Visit The Entrepreneur Effect for all data.
We see global entrepreneurship in real time. Millions of entrepreneurs use Shopify to sell billions of products, creating trillions of data points on commerce as it happens.
That data is clear: as AI arms entrepreneurs with new superpowers and the barriers to starting a business collapse, more people are building. When more people build, the whole world feels it.
In the last year, businesses in the UK on Shopify generated:
- £71.1 billion in economic activity: That’s £8.1 million every hour—up 143% since 2022
- ~479,000 jobs supported—up 141% since 2022
Shopify’s global ecosystem generated $1.2 trillion in economic activity, up 110% from 2022. It also supported 9.6 million jobs, up 193% from 2022. This momentum is showing up everywhere: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports startup activity hitting peak levels globally.
The world needs more entrepreneurs. Today, more people have a genuine chance at becoming one.
What is the Entrepreneur Effect?
The Entrepreneur Effect is the outsized ripple of impact created when someone builds a business. Jobs, wealth, choice, and opportunity spread through employees, suppliers, communities, and economies. The term is a nod to a phenomenon called the “local multiplier effect”: money generated by small businesses tends to stay nearby and circulate more often, creating more wealth and jobs locally.
“Entrepreneurship is an engine of innovation,” says Dr. Gary Dushnitsky, entrepreneurship professor at London Business School. “It creates jobs, opportunities and tax revenue, allowing societies to grow. Just as importantly, it unlocks value for communities and individuals underserved by the main market.”
So The Entrepreneur Effect is what we’re calling the home base for Shopify’s latest data on the rising global impact of entrepreneurship. A few trends are emerging: everything that used to make entrepreneurship hard is getting easier with technology.
AI gives entrepreneurs superpowers
AI is putting business creation within the reach of more people, giving founders the power of a team of experts. But this isn’t the only benefit AI gives builders.
Agentic commerce—curated recommendations through AI chat—is proving to benefit merchants of all sizes by surfacing products based on relevance instead of only popularity or ad spend. Seventy-five per cent of AI-referred sales came from products outside the 100 largest categories; specialised products finding exactly the right customers.
So the benefit is two-fold: AI tools make it easier for entrepreneurs to build, and agentic commerce makes it easier to find the customers who want what they have. More stats on the power of AI for entrepreneurs are here.
Entrepreneurship is ordinary and extraordinary
Entrepreneurship used to be the norm. Every town had its craftspeople who owned their category: the blacksmith, the butcher, the baker. But working for someone else became the default as industrialisation set in. Suddenly building a business demanded skills, time, money, the right location, and reach to compete.
For two decades, Shopify has been working to dismantle all of these barriers, turning entrepreneurship back into an ordinary career. And AI is accelerating that progress:
- Skills: AI tools like Sidekick give entrepreneurs access to expertise they didn’t previously have.
- Time: Half of new Shopify sellers reach their first sale in about three weeks; 43% more stores make a sale within one day compared to 2022.
- Money: Seventy-eight per cent of merchants built their own store instead of having to hire someone, and 41% launched with one product meaning less product investment is required up front.
- Geography: Rural cross-border sales have grown 4.4x since 2019, and country-wide cross-border sales are up 136% since 2022. You can be an entrepreneur from anywhere, and sell to anyone.
- Reach: AI works as a matchmaker, pairing entrepreneurs with customers looking for precisely what they sell.
- More data: on The Entrepreneur Effect.
The collapse of these obstacles opens up extraordinary opportunities that used to be inaccessible to most.
Entrepreneurship is for everyone
Our merchants identify as makers, artists, founders, small business owners... Within every one of those identities is an entrepreneurial mindset. It’s someone who has an idea to build something of their own, paired with the courage and conviction to try it. When we use the word “entrepreneur” we include all of these people, and the millions of independent dreams they’re pursuing.
One business can restart a town
Examples of the Entrepreneur Effect in action exist everywhere, but here is one: Hiut Denim, based in Cardigan, Wales.
For 40 years, that town had Britain’s biggest jeans mill, producing 35,000 pairs a week. In 2002, it shut down. Four hundred people lost their jobs in a town of 4,000.
“When you suddenly shut those factory gates, it rips that community apart,” says David Hieatt, who co-founded Hiut Denim with his wife Clare Hieatt to get those jobs back. “The purpose of Hiut Denim is to go and put that engine back into the town and get its mojo back, and actually give it a reason to exist, not just as a tourist town.”
Assistant cutter Rob Thomas says, “They taught me the skills for me to be here for the last five and a half years, and it pays the mortgage, for you to have a family, to have your home.”
“We've always lucked out,” David says. “‘Oh you can only win if you have the biggest budget.’ Now that shit doesn't apply. The internet for the maker is the holy grail.”
The 9 to 5 has competition
This is what happens when more people take the leap: they launch a business, get their first sale, create jobs, work with suppliers, and generate outsized economic impact around the world.
“When we think about many of the innovations around us, whether that's product innovation, cultural innovation, or new ways of building value, this happens through the act of entrepreneurship,” says Dr. Dushnitsky. “And this is probably one of the most exciting times to be an entrepreneur, as starting a business has fundamentally changed from a matter of months to a matter of hours.”
The desire to build is innate, and it’s never been easier or more possible to do it than right now. An ordinary career choice, leading to extraordinary potential for impact and fulfilment.
This is the golden age of entrepreneurship.
Explore The Entrepreneur Effect for Shopify’s full dataset and methodology, and to meet more of the entrepreneurs behind it. Economic impact data for the period of 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026. Currency conversions calculated as of 30 June 2026.
