‘We saw different buying behavior’: How Shopify is building new enterprise categories & battling bots

Fresh off a record-breaking holiday season, Shopify is entering 2025 with a bigger focus on building its enterprise client base while keeping up with new ways that people are shopping.
While Shopify has long been a hub for beauty and fashion, the company is seeing more people buy items in “not your traditional Shopify categories,” including manufacturing and alcohol, Bobby Morrison, Shopify’s chief revenue officer, told Modern Retail in an interview. As such, Shopify is changing the way that it categorizes and recruits large-scale partners in those verticals. What’s more, on January 10, Shopify launched the Partner Solutions Center, a collection of accelerators and apps designed to “address the complex commerce needs of enterprises,” according to the company.
As Shopify focuses on bigger businesses — something it has been doing since early 2023 — the company is readying other changes for 2025. Its partnership with Roblox, which it announced last year, will go into full effect this year after being in pilot mode. The partnership allows developers, creators and brands on Shopify to sell physical items directly within the gaming platform. The company is also getting ready to release at least 100 new features in June based on customer feedback. Shopify released its last set of updates in December.
Although Shopify made a name for itself by powering online stores of direct-to-consumer brands, the company is doing more with all retail channels. In 2022, it launched a hardware version of its point-of-sale system and in 2024, it launched a fulfillment option for brick-and-mortar stores. In its last earnings report, which covered the three months ending in September, Shopify reported a 26% increase in year-over-year revenue. In December, it said it made $11.5 billion in sales over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a 24% increase from the year before.
Morrison, who joined Shopify in 2022, spoke with Modern Retail about how Shopify is adapting its business to reflect consumer behavior, while also keeping pace with new technology like artificial intelligence. Below are three main highlights of the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.
Non-traditional Shopify categories are in demand
“There are a couple of changes that we’re putting in place going into the next year. We started to see buying behavior in categories that were historically not your traditional Shopify categories: manufacturing, automotive, restricted items, alcohol, tobacco… We decided, ‘Hey, now was the time to change our go-to-market and start to align by industry.’
We have now broken our enterprise and large account space into 18 separate verticals because we’re seeing green shoots in categories that were non-traditional Shopify. We wanted to put some dedicated effort around servicing those particular verticals. That also means we’re mapping the ISVs [independent software vendors], third-party app providers that are unique to those verticals and then bringing them onboard. One carrier that came on board at the end of ’23 and launched in ’24 has helped us identify within that domain of manufacturer, ‘These are the ISVs that we needed to go recruit.’
So structurally, the business has shifted. And we saw that actually carry through Black Friday, Cyber Monday and through the end of the year because you saw spikes in these new categories that were outside of apparel, health and beauty — places like food services, stuff that you would normally not see on Shopify. We saw different buying behavior.”
The future of artificial intelligence & bots
“I don’t know if there is the killer app. You’re seeing [AI in] product descriptions and inventory management pages. You’re seeing it in search and personalization. It’s going to show up all over the place… I think the real growth in AI is going to be just the broad adoption and usage of it across the companies as a whole…
It reminds me of telecommunications back in the day. No one knew what you were going to use 3G for. What will I ever use two megs for? Same thing with four. And all of a sudden, video streaming services and all these other things started to build on that. I think AI will follow a similar but accelerated path…
We have seen buyers using AI in interesting ways. One of the things… at the end of 2023 was bots searching for the best prices. If you have the best price in the market, you can get overwhelmed with those bots driving buy behavior to that site, and you can actually put pressure on the site to be able to handle that demand. We learned from that this year [in 2024] and have the resiliency built into the back end to accommodate those big spikes.”
Being a ‘first mover’ in Roblox
“I think the real story is that the traditional omnichannel view is dead. If you’re still talking omni, you’re talking a decade ago. Omni is buy online, pickup in store. It’s a logistical definition that people have used. Commerce is now everywhere. The conversation that we’re having with clients is that you can’t tell whether a brand is a blogosphere brand, a social brand, a brick-and-mortar brand, a digital brand.
Us going into Roblox is just opening up another venue for brands to feature products and services in unique and dynamic ways… Whatever surface area looks to be commercial at some point in time in the future, we want to be first movers into those areas and then open the doors of possibility to these brands to figure out new and creative ways by which they want to feature their products.”