Insight

When insights meet creativity: Lessons from Shopify and Stripe 🌍

Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring billions in transactions around the world. Global sales reached $5 billion with Shopify merchants alone on this Black Friday, peaking at $4.6 million in sales per minute.

But this headline retail event has also become a showcase for how insights can come to life in modern, creative ways. Let’s consider how two titans of e-commerce — Shopify and Stripe — are turning data insights into data experiences.

Shopify: Futuristic, playful, and interactive 🚀

Over the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, Shopify merchants drove $11.5 billion USD in sales, shattering last year’s figures by more than $2 billion. 

Shopify has now live-broadcast its sales data onto the Sphere in Las Vegas for two years running, bringing together data experiences and brand activation in a vividly compelling way.

Shopify’s space-inspired BFCM visualisation.

The Shopify dashboard takes you into space with a planetary view of transactional data as it happens. The UI is given further texture with stylistic flourishes like synth MIDI boards, gravity toggles, and even a cheeky “do not touch” button. 

Stats like edge requests and webhooks per minute may seem arbitrary, but they’re crafted to delight engineers and spark curiosity.

Stripe: Retro-inspired, with an instruction manual theme 📊

Stripe’s BFCM control monitor with instruction manual.

Over on Stripe, BFCM becomes a “Business Flow Control Monitor” in a retro nod to the early days of digital counters.

Stripe’s BFCM data experience is all about deep dives: technical diagrams, Top Selling Cities Visualizers (TSCVs), and thoughtful explanations of every metric. Less playful, more analytical than Shopify, but still visually captivating.

So who wins?

Stripe’s overall creative concept edges it for me. It draws more curiosity and, in turn, I’d expect it to have longer-lasting appeal. There’s also a technical win: as per Stripe’s front-page manual, ‘all data displayed are the nearest approximations’. Yet Stripe has done a remarkable job capturing and presenting the info in a live (or near-live) format. 

Shopify, less so, with numbers not presented in real time (as our tech team kindly pointed out: try turning off your Wi-Fi to test this!).

As future-focused companies, Shopify and Stripe are both highly collaborative creative environments. They swarm together and make useful things fast when someone shouts out an idea in a Slack channel. Backstory: last year, an engineer at Stripe threw a crazy idea into Slack, and then 130 co-workers chipped in to build their first, IBM-inspired BFCM data experience in the space of just two weeks.

Stripe’s debut data experience from BFCM 2023.

What Shopify have achieved is nothing short of remarkable, starting from humble beginnings when Tobias Lütke starting selling snowboards. (In short, he couldn’t work with the tools available to create an online store experience, so he built his own.) Likewise, it’s a marvel at what the two Collison Brothers have built with Stripe over a relatively short time horizon. So it doesn’t surprise me that these two organisations are a) mutual partners and b) create similarly forward-thinking ways of presenting deep insights in interesting ways.

As AI and tech evolve, we’ll see even bolder ways to present insights — mixing utility with creativity. Knowing the balance between when to play and when to get serious will be key.

Which approach speaks to you: Shopify’s playful edge or Stripe’s detailed depth?

No matter which side you’re on, it’s great to see these two titans delivering creative data experiences on a global scale. It’s also a reminder that while AI is transforming industries, experiences like these remain very much human at heart, far from being replicated to this level of ingenuity and depth by machine learning. If anything, AI is pushing our creative mindsets further.