Tariffs are shifting. De minimis rules are under pressure. And new enforcement could change how retailers operate overnight. If you sell across borders—through ecommerce, marketplaces, or direct—these changes don’t just impact compliance. They impact your pricing, margins, and conversion rates.

Register for our Trade and Tariff webinar series for regular updates.

Both dollar-store giants reported Q1, and the headlines make them look like one story. They aren't. Read the traffic line, not the press release.

Start with the obvious. Dollar Tree grew net sales 7.2% to $5B. Dollar General grew 3.4% to $10.8B. If that's all you saw, you'd call Dollar Tree the growth story. That would be a mistake.

Here's the number nobody at Dollar Tree wants you to linger on: traffic was down 1.0%. The entire 3.5% comp was built on ticket, up 4.5%. Fewer people walked in, the ones who did spent more, partly because Dollar Tree keeps pushing multi-price (about 5,900 stores now, 630 more converted in the quarter). The margins love it. Gross margin expanded 120 basis points, and adjusted EPS rose 38% to $1.74. The engine is humming.

But growth on declining trips is a clock running down. You can raise ticket for a while. Eventually, you need bodies in the store, and converting fewer customers into bigger baskets is harder to repeat every quarter than the EPS line suggests.

Now Dollar General. Comps were only 2.0%, less than half of Dollar Tree's. Boring, right? Except that 1.4 points came from traffic, just 0.5 from ticket. Todd Vasos has the customer voting with their feet, with growth across consumables, seasonal, apparel, and home. Less flashy, healthier mix. People showing up is the thing you can't fake.

Here's where the calls get interesting, because both teams described the same consumer and got different results. Vasos was blunt: the core customer is financially constrained, any tax-refund benefit was eaten by higher gas prices and cut SNAP payments, and shoppers run out of money before the month ends. His tell is the $1 price point. Value Valley, roughly 500 rotating dollar items, comped up 18.4%, and Vasos calls it "a real savior," an add-on early in the month and a budget-balancer at the end. He also flagged the trade-in everyone's watching: the fastest-growing customer count came from households earning over $100K, mostly from drug and grocery.

Dollar Tree's Mike Creedon told a near-identical story. Customers are shopping thoughtfully and closer to need, focused on affordability and gas-saving trip efficiency, with trade-in customers making up more than half, skewing higher-income. All cohorts comped positive. He noted shoppers saw higher gas but also higher tax refunds, with the real fuel drag usually showing up on a lag. About 85% of Dollar Tree sales still come from items priced at $2 or less.

Sit with that. Same macro, same higher-income trade-in, both leaning on the cheapest price points. One turned it into positive traffic. The other didn't. The gap is execution and format, not the customer.

Capital allocation shows what each team believes. Dollar Tree spent $595M on buybacks (5.5M shares) with $1.3B left. Confidence, or a clean post-Family Dollar balance sheet with nothing better to do? Dollar General did the opposite: zero buybacks assumed this year, paying the $0.59 dividend, long-term debt down over a billion from a year ago, holding sub-3x leverage. After 2024, I respect the discipline. You earn the right to buy back stock.

Both raised guidance while eating tariff costs and refusing to bank tariff-refund upside. Dollar Tree took adjusted EPS to $6.70–$7.10; Dollar General to $7.20–$7.45.

My read: Dollar Tree is the better quarter, Dollar General the better trajectory. One of those is easier to sustain. What happens to Dollar Tree's comp if the first quarter ticket can't carry it?

Same consumer, same higher-income trade-in, same lean on $1 price points, but Dollar General turned it into positive traffic (+1.4%) while Dollar Tree's entire comp rode on ticket as trips fell 1.0%, which tells you the gap is execution and format, not the customer. Dollar Tree had the louder quarter and Dollar General the healthier trajectory, and only one of those is easy to repeat.

Here's what the keynotes don't say out loud. Moving to Shopify doesn't fix your business. It gives you a better platform to run your existing business. Those are two different things, and most operators only learn the difference after they've signed the contract and the problems they blamed on the old stack are still sitting there on the new one.

That's not a knock on Shopify. It's a knock on magical thinking.

People love to argue about whether MrBeast counts as an "enterprise" business. Fine, argue about it. But there's nothing to debate about Reitmans, LVMH, or Estée Lauder. These are serious, scaled brands running on the platform, and they didn't get there by accident. In the right circumstances, with the right team and the right expectations, Shopify holds up at scale. That part is real.

The green bag has become shorthand for the whole pitch. Innovation, speed, and maybe, finally, a way out of the vendor prison you've been stuck in for a decade. It's a good story. The question nobody puts on the main stage is the one that actually matters: Does that promise come with thorns? And when brands hit them, how are they working through it?

That's the conversation I want to have. Not the highlight reel. The part where someone tells you what broke and what they'd do differently.

The Big Green Bag of Promise: Enterprise Shopify Webinar Series, sponsored by Avalara, Domaine, and Pattern, is designed to answer those questions rather than dodge them.

If you're evaluating a move, mid-migration, or already living with the decision and wondering whether you got the truth going in, register and show up. Bring your skepticism. We'll have answers, and we won't pretend the thorns aren't there.

Big Green Bag of Promise: Enterprise Shopify Webinar Series is not sponsored by Shopify.

Scott Lux is VP of Digital Commerce at Stanley 1913. You know the cup. The brand that somehow went from outdoorsy niche to cultural phenomenon. Scott has lived the enterprise Shopify migration from inside a brand that had to grow up fast.

Elara Verret is Chief Digital and Customer Officer at Reitman's — 400 stores across Canada, 3 brands, real omnichannel complexity. She is 3 weeks post-launch.

Renee Halvorson is Chief Marketing Officer at Marine Layer, which scaled from $10M to $100M on Shopify and is now confronting the gap between where the platform started and where the business actually is.

Most ecommerce brands are running 50-70% gross margins and squeezing 10-15% EBITDA out of that in a decent year. Tech costs keep climbing. Media isn't cheap. The era when growth covered every operational sin is over. Most brands aren't doubling anymore. Many are up 5-10%, if that.

These webinars are not sponsored by Shopify but contain real talk by operators.

Register for one webinar and be able to join all 3 - if you can’t attend, we will send you a copy to watch on demand.

Date: June 4, 11, and 18, 2026

Time: 12:30 PM ET

Host: Rick Watson