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- [00:00]
Indiana University Representative
Indiana University is proving how higher education can create solutions with industry. We're working side by side with industry partners to fuel economic growth that powers a future ready workforce. Explore. I use impact@iu.edu impact.
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Podcast Announcer
Bloomberg audio Studios Podcasts Radio News despite some of that.
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Bloomberg Host
Economic uncertainty, Spencer was talking about disappointment over the size of discounts. US shoppers did open their wallets on Black Friday. So what does that mean for the month ahead? Harley Finkelstein, president of global commerce company Shopify is here with some good data, some good insights. I mean where we ended it, there was Spencer, Holly, the forecasters, the predictors say that this will be another record shopping season. In aggregate, the data available to you, what are you seeing? What, what are the trends?
- [00:58]
Harley Finkelstein
Yeah, you know, I heard what Spencer said there. I mean look, Friday was another record breaking Black Friday weekend. We saw $6.2 billion in sales for Black Friday. That's about 25% from last year. We saw peak sales of $5.1 million per minute on Friday. That happened around noon on Friday. That's up from 4.6 million last year as well. And if you pull up, actually anyone can see this bfcm.shop, you can actually see global commerce happening right now in real time. We are currently seeing about $2.5 million per sales in sales per minute, about 25,000 orders per minute seen just shy of 70 million unique shoppers buy from Shopify stores. So it's certainly shaping up to be another great day and happy to go into some of the merchants and some of the trends that we're seeing across Shopify.
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Bloomberg Host
Holly, what I'd like to do is actually take a sort of geographic breakdown because in the limited data that we went through with Spencer, I think we're recognizing different speeds of growth. Particular US versus Europe. Could we start there?
- [02:00]
Harley Finkelstein
Yeah, sure. I mean look, if you look at top selling countries across the world where Shopify sells, we have millions of stores. In places like the US we power 12% of all E commerce. So we have a really great view of things. US, UK, Australia, Germany and Canada are the top five. Look at top three selling cities. You see LA, New York and London. In US alone, LA, New York and San Francisco are the top three. The other thing that we also saw is cross border, but 17% of orders were cross border orders so shipped to a different country as well. And then in terms of top trending merchants that we saw, we saw Hatch, which is sort of this, it's called the Restore 3, which is this phone free alarm for kind of morning Routines Crunch Labs has a sort of kids build it yourself monthly toy subscription. Brooklinen in on their super plush robe and then base has their weekend or travel bag as well. So we're seeing across a bunch of different verticals do really well. But a big thing actually that we're seeing now is last year seemed to be a lot, a lot of talk about getting outside gifts were about the products being sold were about, you know, things like skiing or hiking or camping. This year seems to be that home is really, you know, the winner here where people are buying things for their home, whether it's kitchen stuff for the kids kitchen or puzzles or blankets. But generally consumers are buying from brands they love and we're fortunate those brands are on Shopify.
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Bloomberg Interviewer
What does that cross border stat, that 17% signal to you? Is that growing? I mean how does that stand up to last year when perhaps tariffs went such a headwind?
- [03:30]
Harley Finkelstein
Yeah, I mean it's. What I think it means is that consumers generally are somewhat geographically agnostic. They want to buy from their favorite brands. You know we heard from Gymshark they their biggest black Friday sale ever online ag1 athletic greens was up 50 brunt workwear got an order every 5 seconds. So if you think about where consumers are purchasing, they're buying from brands they love. The Voris, the Figs, the Aloe yoga is the on runnings of the world. And I think they're agnostic to where those are coming from. The other thing that we're seeing which is really interesting is that this really wasn't just about discounts this year. People shop brands, not channels. We're almost living in sort of a post world channel where you know, the consumers bounce from a TikTok video to an AI agent to a website to a store. Even in video games like Roblox where Shopify powers commerce, the brand that really won the weekend made the experience feel the same everywhere they were and that that continues today.
- [04:23]
Bloomberg Interviewer
Let's talk Holly about the inevitable AI question because you are like the global commerce company. You're helping people be digitally native. How are they interacting therefore in this world of brands with various agents, whether they're own or whether they're external third party.
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Harley Finkelstein
Yeah, I mean look, it's still very, very early, but since January we've actually seen AI driven traffic on to Shopify stores up about 6x. But we've been preparing for this for years. We've been laying the rails for agentic. We're already, we've already announced deals with Perplexity and more recently with ChatGPT, where brands on Shopify can sell directly in those conversations. No links, no redirects, just sort of this very seamless experience directly in the chat. And so I think we're going to see a lot more of that now. What permutation eventually wins, we're not sure yet, but we'll be ready for it. But the other side of it is really interesting which is that brands, the merchants themselves are using AI to support them on the biggest shopping season weekend of the year. So we have something called Sidekick, which is the AI assistant built into Shopify, which knows everything about merchant stores, knows everything about Shopify. And We've seen over 100 million conversations with Sidekick. So merchants are able to do things like, you know, design, copyright, market, create these incredible analytics dashboards where they can decide where to spend in a much more sophisticated way. And so it's giving smaller merchants a real leg up against the bigger guys because this AI empowers them.
- [05:44]
Bloomberg Host
I want to go back to tariffs, Holly, but with a slightly different way of asking the question. You can look at overall spend but the question we're asking ourselves in the Bloomberg newsroom is are consumers still spending and getting less in return? So what are the data sets that you're tracking? The evidence that impact of tariffs either through a diminished spend or same level of spend, but you just get less for it.
- [06:07]
Harley Finkelstein
We actually measure, you know, both consumer confidence but also consumers appetite to spend at checkout. And so far, I mean as we speak right now, Ed, $2.5 million are going through checkout every single minute. So we've operated through all types of macro environments and our focus is always the same, which is for merchants. And I think what we're seeing though is that, you know, whether during the pandemic, for example, we introduced tools like, you know, contact list delivery back in 2020. Well now we're creating tools to help merchants navigate cross border tariffs and navigate sort of some global uncertainty to make sure they have everything they need. So we're not complacent about this. We're tracking macro conditions. But so far Shopify merchants consistently outperform the overall and we're seeing that, that they're, you know, they have a lot of buyers right now.
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Bloomberg Interviewer
Heidi Finkelstein, great to have some time with you. President of Shopify. What a weekend it's been for you, I'm sure.
- [06:56]
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