With Meta handicapped by Apple's ATT privacy changes, Shopify should step up to provide substitute functionality and build its own advertising network
Tobi Lütke, who famously started Shopify when he realized that the software he built to run his snowboard shop was a much bigger opportunity … Tweets: @cramforce , @modestproposal1 , @nayutsitachitt , @eric_seufert , @carnage4life , @antoniogm , @antoniogm , @carnage4life , @carnage4life , @ericfranchi , @joellewis , @carnage4life , @robleathern , @carnage4life , @joellewis , @eric_seufert , @benthompson , @carnage4life , @swartable , @ntaylor963 , @uffel , @modestproposal1 , @carnage4life , @borrowed_ideas , and @astaniscia86 Tweets: Malte Ubl / @cramforce : This article was getting shared around my team and i thought its worth sharing my personal hot take here. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @modestproposal1 : Been thinking about Shopify and demand gen for a few years now. Seemed like it was both logical and to some extent necessary. With ATT, it is now almost undoubtedly necessary. https://twitter.com/... @nayutsitachitt : 1/ Understanding $SHOP opportunities and challenges. I wrote this thread partly as a response to @stratechery article on Shopify. The entire article is worth a read, but if you haven't, I quote some key points in the thread. https://stratechery.com/... Eric Seufert / @eric_seufert : Idle thought: the very small cadre of product and engineering managers working on advertising privacy across Apple and Google — perhaps totaling fewer than 1000 people with direct impact? — are defining the future of the internet economy. Almost as a modern-day Bretton Woods. @carnage4life : @JoelLewis @stratechery That only works if Shopify builds a first party consumer facing destination and advertising surface the same way Amazon has. Otherwise they still face the same ATT issues. That is not only extremely difficult but also counter to their strategy to be the Intel Inside for brands. Antonio García Martínez / @antoniogm : @eric_seufert Kind of always been true. Inside Apple, the number is shockingly small (though one fewer than it could be). Antonio García Martínez / @antoniogm : @robleathern @eric_seufert The on-device ML org, just to cite a random example. @carnage4life : I'm often a fan of Ben's observations but not of his solutions. I agree Shopify has a problem that Apple has made e-commerce ads less effective on iOS which hurts their business. Creating an ad agency is a speculative solution & outside core competence. https://stratechery.com/... @carnage4life : One thing that gets missed with companies like Apple acting as de facto privacy regulators is that actual legislation has the opportunity for affected parties to give feedback. Apple defined “privacy” in a way that benefits Amazon's marketplace & harms Shopify. Is that good? Eric Franchi / @ericfranchi : A must read. And likely to happen. https://stratechery.com/... Joel Lewis / @joellewis : @Carnage4Life @stratechery You have to use the data as a 1st party e2e. Shopify can't share the final audience data back with it's clients, it would be treated as a 3rd party If they do it all e2e (collect the data, build the audience, buy the ad, track sale in shopify platform), it can comply with ATT @carnage4life : @0xbad1dead ... Agreed. The strategy becomes more plausible if Shopify acquires a consumer facing product with high traffic & commercial intent. However this goes beyond what was mentioned in the @stratechery paragraph which is why it was a head scratcher. Rob Leathern / @robleathern : @eric_seufert @antoniogm There's plenty of people at these companies who don't work in ads or on it directly who are developing technologies (sometimes open sourcing some of these) that will play an important part in the future of advertising eg https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : @eric_seufert The actual impactful people are under a hundred not a thousand. The key people across both companies are probably under 50 people. Joel Lewis / @joellewis : @Carnage4Life ... I think Ben's argument is that if you buy ads at scale and have conversion data, you can compete with FB etc. who sell ads at scale, and can see audience but not conversion (in ecomm). One is guessing at bottom of funnel, one is guessing at top, that could give both room to play Eric Seufert / @eric_seufert : @antoniogm I wonder if people even avoid this group because of its impact and the gravity of the work. Not easy to live with the weight of that. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Ben Thompson / @benthompson : @Carnage4Life ... You're right — everything in the future is going to be probabilistic. Deterministic is dead. The question isn't matching the old world, it's who can be the best at probabilistic @carnage4life : @JoelLewis ... In the world of ATT, buying ads at scale doesn't mean you have conversion data at scale without owning the surface where the ad engagement happen. I honestly don't get it but maybe I just have a rudimentary knowledge of ad platforms and ATT. 🙃 Steve Wart / @swartable : Interesting @stratechery post today on how Shopify's fortunes are tied to Facebook's, with some observations about improving 3PL experience for merchants and the mechanics of advertising data (paywall) https://stratechery.com/... Nathan Taylor / @ntaylor963 : “instead of being an advertising seller at scale, like Facebook, Shopify the company would become an advertising buyer at scale” By hurting existing ways of targeting ads, ATT is driving platform consolidation elsewhere to regain that ability. https://stratechery.com/... https://twitter.com/... Steve U / @uffel : “Shopify... is even more dependent on Facebook to drive e-commerce.... That's why it's not a surprise that Facebook's recent plunge in value was preceded (and then followed) by Shopify's own” https://stratechery.com/... https://twitter.com/... Modest Proposal / @modestproposal1 : Explicit call for Shopify to get into demand generation. And to do it in a direct way, actually purchasing ads on behalf of customers as opposed to providing data to be used by customers. https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : Reading the latest @stratechery on Shopify and I'm stuck on this last paragraph. If Apple's ATT policies effectively bans Shopify Audiences, how does a hypothetical Shopify Advertising Services get around that? Maybe it's just my vacation brain but I'm drawing a blank. https://twitter.com/... @borrowed_ideas : Of course, the current beneficiary (or the opposite of collateral damage) in this battle are $AMZN (the permanent anti-fragile co?) and $GOOG. Highly recommended piece https://stratechery.com/... Giulio S. / @astaniscia86 : Shopify treats all merchants as individual entities, having left the pooling of data for advertising to Facebook. Now that Facebook is handicapped by Apple, Shopify should step up to provide substitute functionality and build its own ad network. https://t.co/p9WwHOpufY https://t.co/6et9Hc0Rf3
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument lands at a specific inflection point: Ben Thompson's earlier review of digital advertising in 2022 already framed the market as moving past a Google-Meta duopoly toward Amazon and Apple, and reporting days later showed advertisers shifting budgets to Google, Amazon, and TikTok as Meta's ad prices rose under ATT. This piece supplies the missing player: Shopify, whose merchants are precisely the advertisers being repriced.
The structural setup comes from Thompson's own prior analysis of the Facebook Shops integration — Shopify historically let Facebook pool its merchants' data for targeting, while keeping checkout on-platform was the contested question. ATT breaks the value of that data handoff, which converts Shopify's first-party purchase data from something it rents out into something it could monetize directly.
First-order effects
- Meta loses the pooled Shopify merchant signal that made its ads effective for direct-to-consumer sellers, while those same merchants face worse targeting and higher prices on their primary acquisition channel.
- Shopify gains a strategic opening: it holds deterministic purchase data across millions of stores that ATT cannot touch, making a closed-loop ad network technically feasible where it previously had no reason to exist.
Second-order effects
- A Shopify network would compete directly with the destinations absorbing displaced budgets — Google, Amazon, and TikTok — rather than merely losing share alongside Meta, forcing each to treat commerce-data networks as rivals.
- Facebook Shops-style integrations lose their leverage: if Shopify monetizes its own data, the price of routing merchants through Facebook Checkout or Facebook-owned surfaces rises, tightening the payments-and-distribution tradeoff Thompson flagged in 2020.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, advertising consolidates around whoever owns the customer relationship — operating systems, marketplaces, commerce platforms — rather than whoever aggregates third-party tracking, validating Benedict Evans' warning that privacy rules entrench the biggest platforms.
- Apple's expanding ad surface, including its App Store ad expansion beyond search results, points toward a structure where the ATT author is also a growing ad seller — raising the long-run regulatory question of whether privacy policy doubles as competitive advantage.
The trend: Digital advertising is reorganizing around first-party data owners — commerce platforms, marketplaces, and operating systems — as ATT devalues third-party tracking intermediaries like Meta.