Latest / The Retail Podcast / Shopify CRO Bobby Morrison | AI Search, Unified Commerce & 10 Trillion Data Queries Explained

Transcript

Shopify CRO Bobby Morrison | AI Search, Unified Commerce & 10 Trillion Data Queries Explained · The Retail Podcast

• 0:00
  Let's not confuse simple with or conflate it with less than.
• 0:03
  Our software is extremely complex and it built for massive
• 0:07
  scale. I mean we had over Black Friday,
• 0:09
  Cyber Monday, 10 trillion data queries, 1.1 trillion edge
• 0:13
  requests. Like we make the complex thing
• 0:16
  simple and and that's way more difficult than just allowing
• 0:20
  that complexity to be passed on to our customer.
• 0:33
  Hello and welcome to the retail podcast.
• 0:36
  Now today's brand and guest is someone well, you may not know
• 0:39
  Bobby specifically, but you've definitely heard the company
• 0:42
  that he works for and what I really like to do today with
• 0:46
  Bobby and in a minute we'll we'll go over across to Bobby is
• 0:50
  get underneath if you like the hood of Shopify and understand
• 0:54
  what is the because there was a release last last month.
• 0:57
  We all heard about the new updates and I know we have a lot
• 1:00
  of listeners on the podcast who are with Shopify agencies, will
• 1:04
  have Shopify consultants or are thinking about I'm launching a
• 1:08
  new product and I'm an established brand and I want a,
• 1:11
  a platform that I can host that that on.
• 1:14
  But before we get to that, let's introduce Bobby, Bobby Morrison,
• 1:17
  Shopify CRO. Is that correct?
• 1:20
  That's correct. Yeah.
• 1:21
  Thanks for having me, Alex. It's an absolute pleasure.
• 1:23
  Where in the world are you? I am in very hot Dallas, TX this
• 1:28
  time of year. Everyone knows Shopify right?
• 1:31
  I'd be surprised anyone on the planet that doesn't know
• 1:33
  Shopify, but maybe I. I believe Shopify seems to
• 1:37
  always be reinventing itself from e-commerce to now physical
• 1:41
  stores. Could you sort of give us a
• 1:44
  positioning on the modern Shopify stack?
• 1:48
  What is on? Who is Shopify?
• 1:50
  Yeah. You know, first we we stand, I
• 1:52
  think our message in market's pretty consistent.
• 1:55
  We're the retail operating system behind some of your
• 1:57
  favourite brands. That operating system is made-up
• 2:00
  of three key pillars. We have a an e-commerce pillar,
• 2:03
  which I think most of your listeners are familiar with.
• 2:06
  But we also have a wholesale offering and a retail offering.
• 2:09
  And one of the things that we focus very hard on is just
• 2:13
  making sure that our underlying primitives are consistent across
• 2:16
  those journeys. So when you're in a retail store
• 2:19
  and have an experience in store, it should feel like the Shopify
• 2:22
  that you have when you're purchasing online.
• 2:25
  And so our focus has been on making commerce better for
• 2:29
  everyone. And commerce isn't just
• 2:31
  ecommerce, it's commerce wherever commerce happens to
• 2:34
  occur. So all the one click checkouts
• 2:37
  that we've built into the social networks that are out there that
• 2:41
  people have tapped into and turned into new channels for
• 2:45
  them and routes to market or whether it's online or in your
• 2:48
  brick and mortar retail location.
• 2:50
  We believe a unified experience is the right experience for
• 2:53
  customers, ones that they're familiar with.
• 2:54
  And we leverage the scale of of the company to help inform not
• 2:58
  only what we've built in the past, but obviously what we're
• 3:00
  going to build in the future. So we had 875,000,000 buyers on
• 3:05
  the network last year. Wow, that purchase from Shopify.
• 3:08
  So that kind of breath across 175 countries around the world
• 3:12
  gives us a unique insight into consumer buying behaviour.
• 3:16
  And we take that insight and really break it down to what are
• 3:21
  the core problems or friction points or changes that we see in
• 3:25
  customer buying. And then we build those insights
• 3:28
  into the software to make sure that we're caring for that as we
• 3:31
  go forward. So we tend to be a bit
• 3:33
  opinionated on where commerce is going.
• 3:36
  And at the end of the day, you know, as we go into this new
• 3:39
  world of all things AI, we think commerce is going to go through
• 3:43
  a massive transformation and how people decide to purchase and
• 3:48
  how they go through the consideration process.
• 3:50
  And we think we have a very, very strong point of view of
• 3:53
  what that looks like. And we brought, we're building
• 3:55
  that into our software. So one of the things I've I've
• 3:59
  heard said a few times at conferences is this path to
• 4:03
  purchase online. And you mentioned social, it's
• 4:06
  becoming a little bit more complex.
• 4:08
  People are having to go via multiple digital touch points
• 4:12
  before they get to the transaction.
• 4:15
  And and where they where they transact is actually changing a
• 4:19
  little bit and AI is having an impact on that.
• 4:22
  And then post purchase in terms of how, and I was on a panel
• 4:27
  last week, E Tel London or E Tel Europe, all four brands were on
• 4:33
  Shopify, which was just quite funny when I said, I'm curious,
• 4:36
  what platforms do you want to sit on?
• 4:38
  And they all said, we're all on Shopify, you know, and they, we
• 4:41
  had beauty, we had fast fashion, but we were talking about post
• 4:45
  purchase. What do you do post purchase?
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  So I'll give you a choice in terms of the the sort of pre
• 4:51
  purchase or post purchase. I'm curious what what are some
• 4:55
  of the trends you're seeing or some of the areas where Shopify
• 4:59
  may have not focused on in the past and is now focusing on a
• 5:03
  little bit more now? Yeah, I think and this is both
• 5:07
  an internal trend, what we see in our own marketing and what we
• 5:11
  hear from our customers. Obviously search has gone
• 5:15
  through a radical transformation and while it's still early days,
• 5:19
  it's no longer the keyword in the box, it's the end of a
• 5:22
  prompt. And we're seeing the emergence
• 5:24
  quarter on quarter of more and more AI enabled searches that
• 5:29
  are getting deep query into product catalogues using third
• 5:33
  parties for quality validation affiliate, which I think a lot
• 5:38
  of marketing firms probably have stepped away from in many, in
• 5:43
  many ways over the past few years.
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  I think is re emerging because the AI engines are going out
• 5:49
  using third parties to validate quality, not your internal
• 5:53
  products scoring system. So like that, that's probably
• 5:57
  the one I hear about the most. My, my marketing is being
• 6:01
  disrupted. Consideration is moving into the
• 6:05
  AI engines and it's not too hard to think about a future where
• 6:10
  commerce will start to happen at that edge as well.
• 6:13
  So I think those are the things that really stand out right now.
• 6:16
  And so that that helps inform how we think about enabling
• 6:20
  commerce for the the next generation.
• 6:23
  You know, not too dissimilar from the pattern, Alex, that we
• 6:25
  saw back in when social became more mainstream for direct
• 6:30
  purchases. Once TikTok shop came in and you
• 6:33
  know, Instagram and Facebook allowed it, allowed for direct
• 6:38
  purchase, we realised very, very quickly that that's where
• 6:41
  commerce is happening and we need to make sure that we enable
• 6:43
  it and let's be the first to get there.
• 6:45
  And we've had a pattern of doing that over and over again and.
• 6:49
  And and Shopify integrates the both platforms, the meta and
• 6:52
  TikTok shop, right? Correct.
• 6:54
  So just one again, another theme, just sticking with the AI
• 6:57
  theme. I'm curious on your opinion.
• 6:59
  It may not have a a direct impact on on Shopify, but one of
• 7:05
  this, one of the things that were themes that were saying
• 7:07
  seeing is what you've mentioned companies such as perplexity
• 7:11
  where people search for that dress, circumventing the Shopify
• 7:16
  or the e-commerce store and taking you directly to the
• 7:20
  product, which in in my mind sort of means there's a new
• 7:24
  model. We need a new model for
• 7:25
  e-commerce like dark stores in in physical world where
• 7:29
  marketing teams. And I guess this is what you're
• 7:31
  saying. You've spent millions of pounds
• 7:33
  on these beautifully created websites that the AI is just
• 7:36
  circumventing and going to the product, which I think you know,
• 7:40
  like in the old days like Alexa voice, all of that data sits
• 7:44
  with perplexity, not the retailer.
• 7:47
  Do you have any thoughts on that?
• 7:48
  Is that like is there any, I don't know there any solutions?
• 7:51
  Is there any things that retailers can do?
• 7:53
  Yeah, I, well, first, I think the product catalogues and the
• 7:57
  checkout still happens within the domain of the retailer.
• 8:01
  It may not come through the front door landing pages and the
• 8:04
  customer journey may be different, but I think most
• 8:06
  retailers would say as long as you're landing on my properties
• 8:09
  and choosing my products, that's a that's a great thing.
• 8:13
  And so I don't have a crystal ball on this one.
• 8:16
  I think we're all learning our way through how customers are
• 8:19
  using different AI engines. Yeah, perplexity is one of them.
• 8:24
  Obviously there are others. And I think as we go forward,
• 8:26
  we're just, we're staying close to how customers are changing
• 8:30
  the way they're purchasing, where we can definitely see how
• 8:33
  they're changing their search criteria.
• 8:36
  And so it's, again, it's not hard to think too far out into
• 8:40
  the future where that search criteria will then end up being
• 8:43
  a transaction. But you're always looking for
• 8:45
  trust. I know when I go to pick your
• 8:48
  one of your favourite brands, gymshark.com.
• 8:50
  Yep. When I land on Gym Shark, I know
• 8:52
  that I am talking to Gym Shark. The product is Gym Shark's
• 8:56
  product that's endorsed by Gym Shark.
• 8:58
  And I'm getting ready to purchase that item.
• 9:00
  And I have an experience that's consistent with the last time
• 9:03
  that I was at Gym Shark, whether I was in the store and hit the
• 9:05
  purple button when I checked out or whether I was online, Gym
• 9:08
  Shark knew me end to end now. Yeah, This, this the future,
• 9:12
  this is a Bobby statement, maybe not a Shopify statement is in my
• 9:17
  mind the the different AI wrappers and engines that sit on
• 9:20
  top that are driving some of the search consideration could also
• 9:25
  be one of those endpoints. And so how the real question
• 9:29
  for, for companies like Shopify and maybe some of the others in
• 9:32
  the spaces, how are they going to enable a direct relationship
• 9:37
  from their customers in an AI engine?
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  And, and I think we have a point of view of what that looks like.
• 9:44
  And, you know, we'll see where that goes here in the in the not
• 9:46
  so distant future. A lot of these brands start tiny
• 9:50
  and then grow to become these global powerhouses.
• 9:54
  Where do you see the future of? You mentioned the three areas
• 9:57
  that Shopify operates in, but what's the profile of a Shopify
• 10:00
  customer or the future customer of Shopify?
• 10:03
  It has changed wildly, Alex, like our core DNA obviously is
• 10:08
  an entrepreneurs and we have a deep passion for making things
• 10:11
  easy for those who have an idea and want to bring it to market.
• 10:15
  I think it's actually, you know, when I first came to Shopify, I
• 10:17
  was wondering, you know, is that a, is that a bug for servicing
• 10:21
  enterprise Oregon a feature? And I think what we're we're
• 10:24
  realising, especially in macroeconomic times like today,
• 10:27
  where you never know what the marketplace is going to demand,
• 10:31
  whether it's geopolitical instability or whether it's
• 10:34
  macroeconomic tariffs that are moving in and out.
• 10:37
  Seems like every other week, you know, speed and agility matter,
• 10:41
  ease of use matters. And so when you design for the
• 10:44
  entrepreneur, you have to take things that are extremely
• 10:48
  complex and make them simple. When you design for the
• 10:51
  enterprise, what most have done is you take things that are
• 10:55
  extremely complex and you hand it over to the enterprise who
• 10:59
  has resources to customise it and try to make it simple.
• 11:03
  What Shopify has done is taken that administrivia out of
• 11:07
  servicing the enterprise market and and we're seeing a lot of
• 11:10
  the your favourite brands like you just mentioned the the last
• 11:13
  engagement you had, all four out of four were on Shopify.
• 11:16
  There's been a big shift in the marketplace.
• 11:18
  So our core business, we stand on the shoulders of the
• 11:22
  entrepreneurs that that we have brought onto the platform and we
• 11:27
  watch them grow at and help them grow at accelerated rates.
• 11:31
  But we also go to the mid market and to the enterprise to make
• 11:35
  sure that we're servicing those customers.
• 11:36
  And all of that was born out of companies like the Gym Sharks of
• 11:40
  the World, who started off small and grew aloe yoga.
• 11:44
  The list. Goes on the list.
• 11:47
  Goes on and on. But now once you have those on
• 11:50
  the platform, you, you realise that you're now enabling them
• 11:54
  differently and there may be others that are looking for
• 11:57
  similar feature functionality across the enterprise.
• 12:01
  And so now over 50% of our business is all upmarket and and
• 12:06
  not a lot of people know that and it makes up in sales.
• 12:09
  Market for luxury? No upmarket, meaning the size
• 12:12
  and maturity of the business. Got you.
• 12:15
  And if you look across that, I think people would traditionally
• 12:18
  think of Shopify as fashion apparel, health and beauty.
• 12:21
  And we do those things extremely well.
• 12:23
  And we're we're going to continue to lean into to those
• 12:26
  customers to make sure we're providing them with a great
• 12:28
  experience. But we've now also seen
• 12:30
  automotive, a big three automotive manufacturer in North
• 12:33
  America is on Shopify. We've seen large consumer
• 12:37
  electronics and software services come on to Shopify.
• 12:40
  We've seen food and beverage become a category for Shopify.
• 12:45
  We've even seen things in education that have come on to
• 12:48
  Shopify. And and it's not just
• 12:50
  e-commerce. We're seeing more and more of
• 12:52
  that unified experience. So there's a customer of ours in
• 12:57
  in North America that runs the retail stores for universities
• 13:03
  campuses across across the states, roughly 1000 locations,
• 13:07
  all 1000 of those locations, those brick and mortar locations
• 13:11
  run on Shopify. Now we also help support them in
• 13:14
  their e-commerce world, but their core business is actually
• 13:18
  face to face interaction with students walking in to get their
• 13:22
  books, to get their sponsored gear from their university.
• 13:25
  And so like the diversity of the Shopify customer base is
• 13:29
  extremely broad and it keeps getting wider every day as we
• 13:33
  build new features, as we build new capabilities and those types
• 13:36
  of customers that we service has been expanding and we expect
• 13:39
  that to continue. What is it that people get wrong
• 13:42
  or when they're looking to come to Shopify, what are some of
• 13:46
  those sort of things that they just, I don't know, through time
• 13:49
  you've seen they're just thinking about it in the wrong
• 13:51
  way. Yeah, I I'll take it.
• 13:53
  That's what an amazing question, by the way.
• 13:54
  I'll take it back to what I what I said earlier, but maybe unpack
• 13:58
  it a little bit, I think. And by the way, I fell into this
• 14:00
  trap as well. I remember sitting in a meeting
• 14:03
  and I had a conversation, it was in like one of our keys senior
• 14:08
  leadership meetings and I had mentioned simple, the word
• 14:11
  simple over and over again. And and I got corrected by Toby.
• 14:15
  Actually don't let's not confuse simple with or conflate it with
• 14:19
  less than simple. Our software is extremely
• 14:22
  complex and it built for massive scale.
• 14:25
  I mean, we had over Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 10
• 14:28
  trillion data queries, 1.1 trillion edge requests just over
• 14:32
  a three day period. Like we make the complex,
• 14:35
  complex things simple and, and that's way more difficult than
• 14:39
  just allowing that complexity to be passed on to our customers.
• 14:42
  So I think one of the things people think about when they
• 14:44
  think about Shopify is, oh, they're the entrepreneur
• 14:46
  company. We are, but don't take that as a
• 14:49
  I'm not ready for enterprise. Take that and say they have now
• 14:53
  taken the legacy old school, old software mentality that is
• 14:59
  traditional enterprise and and made it easy for me to be able
• 15:04
  to deploy and operate. We have brands, Alex on Shopify
• 15:07
  that have come to us with upwards of 400 technical
• 15:11
  resources keeping the lights on of their legacy custom platform
• 15:15
  or maybe some of those that are operated by our competitors.
• 15:19
  Yeah, when we have moved them to Shopify, they've been able to
• 15:22
  run that same core platform with a third of the people, sometimes
• 15:27
  even a tenth of those people. Now it doesn't mean that those
• 15:30
  resources go away. It means they get to go work on
• 15:32
  the fun stuff that they always wanted to work on versus the
• 15:35
  keep the lights on kind of work that was happening before.
• 15:38
  And I think this is the pattern of behaviour that we see in the
• 15:41
  market. Each one of our retailers wants
• 15:44
  to build new and and dynamic experiences, both for their
• 15:48
  employees and for their customers.
• 15:51
  But they're caught in the keep the lights on tech debt that has
• 15:55
  them handcuffed and doesn't give them the resources they need to
• 15:59
  be able to build. We help customers do that.
• 16:01
  Yeah, I mean I I've got personal experience and I'm ex Microsoft
• 16:04
  so I've had some horror stories of people.
• 16:07
  Trying to ex Microsoft as well so I know what you're talking
• 16:10
  about. Yeah, So I can, I can definitely
• 16:13
  see you know the the allure of of a Shopify because it does go
• 16:18
  into ERP and other some of the other CRM systems that
• 16:22
  enterprises or mid sized enterprises.
• 16:24
  If you don't have 5000 developers on call, how do you
• 16:29
  create a model? And, and, and so like right now,
• 16:32
  Alex, This is why it matters because when you have a change
• 16:35
  that comes, you know, most people operate their commerce
• 16:38
  platforms on some sort of a schedule.
• 16:40
  Generally it's looking out over a six to nine month period.
• 16:43
  They have a milestone moment of drop dead, no touches heading
• 16:47
  into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And then all of a sudden a
• 16:50
  change in economic policy comes out of the middle of nowhere and
• 16:52
  everyone has to scramble to figure out, do they have the
• 16:55
  right supply chain? Are they compliant?
• 16:57
  Are they applying the VAT tax or whatever it may maybe
• 16:59
  appropriately, are the tariffs all set up in a line and will
• 17:02
  that sustain for just two weeks or is that going to be in
• 17:05
  perpetuity? And what customers are now
• 17:07
  realising is that the legacy systems and platforms that
• 17:11
  they've been running on for 20 years aren't actually helping
• 17:13
  them when they're holding them hostage.
• 17:15
  And so this is, this is where our partners who have deep
• 17:18
  domain expertise, it's, it's the lasers, the domains, the, the
• 17:23
  mazes, our, our GSI partners, Accenture, Deloitte and and
• 17:28
  others like coming alongside of our customers and showing them
• 17:32
  there's a better way. And we've built migration tools
• 17:35
  to make that move. That was probably very painful
• 17:38
  when you did it 1520 years ago. You've made it a lot easier
• 17:42
  today to flip the switch and and get to a platform that is anti
• 17:47
  fragile and will actually scale with you when you need it to
• 17:50
  scale. So like now, now is one of those
• 17:53
  times where these systems, this kind of legacy view of
• 17:56
  enterprise SAS is really being stress tested.
• 17:59
  Coming coming towards the end of of the our conversation, couple
• 18:04
  of quick fire questions. Obviously, as I mentioned, a lot
• 18:07
  of listeners are already on Shopify.
• 18:10
  What's the one thing that they should do that they've not done
• 18:12
  because they've been on Shopify for a long time and, you know,
• 18:16
  maybe they've not. I'm just curious, is that one
• 18:19
  thing that you see people haven't done?
• 18:21
  Yeah. I don't know if there's one
• 18:23
  single thing that stands out, but I can tell you the pattern
• 18:26
  of behaviour that our best brands, those that are growing
• 18:29
  the fastest typically, typically do one.
• 18:32
  They have a trusted partner that they're working with.
• 18:34
  You don't have someone that's sitting with you side by side
• 18:37
  helping you innovate and design and think about the future,
• 18:40
  leveraging their experience across other brands that may be
• 18:44
  in your industry or across the market.
• 18:46
  That's normally a miss. I would deeply encourage
• 18:49
  everyone to get connected to a partner who understands all
• 18:52
  things Shopify. They they are behind the scenes,
• 18:54
  they know our Rd maps and they can help you design for the
• 18:57
  future. Number 2 is we have a cut an
• 18:59
  amazing customer success team. I love our customer success
• 19:02
  team. It is one of our superpowers
• 19:04
  inside of Shopify and at their fingertips.
• 19:07
  They have access to tools that can help you think about your
• 19:11
  business and make strategic decisions like what are the
• 19:13
  patterns and what are we seeing? And how are people solving for
• 19:16
  AI driven search versus traditional search?
• 19:19
  Like we, we can come in as trusted third parties.
• 19:22
  We have no skin in the game. And what search engine you use
• 19:26
  on your on your website, you can use Algolia, you can use bloom
• 19:30
  reach, you can use whoever you choose to use.
• 19:32
  But we may have an opinion or a set of data that might be
• 19:35
  helpful for you as you decide how to optimise that experience
• 19:39
  for your customers. And we can share with you
• 19:41
  feedback on what's working, what's not working.
• 19:43
  And I would tell you the third thing and this is, this is maybe
• 19:46
  the the best one, Shopify has launched something called
• 19:49
  Sidekick. If you are not using Sidekick
• 19:52
  today, don't think it's an AI, it's an AI agent that's embedded
• 19:56
  in the admin that's available to you.
• 19:59
  That agent capabilities are going to infinitely scale as AI
• 20:04
  continues to get better over time.
• 20:06
  And so we don't believe in boxing in.
• 20:08
  And building a particular product around AI capability
• 20:12
  today, that walled garden we think is overly restrictive.
• 20:15
  What we are doing is casting a sale.
• 20:17
  I, I wrote something about this on LinkedIn just recently from a
• 20:20
  commercial perspective, we do the same thing on the product
• 20:23
  side. So as you move from, you know,
• 20:25
  Anthropic 3, seven to four O Opus to whatever's next, the the
• 20:30
  engines going to continue to get better.
• 20:32
  And it is doing wonderful things right now, helping merchants
• 20:35
  make great decision. So I would just encourage your,
• 20:39
  your listeners, if you are on Shopify and you haven't used
• 20:42
  Sidekick, get it, pull it up, use it regularly and just know
• 20:47
  it will grow and innovate at the speed of AI innovation, which we
• 20:51
  all know is a runaway train right now.
• 20:53
  And, and that's a good thing. Final question.
• 20:56
  It might might be a bit of an old question.
• 20:58
  What's the one question I should have asked you but I didn't?
• 21:01
  Oh my gosh, I think you probably see it on my face.
• 21:07
  What's it like to work at? What's it like to work at
• 21:10
  Shopify? What's it like to be in this
• 21:12
  company that's wildly disruptive?
• 21:14
  And how does that, how does that manifest with your partners and
• 21:18
  customers? Like it's a great question.
• 21:19
  I'm glad you brought it up. It's I love this place.
• 21:22
  There's something special telling.
• 21:24
  Everybody in there just. Quickly, I've been, I've been to
• 21:26
  Shopify for three years. Oh no, I was at Intuit.
• 21:31
  Intuit for three years, Microsoft for three years, telco
• 21:35
  for a very long time. And I've seen, I've worked with
• 21:37
  some great leaders. I, I got a chance to see Satya
• 21:40
  in action and just his obsession around customer and bringing
• 21:43
  customers into meetings and his curiosity is real.
• 21:46
  Growth mindset is not a tagline. It's it's a reality.
• 21:50
  I watched the song and how he operates and he's a masterful
• 21:54
  operator. I got to tell you, a founder LED
• 21:56
  is just different. And the purity of purpose in our
• 22:00
  mission of making commerce better for everyone is not a
• 22:03
  cliche. It is deeply rooted in
• 22:06
  everything that we do as a company.
• 22:08
  And, and it's so inspiring to have not just the permission,
• 22:13
  but the mandate to do the unorthodox but true to
• 22:18
  intentionally break the mainstream way of thinking of
• 22:22
  classical old school. We use the language corpo
• 22:26
  businesses and reinvent the way, the way not only commerce runs,
• 22:31
  but how companies operate. And, and I tell you, it's a
• 22:34
  great place to work if you're a builder, it's a great place to
• 22:37
  work if you're an operator. We're probably not the right
• 22:40
  place for you. And, and I think our, our
• 22:42
  partners pick up that energy. It's exothermic in the way that
• 22:47
  they show up on behalf of the customers and in behalf of
• 22:50
  Shopify with our customers and, and we just love having great
• 22:54
  conversations with our customers, helping them succeed.
• 22:56
  I mean, there's nothing better than a model where we succeed
• 23:01
  alongside our customer success. It's not a usage consumption
• 23:04
  model like the hyperscalers. It's not a subscription seat
• 23:07
  model that tends to lock people in.
• 23:09
  Many of the brands when I was in Shop Talk Barcelona are really
• 23:13
  struggling with this fixed construct of cost, regardless of
• 23:19
  the macro environment. And and now they're looking to
• 23:22
  switch at Shopify. Our our monetization models line
• 23:27
  up exactly with our customers aspirations, which is to help
• 23:30
  them grow. And it's just, it's a, it's a
• 23:33
  well oiled machine focused on a common mission with a great
• 23:36
  leader who arguably is one of the best technologists of our
• 23:39
  time at the helm guiding the product road map.
• 23:43
  While myself and my team are are building the go to market engine
• 23:47
  that aligns and takes advantage of that product road map, road
• 23:51
  map and brings it to life in the market.
• 23:53
  I saw that you've got a new level of partners or sorry, you,
• 23:58
  I need to caveat this. What are the level of partners
• 24:01
  that you now have? Because I saw somewhere on
• 24:03
  LinkedIn one of the agencies saying we are now an enterprise
• 24:07
  Shopify partner. Is that a new grade that you
• 24:11
  bought out? Yeah, that sounds a little
• 24:14
  creative marketing maybe a little bit.
• 24:16
  We have we have certification levels inside of Shopify.
• 24:20
  I I like to think of our partners as servicing all of all
• 24:23
  of our customers. Some of them have domain
• 24:25
  expertise upmarket with our largest enterprises.
• 24:28
  Some people, some of them are working with some of our our mid
• 24:31
  market customers. All of them are extremely
• 24:33
  valuable. I think we have one of the
• 24:35
  strongest partner ecosystems on the planet.
• 24:38
  We certainly have the most mission driven partner ecosystem
• 24:43
  on the planet and I think that shows up in the conversations we
• 24:45
  have with customers. But, but you're, you're not
• 24:48
  wrong in that the type of partner that's on Shopify today
• 24:52
  is very different than what it was three years ago.
• 24:54
  Yeah, it's not the one as I was saying, you know, the the the
• 24:57
  one man band. It's.
• 24:59
  It's not. It's not.
• 25:00
  Your agencies. Now we, we, we, we have deep
• 25:04
  exclusive partners that have been with Shopify that know it's
• 25:06
  inside and out that are still with us and are growing and are
• 25:10
  succeeding and we're, we're deeply invested in their
• 25:13
  success. But we also have, you know,
• 25:15
  great Gsis Victoria and the song team over Attic Century.
• 25:19
  We have great partnerships, Deloitte, we have great
• 25:22
  partnerships. EY Brian and team, we have great
• 25:25
  partnerships. We have systems integrators,
• 25:28
  which is brand new for Shopify over the last three years.
• 25:30
  So the astounds of the world, the mazes of the world, the the
• 25:34
  new partners who used to be exclusive shops with our
• 25:38
  competitors are making them move to Shopify.
• 25:40
  You know why though, Alex? It's because their customers are
• 25:43
  moving. Yeah, Like I, I shared this data
• 25:45
  point back at Investor Day. At the end of 23 customers, we
• 25:49
  look at imports versus exports, those customers that are coming
• 25:52
  to Shopify versus those that are leaving and going to the
• 25:54
  competition. We were winning 38 to one in
• 25:58
  October. That number of 23, that number
• 26:01
  at the end of 24 increased to 4241.
• 26:05
  I can't remember the number one of those 241 to 1 like that.
• 26:09
  If you're a partner and you see this exodus happening in your
• 26:12
  base from this company that you've been with for the last
• 26:15
  decade plus now moving to Shopify, you realise, hey, I
• 26:19
  probably need to build a Shopify practise and and be the hero of
• 26:23
  that story versus losing out. And so we've done a lot there.
• 26:27
  And we have a couple of announcements we'll make later
• 26:30
  on this quarter with another type of partner that's giving us
• 26:33
  scale and reach into, you know, the hundreds of thousands of
• 26:38
  resellers that will give us breadth down market and help
• 26:42
  take both our retail offering to market as well as our e-commerce
• 26:45
  offering. But we have a very high bar for
• 26:47
  our partners. We require them to be deep
• 26:49
  domain experts on our platform. We require them to have high EQ
• 26:54
  and understanding of our customers businesses and we show
• 26:57
  up side by side. It's almost 70% of our business
• 27:00
  when we have a conversation with any of our clients that are
• 27:03
  considering coming to Shopify is with a partner in the room
• 27:06
  because we believe deeply in that Co sell motion and making
• 27:09
  sure that we're helping them get connected.
• 27:11
  Yeah, I can't imagine doing coming to Shopify alone.
• 27:16
  So I I definitely, I think it's a it's a, it's an important
• 27:19
  relationship. It is.
• 27:20
  Well, you know, I could, I can carry on asking you so many
• 27:23
  questions, but I have to be conscious of time.
• 27:25
  Thank you so much. I look forward to hopefully
• 27:27
  meeting you at one of these events.
• 27:30
  Maybe not in the UK, but we. Will make it happen.
• 27:33
  We will make it happen. Wonderful, Bobby.
• 27:35
  Thank you so much. All right.
• 27:37
  Thank you.