As Americans start businesses at record rates, Shopify data helps quantify the growing economic impact of the retail sector

Americans are starting businesses at record rates, with business applications at historically high levels, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports startup activity at peak levels across many economies, too.

That trend shows up clearly in data from Shopify, a commerce platform used by businesses to sell online and in person. American businesses on Shopify generated $688 billion in economic activity in the last year, supporting 2.3 million jobs across the United States, up 100% since 2022, according to the data from July 2025 to June 2026.

When someone builds a business, the impact ripples out to the people it employs, the suppliers it buys from, the neighborhood it operates in, and the wider economy. Economists call this the local multiplier effect: money generated by a business tends to stay close to home, and the more it circulates, the more employment and income it produces.

A shift is underway right now in the number of people becoming entrepreneurs, and the tools making it easier for them to do it.

More people are starting businesses

Entrepreneurs supported 9.6 million jobs and generated over $1.2 trillion in economic activity globally in the last year, according to Shopify data.

Every 26 seconds, an entrepreneur gets their first sale—that's 1.2 million a year. About half of new sellers make their first sale within three weeks of opening. Compared to 2022, 43% more sellers make that first sale within a single day of signing up.

Starting a business is now accessible enough that money, technical skill, and distance from customers no longer stand in the way.

Building an online store used to mean hiring someone. Now 78% of entrepreneurs build their own store, according to Shopify's 2026 Merchant Pulse Survey. And 86% of American entrepreneurs surveyed by The Harris Poll say ecommerce platforms have made starting a business easier than it was a decade ago.

Entrepreneurship has no zip code

It doesn’t matter whether business owners live in a big city or the tiniest dot on a map. Where a business is based has stopped determining who it can sell to. An order from a rural business now travels 1,118 miles on average, close to the 1,162 miles of an urban order.

Entrepreneurs globally sold $68 billion to customers outside their own country last year, and the rural share of those sales has grown 4.4x over the last six years.

The range of products being sold has opened up, too. Most sales happen outside the 100 biggest product categories, essentially specialty products outside the mainstream. Those categories account for nearly 55% of all sales, and are growing faster than the big categories. Nearly 54% of new stores launch in a category outside the top 100. “Niche” no longer means “limited.”

AI benefits the business owner

AI tools help entrepreneurs build and run their business, doing work that used to take a large budget and a team of experts. Another lesser-known AI benefit for entrepreneurs is the product discovery that happens through agentic commerce. That’s when shoppers use AI chat to find a product and get a curated recommendation based on exactly what they’re looking for. Seventy-five percent of sales from AI-referred orders came from outside the top 100 categories.

According to Shopify’s data, AI-referred sessions convert 80% better than organic search. Average order values are 14% higher, and AI channels convert nearly twice as many first-time customers as other channels. Agentic search brings a more informed, motivated buyer, and the data shows they’re more likely to purchase.

The opportunity is expanding

The pool of potential customers for entrepreneurs is significant: 186 million people bought from an entrepreneur for the first time in 2025, roughly six every second.

“Entrepreneurs are the ones taking us into the future. They serve as the conduit for getting an idea from the place where it was created and out to where people actually value it,” says David Audretsch, a distinguished economics professor at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. “They dare to go where others have not dared to go.”

The local multiplier effect is in full force. Leaps in technology are knocking down barriers that kept entrepreneurship out of reach, and a traditional 9-to-5 job is no longer the only rational option for employment.

Figures are from Shopify platform data unless otherwise noted. Economic activity and jobs supported cover the year ending June 30, 2026, and are estimated using a standard input-output framework, with global supply-chain activity modeled by the OECD. "Economic activity" is defined as the direct, indirect, and induced effects of a merchant's sales. "Jobs supported" is the number of persons engaged in the business activity of the Shopify ecosystem, which includes Shopify-powered businesses and the app developers, designers, and agencies that support them. Cross-border sales are sales shipped outside the merchant's home country. AI figures cover April–June 2026, where sessions and orders are counted as AI-referred when the session is attributed to an AI-powered feature or channel. Business application data is from the U.S. Census Bureau, and global startup activity is from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Survey figures attributed to The Harris Poll are from a survey conducted on behalf of Shopify from March 9–25, 2026, among US business owners and senior decision-makers. Merchant survey figures are from Shopify's 2026 Merchant Pulse Survey. David Audretsch was interviewed by Shopify. Growth figures since 2022 are nominal and not adjusted for inflation. Full methodology is at shopify.com/entrepreneur

This story was produced by Shopify and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.