ACKSHUALLY, Roblox is an Entrepreneurship Platform

Welcome to Friday, futurists. 

Today we’re breaking down the massive news about Shopify’s new partnership with Roblox. Keep on reading below.

🚨🚨 But first, ticket prices just increased for VISIONS Summit: Los Angeles, coming October 10th. If you missed the cutoff, you can still save 20% with a Plus Membership. Grab your ticket ahead of our speaker announcements because you don’t want to miss this.

This week on the podcast, Sur La Table’s Head of Brand Marketing, Kristin Flor Perret, delivers some “saucy” takes on secondhand influence, decisive leadership, AI, creativity, Amazon, and more.

Queue up for the weekend on Spotify or Apple.

Shopify Targets the New Consumer

Shopify’s consumer futureproofing campaign, which began with a MrBeast partnership in 2022, continued today with the announcement of a partnership with Roblox. 

Announcing the effort via a Roblox-styled movie on X/Twitter, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said that the partnership would “give Roblox creators a new avenue to entrepreneurship, and brands will be able to sell within Roblox [game] experiences.” 

The order is important there, but we’ll return to this point.

Shopify’s Seizing Walmart’s Opportunity

With the emergence of a new consumer, new modes of buying, shopping, and brand consideration emerge.

👾Roblox has 79 million daily active users, who collectively account for ~$53 of annual bookings (Roblox earnings call-speak for GMV). This is almost entirely digital currency purchases (called Robux) that are spent on digital items for in-game use. 

🛍️Our analysis of Walmart Discovered on Roblox in May 2024 revealed that the platform has already enabled creators with high-fidelity tools to create these in-game items for purchase. 3D modeling, marketing, and merchandising are all software capabilities that are available as both first-party and third-party tools within Roblox. 

💡The Metaverse Left the Hype Cycle and now the cycle of quiet innovation is beginning, led by large retailers and brands. Justin Breton, Walmart’s Head of Brand Marketing and Innovation, confirmed as much in an interview with the Future Commerce Podcast.

“Do I think that any of these introductions of real-world commerce on these new platforms will be a $1B industry next year? Probably not…” said Breton. “But if we're early and test and learn in two, three, five years, it could be a $1B industry.” 

Walmart’s custom checkout technology powered the first two Real-World Commerce launches—Walmart Discovered and e.l.f. Beauty’s UP experience. Those checkouts were not integrated into the larger eCommerce catalog and checkout platforms owned by the larger brands, which is a break in an otherwise holistic omnichannel experience. 

New Modes vs. New Channels

According to the New Modes research, “modes” are superlative to “channels.”

A new behavioral mode—that prefers streams over catalogs—is brewing within a savvy younger shopper who likes the ability to ‘tune’ their algorithm. To a retailer, “omnichannel” is an idealistic future state where a customer can make a purchase decision wherever they happen to be, whenever they choose to convert. 

But Shopify doesn’t merely see Roblox as a platform for brands to activate as a channel. They see it as an untapped audience of entrepreneurs. 

Approximately 5 million developers and creators across 170 countries earned Robux (Roblox's virtual currency) on the platform (source). Over 12,700 developers earned at least $1,000. Compare this with 12,000 Shopify app developers making an equivalent amount. 

A Shopify app developer’s skillset may extend nicely into the Roblox universe when commerce comes a-knockin.

💵Passive purchase decisions are made every day in channels like Twitch, YouTube, ChatGPT, and yes, Roblox. Brands activating within that new form of media, up until today, have been pure marketing-led activities. However, billions in GMV are already transacting on the platform. 

🔮Shopify’s announcement is a tell-tale of a future-proofing strategy to distance itself from the homogeneity of Web commerce, which it helped to perpetuate. In addition to partnerships with MrBeast and Emma Chamberlain, Shopify have marketed the promise of entrepreneurship to youth audiences in the way that gyms market fitness to the aspirationally active: we have all the tools and the space if you have the will (and the monthly subscription fee).

🧠“Real-World Commerce,” announced to Roblox investors in November, came about at the same time that Shopify stopped calling itself a commerce platform and began calling itself the “entrepreneurs desk.”  

Entrepreneurship is a “new mode” unto itself. It’s an aspirational pursuit that software platforms can leverage into a form of commerce.

With this new partnership, Shopify continues to build for a future where the “new modes” replace the old channels. At the same time, it doubles down on investments made by larger players who are going after the same consumers. 

The future of commerce is getting more and more immersive every day.

— Phillip

P.S. Grab our New Modes research here.