As Shopify's competitive marketing lead, I spend my days analyzing market trends and understanding why enterprise brands make the technology decisions they do. Recently, I had the opportunity to present alongside my colleague Sahiti Surapaneni, a senior solutions engineer here, about a phenomenon we've been tracking closely: the massive migration of enterprise brands to Shopify.
What I'm about to share might surprise you. When I first saw the data, I had to double-check it myself—because even as someone who lives and breathes this stuff daily, the numbers were striking.
A closer look at the enterprise migration
Let me start with some context that'll help frame everything we're diving into today. Part of my role involves breaking out of what I call the "Shopify bubble"—that echo chamber of passionate employees and partners who tell us daily about our positive impact on global commerce. To get a clearer, less biased picture, I rely heavily on third-party data.
Store Leads, a front-end-scraping tool that identifies the technology powering websites, recently revealed something remarkable about enterprise commerce trends. Looking at the top 10,000 ranked sites (roughly equivalent to brands doing more than $50 million in GMV), we discovered that 42.2% of new enterprise launches in the past two years chose Shopify.
But here's where it gets really interesting. When we look at migrations—brands switching from one platform to another—over a third of enterprise brands made the move to Shopify in just the past two years.
The net migration data tells an even more compelling story. Across the top five most popular enterprise commerce solutions, Shopify is the only platform moving forward, adding over 1,200 enterprise brands while others remain stagnant or actually lose ground.
We're talking about household names here: Staples, Skullcandy, JB Hi-Fi, and Dollar Shave Club are just a few examples of the kinds of brands switching off of other platforms and moving to Shopify. And each of them are proving what's possible on our platform.
But the key underlying question here is why? Why are we seeing this momentum?
And after I sifted through countless migrations and spoke with dozens of enterprise brands, four clear themes emerged that can speak to why so many big brands are making the move to Shopify:
- Unified commerce
- Reduced complexity
- Innovation
- Return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO)
In this post, I’ll be digging into each of these themes in more detail, with a look at some real-world examples and technical details along the way.
Beyond the buzzword of unified commerce
Let me first tell you about Venus et Fleur, because their story perfectly illustrates what unified commerce actually means in practice. Their head of ecommerce, Brendan, shared something that stuck with me: he was able to integrate all their sales channels within a single platform, allowing them to deliver the seamless luxury experience their customers expect.
The results speak for themselves. They've improved customer loyalty and lifetime value through personalized product recommendations in-store, and they've increased average order value thanks to enhanced cross-sell and upsell capabilities powered by real-time inventory tracking.
A closer look at Shopify's unified model
Here's where most platforms talk a big game but fall short on delivery. When everyone else defines unified commerce as simply meeting customers where they are—which is really just omnichannel, nothing new there—we've built something fundamentally different.
We define unified commerce as a business strategy that integrates all a business’s sales channels, data, and back-end systems into a single platform. Essentially, it allows brands to successfully execute their omnichannel strategy because data isn’t siloed in multiple solutions, and they’re not relying on integrations to bring it all together.
Our unified model rests on three core pillars:
- Data models: Your ecommerce primitives—products, orders, customers, inventory—all speak the same language from day one.
- Features: Pricing, analytics, APIs, payment options: everything works together seamlessly rather than requiring complex integrations.
- Channels: Here's where the magic happens. Your online storefront, B2B operations, retail footprint, and social channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Shop app) all operate from the same foundation.
But we know enterprise brands have complex, custom use cases. That's where our 80/20 philosophy comes in: 80% of what you need works out of the box, and the remaining 20% is where our extensibility and integration capabilities shine.
Competitive comparison
Now let’s look at how Shopify stacks up against other major platforms. Shopify’s unified commerce architecture gives brands a critical advantage: DTC, B2B, and POS operate from a single customer profile, unified inventory, and shared dataset. This native integration eliminates the data silos and operational complexity that hold back most enterprise commerce setups.
The contrast with other platforms is stark:
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud runs B2C on Demandware (acquired in 2016), and POS on PredictSpring (acquired in 2024). Neither are natively integrated with their B2B commerce solution, which requires management of dual customer profiles and inventories.
- BigCommerce added B2B through the Bundle B2B acquisition, and they lack a native POS solution.
- Adobe Commerce offers solid B2C/B2B integration but requires third-party POS integrations and multiple data sources.
The result? Businesses on Shopify operate with unified data and streamlined operations, while competitors require complex integrations between disparate systems. It’s a foundational difference that impacts everything from customer experience to operational efficiency. And it’s a key reason I’ve seen for enterprise brands making the move.
Reduce complexity and get your developers back
The Conran Shop's migration from Adobe Commerce is another example that perfectly captures why brands are migrating. Their head of ecommerce, Richard, told us that Shopify's ease of use and flexibility transformed their approach to testing and learning. Instead of committing months of expensive developer time to every project, they can now move fast and get new features running smoothly and quickly.
This resonates with so many enterprise brands I talk to. They're tired of platform limitations holding back their growth.
The international expansion breakthrough
Let me show you a perfect example of how we've simplified something that's typically more complicated on other platforms: international expansion.
Most enterprise brands block off an entire year and dedicate massive developer resources for international expansion. With Shopify Markets, we've reimagined this process entirely.
Markets serves as your central command center—a unified home for business expansion that aggregates all your experiences in one centralized surface. And it's not just about cross-border commerce. You can see your B2B operations, retail activities, and online operations all in one place.
The Ruggable transformation
Ruggable is another great example. They wanted to prioritize international expansion, and they were dreading the typical timeline and complexity. After implementing Shopify Markets, they told us something pretty incredible: “We've been able to get things down to launching a new market in under just one month. We don't have to worry about manual pricing or tracking currency conversion—Shopify does it all for us."
That's the difference between building features that look good in demos versus building solutions that actually solve real business problems. And ultimately, that’s what our objective is here at Shopify: to build and do all the hard things for our customers, so that they get to build all the fun things on their end.
Competitive comparison
If you search for “top frustrations with [any major enterprise platform],” you'll find remarkably similar themes: complaints about overreliance on developers, and colorful language from frustrated users struggling to navigate complex systems. The point here isn't to drag other platforms through the mud—I'm sure you could find equally colorful complaints about Shopify. But the theme around usability and developer dependency is unmistakable: where other platforms rely heavily on developers because of complexity, Shopify significantly reduces that reliance—freeing up your developers to focus on other more impactful projects.
The billion-dollar difference of innovation at scale
Moving from reducing complexity to improving innovation, Skullcandy's migration story echoes themes I hear repeatedly. They wanted to move as quickly as their more nimble competitors, and having Shopify's innovation engine backing them up made that possible.
The numbers are striking: they can now test new features and channels with just a few clicks, they're launching products on their site in 30 minutes (down from 2 days), and they spend less time worrying about reliability and site maintenance.
What a $1.4 billion innovation engine gets you
At the core of Skullcandy’s success is a powerful engine of innovation. And it’s here that the investment numbers become crucial. In 2024, Shopify invested $1.4 billion in commerce innovation. That's not a typo, and it's not spread across multiple product lines—it's 100% focused on commerce because that's 100% of what we do.
Compare that to BigCommerce's $80 million investment in 2024, or the undisclosed commerce investments from Adobe, Salesforce, or SAP, where commerce represents maybe 10%–20% of their revenue. And for brands running custom solutions, innovation dependency becomes particularly painful. You don't get the passive benefit of new features and capabilities—everything requires internal development resources. This is consistently one of the top reasons custom-built brands migrate to Shopify.
Ultimately, to get a feel for what Shopify is working on—and just how much we’re working on—I’d say the best place to start is Editions. Every six months, we release a showcase of all the newest features and upgrades that we’ve launched. So even looking at the last couple, you can get a great sense of what the common themes are and where we’re investing in the product and innovating. For example, off the top of my head I’d say the top four themes from the last few Editions are flexibility, retail, B2B, and AI.
AI that actually works
I want to focus on that last theme, AI. Recently, our CEO, Tobi Lütke, issued a bold memo declaring Shopify’s stance on AI. Truly, just as AI is a fundamental expectation of Shopify employees, it’s becoming a fundamental expectation in commerce, core to everything else.
Let me walk you through three AI innovations that are already transforming how Shopify businesses operate:
- Semantic search: Instead of customers struggling with keyword searches, they can have natural conversations with your site. A customer searching for "something warm to wear in winter" gets results for winter hats, jackets, and turtlenecks. The AI search understands intent, not just keywords.
- Shopify Sidekick: This is your AI-powered business assistant that understands Shopify's data and your specific context. Want to create a 50%-off promotion? Just tell Sidekick. Need a conversion rate report? Sidekick compiles it automatically, pulling from all your data sources.
- Media generation: Our AI-powered image-editing tools let you create professional product photos and automatically update backgrounds for holidays, events, or promotions. We're building toward video generation so you won't need studio time for every product update.
The bottom-line impact of ROI and TCO
Finally, the last main reason—and a big one too—why we see brands making the switch to Shopify: they want to reduce their cost or increase some key metrics. Daniel Wellington's migration from commercetools exemplifies this kind of financial impact. They needed a platform with native solutions that could replace commercetools' requirement for a huge technical team and in-house hosting. And they needed to get all of that while maintaining their high expectations for global presence and localized needs.
The results exceeded their expectations. By switching to Shopify, they reduced platform licensing costs by 50%. But the bigger win was the massive reduction in technical debt—something we hear from brands across most legacy platforms.
The conversion rate advantage
About two years ago, we commissioned a third-party study analyzing conversion rates across major platforms, examining hundreds of thousands of transactions.
The results were clear: Shopify converts up to 36% better, and on average 15% better than other checkouts.*
For enterprise brands, that conversion difference translates directly to revenue impact. Let’s say you’re doing $50 million in GMV. Using that average 15% conversion improvement, that’s an easy $7.5 million boost—just from switching to Shopify.
The TCO reality
But let’s look beyond just conversion. We also commissioned a third-party study from a leading independent consulting firm to study TCO across major platforms in North America. This study looked at three key areas, besides the conversion aspect I just covered:
- Implementation costs
- Platform fees and ongoing costs
- Maintenance and internal team investment
Across all categories, Shopify's total cost of ownership came out 36% better than competing platforms.†
What might not be apparent on the surface is that there’s also an opportunity cost to not choosing Shopify. I just mentioned Shopify’s conversion advantage—but our TCO study took that a step further. When looking at the subset of the four competitors evaluated in the study, the result is an average of 18% higher checkout rate with Shopify. And when that’s expressed as a percentage of TCO, assuming a 10% margin on goods sold, that’s a roughly 1.8% TCO offset. That’s not to mention the less tangible cost savings you get by switching to Shopify. For example, when your developers aren't maintaining platform infrastructure or building basic commerce functionality, they can focus on what actually differentiates your business.
The enterprise migration continues—don’t get left behind
Even as I write this, the momentum shows no signs of slowing. Every week, I see more enterprise brands making the switch, and the four themes I've outlined consistently emerge in our conversations with them.
The unified commerce advantage isn't just about having everything in one place—it's about having everything work together natively.
The complexity reduction isn't just about easier interfaces—it's about freeing your team to focus on business growth instead of technical maintenance.
The innovation access isn't just about new features—it's about having a platform that leads the evolution of commerce rather than one that treats it as a side project.
And the financial impact isn't just about lower costs—it's about better performance and higher returns.
The data speaks for itself: while other platforms lose enterprise brands or remain stagnant, Shopify continues adding over 1,200 enterprise brands annually. That's not happening by accident—it's the result of building a platform that actually solves the problems enterprise brands face every day.
The question isn't whether this migration trend will continue. The real question is what you'll do about it—join the migration to sustained success or continue struggling with yesterday's commerce technology.
*Based on a study completed in April 2023 in partnership with a Big Three global management consulting company.
†According to research commissioned by Shopify from a leading independent consulting firm to study TCO across major platforms in North America through objective research methods.
Enterprise commerce FAQ
Can Shopify handle complex B2B requirements and enterprise-scale catalog?
Absolutely. Shopify powers brands like Barnes & Noble and Overstock.com with massive SKU counts and advanced B2B operations. Our unified commerce platform supports B2B, DTC, and retail operations on the same backend—sharing customer data, inventory, and workflows. With our 80/20 extensibility model, complex custom requirements can be built efficiently without expensive integrations.
How do we evaluate if Shopify is right for our specific use case?
Start with a technical consultation with our enterprise team. We’ll audit your current infrastructure, identify pain points, and align our unified commerce model with your needs. We can also connect you with brands in your industry that have migrated to Shopify. With over 1,200 enterprise brands joining us annually, we likely have experience solving challenges similar to yours.
How is Shopify equipped to handle strict regulatory requirements related to security and compliance?
Shopify meets enterprise-grade compliance and security standards. We’re SOC 2 Type II certified, PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, and aligned with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws. Shopify handles security updates automatically, reducing the burden on your IT teams. Regulated industries like healthcare and finance trust us with their commerce operations, and we can provide full compliance documentation during your evaluation.
How disruptive would a migration be from an existing tech stack, especially one with dozens of existing integrations and custom APIs?
Migration to Shopify is typically less disruptive than expected. Our platform supports over 10,000 apps and a robust API framework, so most integrations have direct replacements or can be rebuilt quickly. Our migration team works with you to streamline your integrations—often reducing the number by replacing multiple legacy systems with native Shopify features. We also support parallel environments so you can thoroughly test before launch.
