Ecommerce software provider Shopify’s business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce segment is growing fast — and drawing in some unexpected names.
Shopify more than doubled B2B gross merchandise volume in its fiscal Q2, as it pushed deeper into wholesale ecommerce and signed new clients across both retail and industrial sectors.
“Our B2B GMV is up 101%,” said Shopify president Harley Finkelstein on the company’s Q2 earnings call. “We’re bringing the biggest brands on the planet to the platform.”
Recent additions include Starbucks, Canada Goose, and Burton Snowboards — major retailers that increasingly operate wholesale channels — as well as Boart Longyear, a global provider of drilling services. The presence of a mining services firm on a platform known for consumer retail signals how far Shopify has expanded into enterprise commerce.
Shopify’s investment in B2B ecommerce
Shopify has been steadily investing in B2B capabilities, including support for purchase orders, tiered pricing, customer-specific catalogs, and integration with ERP systems. Now, it’s positioning itself as a single platform for both retail and wholesale operations. That’s particularly attractive to large brands with hybrid models.
Fiskars Group owns brands like Waterford and Wedgwood. It’s consolidating five ecommerce sites into one through Shopify. The company cited improved support for managing multiple business entities and cross-border sales as key reasons for the move.
These types of features — once the domain of specialized B2B software — are now part of Shopify’s core offering, as it competes for larger and more complex customers.
Shopify AI technology
Shopify is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) tools and infrastructure aimed at a future where consumers use digital agents — not traditional search — to shop.
The company launched a new product catalog API in Q2. It gives AI agents real-time access to inventory, pricing, and product data from millions of merchants.
It also rolled out Universal Cart, which lets users shop across multiple Shopify stores in a single transaction, and Checkout Kit, which Microsoft Copilot already adopted. Checkout Kit embeds Shopify’s checkout into third-party apps.
Merchants are using Shopify’s in-house AI assistant, Sidekick, to analyze churn, campaign performance, and inventory issues in real time. The company also launched a tool that builds ecommerce storefronts from a specific product description using generative AI.
Shopify grows GMV
Shopify’s total gross merchandise volume (GMV) for the quarter was $88 billion, up 31% from a year ago. Revenue also grew 31% to $2.7 billion. International sales were a key figure, with Europe up 42% year over year. Offline sales, powered by the company’s point-of-sale system, increased 29%.
Shop Pay, the company’s one-click checkout product, processed $27 billion in volume, up 65%. Meanwhile, cross-border transactions accounted for 15% of total GMV.
The company has now reported 11 straight quarters of positive free cash flow and plans to pay off a $920 million debt maturity in November using cash on hand.
Shopify’s enterprise segment continues to expand. In addition to high-profile retailers, it is attracting larger manufacturers, consumer packaged goods firms, and non-retail businesses. New clients this quarter include Unilever’s luxury skincare division, appliance maker Miele, Amazon’s Woot.com, fitness brand Beachbody, and Signet Jewelers.
Finkelstein emphasized that many of these clients aren’t well known to consumers but are leaders in their categories. Shopify is betting that its ability to serve both ends of the market — from solo entrepreneurs to multinational firms — will be a long-term advantage.
“We’ve built a platform that can scale with any kind of business,” he said.
As B2B ecommerce continues to grow, Shopify appears determined to become a major player. With traditional software vendors slow to modernize and large enterprises increasingly open to cloud-based solutions, Shopify’s push into wholesale may be just getting started.
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