The morning of Wednesday, January 21, Shopify laid off quite a large number of partnership team members across a number of functions, including partner managers and marketing. There is already of course widespread speculation as to what it means.

"Shopify is abandoning its partners"

"Shopify doesn't care about global system integrators"

... and of course the big kahuna...

"Shopify is abandoning the Enterprise" (but how are they ABANDONING something they... well, never mind. You get the point). 😀

Like all things, I expect the real answer is not simple.

One can only guess that Shopify puts partner-influenced sales into two buckets:

Partner Bucket One. Those partners that need Shopify more than Shopify needs them.

Shopify may feel that if they can innovate, warm-blooded human contact is absolutely not necessary. The partner just needs to fill in the lead form, whaddya expect, a party? (The era where Shopify needed these small to mid-tier partners more than the partners needed them is long past.)

Partner Bucket Two. Those bigger global system integrator partners that really don't need Shopify that much and make their money from other big systems (Google, Microsoft, AWS, heck even CMS implementations make more money for almost all global system integrators (GSIs) than a Shopify build).

Shopify may feel that any amount of money spent here is likely pushing on string, because at the core of it, Shopify thinks it is trying to disrupt not only eCommerce innovation, but also the Enterprise sales model with a simpler way - product-led growth and enablement with a "small e." Our pitch is so much cognitive dissonance, so why bother.

This quote somehow feels appropriate to our discussion:

Shopify CEO Tobi - not Harley, who is personally involved in most Enterprise deals - hates sales and detests the idea he would have to take time away from building and refactoring to bother talking to change-resistant humans, convincing them to move away from their existing crappy infrastructure.

Check out my LinkedIn conversation, which several Shopify employees commented on and started getting spicy…

What is old is new again. Shopify confirmed this week that, from January 26, ChatGPT will charge Shopify merchants a 4% transaction fee. While it’s not 15% like Amazon’s, it will cost merchants a percentage of margin on top of their normal transaction costs.

So you are, in essence, paying ChatGPT a 4% fee for being found within their large language model, without taking into account any additional costs needed to optimize for agentic commerce. To put it in perspective, this fee is higher than what Visa and Mastercard charge for using their payment networks (between 1.5% and 3.5% processing fees).

The reality is, this channel is experimental, and given Altman’s recent CODE RED against Google Gemini, it’s not clear how much they are even developing their commerce offerings at the moment. Even if they are, this is a low volume, high conversion channel. One that is perfect for experimentation and long-term growth, but not going to hit your number this year.

Keep in mind: this is before ChatGPT's newly announced ad solution kicks into effect, which, of course, will not influence any results. 😉