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 Canada on Shopify generated:
- C$60.6B in economic activity: That’s $6.9 million every hour—up 72% since 2022
- ~221,000 jobs supported—up 72% 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: entrepreneurs are forming record numbers of businesses in the US, according to the US Census Bureau, and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports startup activity hitting peak levels globally.
The world needs more entrepreneurs. Today, more people have a real shot at becoming one.
What is the Entrepreneur Effect?
A ripple of impact is 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.
“Entrepreneurs are the ones taking us into the future,” says David Audretsch, a renowned entrepreneurship economist. “They serve as the conduit for getting an idea from the place where it was created and out to where people actually value it. They dare to go where others have not dared to go.”
The Entrepreneur Effect is 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 amplifying the Entrepreneur Effect by 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 be merit-based, surfacing products based on relevance instead of popularity or ad spend. Seventy-five per cent of AI-referred sales came from products outside the 100 largest categories; specialized 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 for them to find customers. 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 industrialization 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 66% 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.
The people doing the building come from all ages and backgrounds. Grant and Carolyn Westcott were longtime corporate IT professionals in Toronto, close enough to retirement that packing up for Niagara wine country sounded like a mistake to almost everyone they knew. “Pretty much everyone said, ‘Are you guys crazy? Why do you want to take on that kind of risk at this stage of your life?’” Carolyn says.
But they weren't really the retirement types. So they brought in experts, pulled in their family, and went all in on Westcott Vineyards. “Deep down I'd always wanted to have our own business,” Carolyn says. “If you don't kind of take that first step off the edge of the cliff, into the abyss, you never get to experience some of the joys that we've had.”
Grant is still more interested in what he doesn’t know yet. “It's mostly about attitude and it's mostly about zeal and desire. I want to keep learning and keep challenging myself until I draw my last breath.”
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.
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 fulfillment.
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 July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. Currency conversions calculated as of June 30, 2026.
