of mind, it ends up pinned in their Shop app themselves so they could purchase direct through the Shop app into your storefront or to bring them back to your store because you now have access to that information that’s super valuable. All the stuff we’ve done with endless aisle, abandoned cart or still-in-cart online, and extending those experiences into store, Shopify enables all of that. We’re excited to help people learn more and more about what we’re doing to help traditional retailers create great experiences for their customers.

Are we going to see the first till-less retail store powered by Shopify like what Amazon did in their stores?

I’m not able to share details that are not publicly related on our roadmap.

Fair enough.

Thank you for asking. That was a really good last-minute question. It’s an exciting time. Enterprises have a tough job. 2024 is going to be a challenging year. They need to know you don’t have to do it alone. There are all sorts of different levels of effort where you can get immediate benefit or bigger benefit if you’re willing to do something more material. We think Shopify comes along and we’re intentionally focused on helping our customers win. At the end of the day, that’s what we want to do. If there’s something we don’t have currently or isn’t on our roadmap, rest assured, with the engineering talent we have, we will get there very quickly.

Bobby, thank you for coming on the podcast. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Congratulations with the direction Shopify Plus is going in the enterprise space. It’s a pleasure to have you on the 2X eCommerce podcast.

Thank you so much, Kunle. I appreciate it.