The next era of commerce, built by partners

The first time I visited our app partner Gorgias, I wasn't sure I had the right address. The directions took me to a garage in SoMa. Above the garage were founders Romain and Alex, hunched over laptops, building customer service software for online stores.

Back in 2016, that whole category belonged to a much bigger, well-funded incumbent. But there they were, betting they could do it better. 

Gorgias grew from that garage into a platform now woven into the tech stacks of more than 17,000 brands ranging from solo entrepreneurs to household names. 

Romain and Alex were entrepreneurs, doing exactly what any founder does: spotting a problem, believing they could solve it better than anyone else, and getting to work. 

Every partner is an entrepreneur

On the partnerships team, we spend our days working with entrepreneurs who are building agencies, apps, and service businesses in around 100 countries* that support millions of merchants around the world. We're all working on one mission, but from different angles. 

Most people picture Shopify in the middle, with thousands of apps and agencies radiating out from it. That's not it. This ecosystem is a living, evolving thing. It’s connected to us, but constantly changing and growing on its own. Every new person, company, or technology that joins makes the whole ecosystem more valuable to belong to. The value compounds. 

And that compounding value is what sets this ecosystem apart. Those that are a part of it, don’t just invite new players in, they embrace them and help set them up for success. It’s what we like to call collaborative competition: partners who compete for the same customers will still share everything they know with each other because that brings better outcomes for merchants and for themselves. 

It's what makes DotDev, Shopify's annual developer and partner gathering, so impactful. Two thousand people come from all over the world for two days to share what they know, get hands-on with what Shopify is building next, and meet the teams behind our products. DotDev gives this community time to connect with each other. People spend most of the year heads-down in their own work, so something magical happens when you get them all in the same room.  

Last year, 40,000 partners referred a new merchant to us.* That doesn't happen unless you believe in what's being built. That belief is what fills this community: entrepreneurs, taking a risk on an idea and trusting they can build it into something life-changing.

And when a partner helps a merchant win, it doesn't stop with them. As a merchant grows, takes on new opportunities, expands to new countries or builds out new product lines, partners are there, shoulder to shoulder with Shopify, to support them. This is the part people get wrong when they talk about market share like there's a fixed slice to fight over. The pie is infinite. Every new builder makes room for the next one. In 2025, the partner ecosystem generated nearly 7x Shopify’s total revenue. To be precise, that means for every dollar Shopify earns, the ecosystem around us generates $6.86.**

Say someone builds an app that helps a merchant sell more. Or helps a merchant get off the ground with a storefront that is beautiful and fast. That merchant grows, hires, and needs more apps and more custom optimization. Those get built by more partners, who hire too. 

The Shopify platform is a growth engine for merchants. The partner ecosystem is the same for the people who build on it. Last year, the ecosystem supported more than 1.5 million jobs, up 2.5 times from 2021.** Every one of those jobs is a person who chose to build here.

AI puts a premium on expertise

AI is expanding who gets to participate. It makes building faster, easier, and more accessible. If this is your craft, it's understandable how this can feel less like an opportunity and more like uncertainty. But when the floor gets lower, the ceiling rises even higher.

While fewer people need help getting from zero to one, they still need help getting from one to two to three and beyond. App store installs are growing for this exact reason. Merchants still want real expertise and judgment. As the price of building is coming down, the value of expertise is going up. The hardest problems of building aren't budging: what to build, why it matters, and how to make it hold up in the real world with real users.

That's where partners come in. What we keep seeing is that AI lets them move quicker and take on more business than they could before. The partners who thrive are already picking up these tools and tinkering. They win by solving the problems you can't vibe-code your way out of. Where the value sits has changed.

We believe in the future of this ecosystem so much, we changed the way we reward our partners to show it. Incentives are where a company tells you what it values. For years, ours were simple: a partner earned a percentage of the subscription fees a merchant paid us. Over time, it got more complicated than it needed to be, with tiers and rules that weighed the ecosystem down. So this month we simplified, and changed what we reward. We built it around what should matter most: the success of the merchant.

For the agencies who build and launch stores, that means sharing in the growth. When a merchant they helped launch sells more, they earn more. For app developers, it means continuing to earn on top of the $1.3 billion the app ecosystem earned last year. And for everyone, we've introduced a new opportunity by opening Shopify Catalog—which makes it possible to build experiences that reach well beyond a traditional storefront. Soon partners will be able to earn commission on the sales those experiences drive. This all comes back to a single worldview: we want everyone on the same side of the table.

And we’re still early

We're twenty years in, and people ask if the big moments are behind us. I think it's the opposite. 

Every time a new technology shows up, you get to start over and ask what's possible now that wasn't the day before. That’s the question in front of every partner right now.

Somewhere someone in a garage is hunched over a laptop, locked in on a vision, convinced the rest of the world just hasn't caught on yet. They aren’t waiting for permission, they’re already building.

There's so much left to build, and we get to do it together.

*Shopify Partner Survey 2026 (Shopify Market Insights, internal research; fielded May 29 to June 4, 2026). Base: all partners (n=2,501), weighted to be representative of active Shopify Partners; revenue-change items: partners with 2+ years tenure (n=2,018). Significance tested at 95%.

**Partnership revenue is based on 2025 activity across on platform partnership engagements and merchant activity.