Lithuania and Romania in top 3

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• Lithuania and Romania in top 3 of SEI

• World’s best checkout

• Shopify email’s AI upgrade

Shopify beta launched the Shopify Entrepreneurship Index - the first of its kind insights and database on global entrepreneurship.

While it might not be of any surprise to see the US ranked first in economic impact created, Lithuania and Romania have claimed the next 2 spots.

Some 🤯 stats from the report:

• 5.2 M jobs supported

• $27.7 B of exports

• $229.3 B in GDP contribution

• $490.5 B in created economic activity

The US alone accounts for some crazy numbers!

• 1.1 M jobs supported (21% of global)

• $7.3 B of exports (26%)

• $128.7 B in GDP impact (56%)

• $270.8 B in economic activity (55%)

Shopify has reported they will be updating the data every quarter. We’ll be back with another update on this once the new data drops.

Major news #2

Shopify has the world's best-converting checkout - and it’s not even close.

Shopify rocks a conversion rate as much as 36% higher than its competition, and on average by 15%.

There are a couple of more interesting points from this study:

• Shop Pay increases conversion by as much as 50% compared to guest checkout, and 10% more than other accelerated checkouts

• Shop Pay’s 100 million buyers experience a 4X faster checkout than guest checkout thanks to prefilling customer info.

• Shopify currently powers about 10% of U.S. ecommerce and processed over $500 B of GMV in 2022 alone!

We couldn’t end this better than Harley: “Not building with Shopify is now a competitive liability.”

Shopify email’s AI upgrade

The world is at the dawn of an AI revolution. Shopify has implied in their recent business update on layoffs and business changes that their “main quest” is to make the best thing possible for their customers by leveraging AI.

Though Shopify has invested a cool $100M in Klaviyo, Shopify Email still remains one of the top apps for brands that are starting out.

Just a few weeks after Shopify announced Shopify Magic, its first AI feature to write product descriptions, it is now making its way to email:

1/ Create subject lines with inputs from your email body copy or your own prompts.

2/ Optimize send times based on your store’s time zone and when you can expect the highest CTR on your emails.

In a non-AI update, merchants can even create and save their own custom templates in Shopify Email.

While these might not stand out as being the most impressive AI features for now, we believe this is just the start.

It’s not long before we see the world’s first e-commerce copilot - and our bet is that it’s going to be on Shopify.

Pulse Check ⚡️

1. ShopifyQL Notebooks support Python code blocks.

2. Shopify’s recent sale of Deliverr to Flexport is likely at a 50%+ discount to the $2.1B price tag it paid

3. Tempur Sealy has entered into an agreement to buy Mattress Firm for a whopping $4 billion.

That's a wrap for this week! Join us over on Twitter to chat about all things e-commerce. It's like attending the coolest virtual shopping party – no long lines, pushy salespeople, or shopping cart collisions in sight (@theshoppulse)