Entrepreneurs are creating new markets and outselling the mainstream

The fastest-growing area of commerce isn't one major category. It's thousands of new ones being created by entrepreneurs.

As the barriers to starting a business collapse, people are turning their obsessions into viable businesses by reaching customers with something specific and meaningful. Increasingly, that connection is happening through AI matchmaking.

Our data shows product categories outside the top 100 now account for nearly 55% of all sales on Shopify—and they're growing faster than the mainstream.

A screenless phone for kids that looks like a tin can. Horse hay nets designed for slower, healthier grazing. Metal pill cases engineered so precisely that one customer wrote, "I am certain I will go to my grave owning this."

These are businesses built by people who cared deeply about one specific thing and turned it into a specialized product. “Niche” no longer means “limited.” There’s no ceiling to the success of specificity.

The long-tail of commerce

Commerce has a shape. A handful of massive product categories (think clothing, electronics, and beauty) dominate the top. That’s the "head." Then there's the long, trailing distribution of thousands of more specific categories. This is the "long tail," a concept Chris Anderson named in 2004 when he predicted the internet would make these markets economically viable.

And the tail keeps getting longer. Every year, entrepreneurs create product categories that didn't exist the year before. Entrepreneurs are continually expanding the landscape of commerce, and finding success as they do it.

From 2021 to 2025, the number of Shopify stores selling sports trading cards grew more than 6x, turning a hobbyist corner of commerce into a $500M+ industry. Trading cards have been around for decades, what’s new is how much easier it is to build a business around them.

One product is enough to start

As Tobi put it, “Shopify represents mostly the catalog of products that people really want rather than the necessities.”

Products people really want tend to be specific, and often they're singular.

Forty-one percent of Shopify stores sell a single product at launch, and nearly 54% of new Shopify stores launched in 2025 were in a long-tail category. The majority of new entrepreneurs are starting with one specific thing that matters to a specific group of people.

Starting narrow doesn't mean staying narrow. It means the distance between "I have an idea" and "I have a business" has shrunk.

AI favors the specialist

Entrepreneurs are the biggest beneficiaries of AI. In addition to giving them a powerful Sidekick, AI collapses the distance between someone who makes something extraordinary and the person who's been looking for exactly that. The more specific the product, the better AI gets at making the match.

AI-attributed orders—purchases where the buyer discovered the product through an AI-powered channel—skew heavily toward specialized products. 71% of those orders came from the long tail in 2025.

A search engine rewards popularity. An AI agent recommends relevance. When a buyer asks an AI assistant to find the best kite for flying without wind, it doesn't default to the most popular result. It finds the specialist.

Commerce as expression

On a major marketplace, product reviews describe the category. "Great quality." "Keeps me organized." "Good value." The language is functional.

On Ikigai Cases, a pill box company, the reviews describe a relationship with an object. The weight of the metal. The click of the magnet. The go-to-your-grave-owning-this factor. And why? Because the business was created by two brothers whose dad couldn’t open his pill box easily. So they built him one.

That’s what happens when someone creates the exact thing they want to exist in the world, and the exact right person finds it.

The long tail has never been longer. If you have an idea that feels too weird for the mainstream, or too small to have legs, the data says you're looking at it backwards. The most specific ideas have the most room to grow.

Methodology

This analysis draws on anonymized, aggregated data from Shopify's platform of millions of merchants across 175 countries. Product categories are classified using Shopify's machine learning-based taxonomy system. "Long tail" refers to categories ranked outside the top 100 by gross merchandise volume. “New Shopify store” refers to shops that were created in 2025, with the launch/start period being the first six months since creation. Growth rates reference year-over-year changes. AI-attributed orders are defined as purchases where the buyer's discovery path included an AI-powered channel. All external references are cited inline.