Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Despite some of that economic uncertainty, Spencer was talking about
Speaker 2: disappointment over the size of discounts. US shoppers did open
Speaker 2: their wallets on Black Friday, So what does that mean
Speaker 2: for the month ahead. Harley Fingalstein, president of global commerce
Speaker 2: company Shopify, is here with some good data, some good insights.
Speaker 2: I mean where we ended it. There was Spencer, Harley,
Speaker 2: the forecasters, the predictors say that this will be another
Speaker 2: record shopping season in aggregate the data available to you.
Speaker 2: What are you seeing? What are the trends?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I heard what Spencer said there. I mean, look,
Speaker 3: Friday was another record breaking Black Friday weekend. We saw
Speaker 3: about six point two billion dollars in sales for Black Friday.
Speaker 3: That's about twenty five percent from last year. We saw
Speaker 3: peak sales of five point one million dollars per minuted
Speaker 3: on Friday that happened around noon on Friday. That's up
Speaker 3: from four point six million last year as well. And
Speaker 3: if you pull up actually anyone can see this BFCM
Speaker 3: dot shop, you can actually see global commerce happening right
Speaker 3: now in real time. We are currently seeing about two
Speaker 3: point five million dollars per sales in sales per minute,
Speaker 3: about twenty five thousand orders per minute, and we've seen
Speaker 3: just shy of seventy million unique shoppers buy from Shopify stores.
Speaker 3: So it's certainly shipping up to be another great day.
Speaker 3: And happy to go into some of the merchants and
Speaker 3: some of the trends that we're seeing cross Shopify.
Speaker 2: Harley, what I'd like to do is actually take a
Speaker 2: sort of geographic breakdown because in the limited data that
Speaker 2: we went through a spencer, I think we're recognizing different
Speaker 2: speeds of great sharpicula.
Speaker 1: US versus Europe. Could we start there? Yeah? Sure.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, if you look at top selling countries
Speaker 3: across the world where Shopify sells, we have millions of
Speaker 3: stores in places like the US, we power twelve percent
Speaker 3: of all e commerce, so we have a really great
Speaker 3: view of things. US, UK, Australia, Germany and Canada are
Speaker 3: the top five. Look a top three selling cities you
Speaker 3: see La New York and London in US alone, La
Speaker 3: New York and San Francisco were the top three. The
Speaker 3: other thing that we also saw is cross border, but
Speaker 3: seventeen percent of orders were cross border orders, so shipped
Speaker 3: to a different country as well. And then in terms
Speaker 3: of top trending merchants that we saw, we saw Hatch
Speaker 3: which is sort of this it's been called the Restore three,
Speaker 3: which is this phone free alarm for kind of morning routines.
Speaker 3: Crunch Labs has the sort of kids build it yourself
Speaker 3: monthly toy subscription, brook linnen on their super Plush robe,
Speaker 3: and then Bass has their weekend or travel bag as well.
Speaker 3: So we're seeing across a bunch of different verticals do
Speaker 3: really well.
Speaker 1: But a big thing.
Speaker 3: Actually that we're seeing now is last year seemed to
Speaker 3: be a lot to talk about getting outside gifts, were
Speaker 3: about the products being sold, were about you know, things
Speaker 3: like skiing or hiking.
Speaker 1: We're camping. This year seems to be that home is
Speaker 1: really you.
Speaker 3: Know, the winner here where people are buying things for
Speaker 3: their home, whether it's kitchens except for the kitchen, or
Speaker 3: puzzles or blankets, but generally consumers are buying from brands
Speaker 3: they love, and we're fortunate those brands are on Shopify.
Speaker 1: What does that cross border stat that's seventeen percent signal
Speaker 1: to you? Is that growing? I mean, how does that
Speaker 1: stand up to last year when perhaps Taris went such
Speaker 1: a headwind.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's what I think it means is
Speaker 3: that consumers generally are somewhat geographically agnostic. They want to
Speaker 3: buy from their favorite brands. You know, we heard from
Speaker 3: Jim Shark they had their biggest Black Friday sale ever
Speaker 3: online ag one Athletic Greens was a fifty percent brunt
Speaker 3: Workware got an order every five seconds. So if you
Speaker 3: think about where consumers are purchasing, they're buying from brands
Speaker 3: they love the Voris, the figs, the Alo Yogas, the
Speaker 3: on Runnings of the World, and I think they're agnostic
Speaker 3: to where those are coming from.
Speaker 1: The other thing that we're.
Speaker 3: Seeing, which is really interesting, is that this really wasn't
Speaker 3: just about discount this year.
Speaker 1: People shop brands, not channels.
Speaker 3: We're almost worrying living in sort of a post world
Speaker 3: channel where you know, the consumers bounce from a TikTok
Speaker 3: video to an AI agent, to a website to a store.
Speaker 3: Even in video games like Roadblocks where Shoppi by powers commerce.
Speaker 3: The brands that really won the weekend made the experience
Speaker 3: feel the same everywhere they were, and that continues today.
Speaker 2: Let's talk holly about the inevitable AI question.
Speaker 1: Because you are like the global commerce company. You're helping
Speaker 1: people be digitally native. How are they interacting therefore, in
Speaker 1: this world of brands with various AI agents, whether their
Speaker 1: own or whether they're external third party.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, look, it's still very very early, but
Speaker 3: since January we've actually seen AI driven traffic on to
Speaker 3: Shopify stores up about six x.
Speaker 1: But we've been preparing for this for years.
Speaker 3: We've been laying the rails for AGENTI where alread we've
Speaker 3: already anounced deals with Perplexity and more recently with chat GBT,
Speaker 3: where brands on Shopify can sell directly in those conversations,
Speaker 3: no links, no redirects, just sort of this very seamless
Speaker 3: experience directly in the chat. And so I think we're
Speaker 3: going to see a lot more of that. Now what
Speaker 3: permutation eventually wins, we're not sure yet, but we'll be
Speaker 3: ready for it. But the other side of it is
Speaker 3: really interesting, which is that brands, the merchants themselves, are
Speaker 3: using AI to support them on the biggest shopping season
Speaker 3: we can of the year. So we have something called Sidekick,
Speaker 3: which is the AI assistant built into Shopify, which knows
Speaker 3: everything about merchant stores, knows everything about Shopify, and we've
Speaker 3: seen over one hundred million conversations with Sidekick. So merchants
Speaker 3: are able to do things like you know, design copyright
Speaker 3: market create these incredible analytics dashboards where they can decide
Speaker 3: where to spend in a much more sophisticated way. And
Speaker 3: so it's giving smaller merchants a real leg up against
Speaker 3: the bigger guys because this AI empowers them.
Speaker 2: I want to go back to tariffs, Holly, but with
Speaker 2: a slightly different way of asking the question. You can
Speaker 2: look at overall spend, but the question we're asking ourselves
Speaker 2: in the bloom Bag newsroom is our consumer is still
Speaker 2: spending and getting less in return. So what are the
Speaker 2: data sets that you're tracking the evidence that impact of
Speaker 2: tariffs either through a diminished spend or same level of spend,
Speaker 2: but you just get less for it.
Speaker 3: We actually measure, you know, both consumer confidence but also
Speaker 3: consumer's appetite to spend at checkout and so far, I
Speaker 3: mean as we speak right now, ed two point five
Speaker 3: million dollars are going through check with every single minute.
Speaker 3: So we've operated through all types of macro environments and
Speaker 3: our focus is always the same, which is for merchants
Speaker 3: and I think what we're seeing though, is that, you know,
Speaker 3: whether during the pandemic, for example, we introduce tools like
Speaker 3: you know, contact list delivery back in twenty twenty. Well,
Speaker 3: now we're creating tools to help merchants navigate cross border
Speaker 3: tariffs and navigate sort of some global uncertainty to make
Speaker 3: sure they have everything they need.
Speaker 1: So we're not complacent about this.
Speaker 3: We're tracking macro conditions, but so far Shopify merchants consistently
Speaker 3: outperform the overall market, and we're seeing that that they're
Speaker 3: they're you know, they have a lot of buyers.
Speaker 2: Right now, and I think we'll see great to have
Speaker 2: some time with the president of Shopify. What a weekend
Speaker 2: it's been for you, I'm sure