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