Companies sharing Shopify's market
Bob Moore, CEO and co-founder of Crossbeam, on ecosystem-led growth
This reveals that Klaviyo grew less like a standalone horizontal software company and more like a picks and shovels company built inside Shopify’s economy. In practice, Klaviyo sold to the same merchants, solved the same core problem of helping those merchants grow sales, and benefited as Shopify added more stores and GMV. That is why Shopify’s expansion created demand for Klaviyo, and Shopify slowdowns showed up in Klaviyo’s growth curve too.
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Klaviyo won early by turning messy merchant data into usable marketing segments inside one tool. Instead of exporting CSVs and doing spreadsheet work, a Shopify brand could trigger abandoned cart emails, win back lapsing buyers, or target subscribers based on actual store behavior. That product fit matched the needs of small and mid sized Shopify merchants especially well.
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The dependency was structural, not just a channel partnership. Klaviyo was an early Shopify app store partner, most of its 100,000 plus customers were Shopify merchants, and its own research notes that growth decelerated alongside Shopify as Klaviyo moved into SMS, chat, and CDP products to diversify beyond pure Shopify driven email demand.
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The same pattern shows up across the Shopify stack. Gorgias built a large business by serving Shopify merchants with support software, and 40% of Shopify’s top 250 merchants use it. That is what it means for an ecosystem company to share Shopify’s market, the app is different, but the buyer, workflow, and economic base are largely the same.
Going forward, the biggest ecosystem winners around Shopify will be the ones that start with one sharp merchant workflow, then broaden into adjacent jobs before platform dependence becomes a ceiling. Klaviyo has already pushed from email into SMS, customer data, and CRM, which is the standard play for turning a Shopify app into a broader commerce software company.