Link in Bio Becomes Commerce Endpoint
Linktree: the $33M ARR About.me for Gen Z
This move turns link in bio from a traffic router into a commerce endpoint. When Shopify folds products and checkout into a lightweight bio page, the creator is no longer sending fans out to a separate store. The same system that holds catalog, inventory, orders, customers, and affiliate relationships now powers the page in the bio, which makes the funnel shorter, cleaner, and more valuable for Shopify than a standalone link page ever could.
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Linkpop was built so shoppers could browse a curated set of products and complete checkout directly from the bio page, while Shopify Collabs kept inventory, order, and customer data synced in the same Shopify admin. That is the practical meaning of vertical integration here, one front door tied directly to the merchant back office.
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That model works best when the creator is already inside one commerce stack. Beacons took the opposite approach, building a mobile page that could link out, collect tips, sell through Stripe, capture email or SMS, and later add tools like invoicing, audience CRM, and tax workflows because many creators use several SKU types and several platforms at once.
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The category has since moved from link in bio to store in bio. Stan showed why, growing to $14.7M ARR in 2023 by bundling native selling with tools that look more like a creator operating system. That raises the bar for Linktree, because simple link aggregation gets commoditized once storefronts start owning the transaction.
The next phase is tighter bundling around the creator’s whole business. The winners will be the products that start with a mobile storefront but keep adding the systems behind it, payments, customer identity, email, brand deals, and fulfillment, while still handling the messy reality that creators often sell many different things across many platforms.