Shoplift

Shopify just announced their first-ever native building blocks for storefront experimentation. Rollouts for staging theme changes (and more coming). SimGym for AI-powered pre-launch signals. Both built directly into the platform. We've been tracking this for months as it’s progressed in private beta and we’re so excited this is finally going to launch next year. Here's why we're excited about it: We’ve always prioritized our hand-in-glove integration with Shopify. We take our partnership seriously, and are proud to be the only Shopify Plus Certified A/B testing app. But because Shoplift was one of the earliest leaders in our category, a lot of the core infrastructure to support Shopify experimentation didn’t exist yet. Just like Oisin O'Connor in his early days at Recharge, and Tomer Tagrin. in his early days at Yotpo: we were out on the prairie with no train tracks leading to our town, so we had to build solutions from scratch. This is the genius of Shopify’s model. They have a strong symbiotic relationship with their ecosystem partners, and they rely on us to explore the frontiers of ecommerce and establish footholds in new territories. Fast forward to today, our frontier town is booming, and it’s been an honor to work with Shopify to collaborate on the future of ecommerce experimentation. When Shopify validates a category, the entire ecosystem grows. The pattern is proven: → Klaviyo built a $10.7B business on advanced orchestration → led to Shopify Email  → Recharge pioneers subscription products → led to Native subscriptions  → Yotpo thrives with sophisticated workflows → led to Native reviews It’s a virtuous cycle. Once these baseline products are established, Shopify helps educate merchants, which allows partners like us to generate even more value for brands as they graduate to specialized solutions. That's where we come in. Our bet has never been checkbox feature parity. It's strategy, workflow, insights, and merchant success. When Shopify brands win, we win. Today's announcement expands our addressable market. More merchants will start testing. More will discover they need incrementality measurement, orchestration, and advanced analytics. Winter Editions ‘26 was the experimentation category’s golden-spike moment. The train tracks are laid, and we’re so excited to welcome all the new settlers. If you understand this pattern, it’s easy to see why we’re so bullish on the future of Shoplift and experimentation on Shopify. This is just the beginning.

BFCM is the ultimate stress test for any e-commerce infrastructure. Traffic doesn't just increase, it explodes. Year after year, even the most robust platforms face their biggest challenges during this weekend when traffic can spike 5-10× normal loads in minutes. Shoplift was built so merchants never have to choose between testing and reliability.

Shoplift customers made more than half a BILLION dollars in revenue during BFCM. It was another record-breaking year. But the piece that often gets taken for granted is the sheer scale of infrastructure required to support that kind of volume. That’s why I want to take a moment to recognize our incredible engineering team for pulling off what our merchants expect from us: stability and reliability. Every year, across the ecommerce ecosystem, some platform or app has a high-profile outage that costs merchants millions. This year, even some of the largest platforms experienced downtime during peak traffic. But Shoplift? We just kept humming. Not one blip. Scale and stability at this level don't happen by accident. They are the result of Adam J Abdelaziz and our engineering team’s obsessive commitment to resilience and performance (you can read more about this in the comments). Our merchants trusted us with their biggest sales weekend of the year. Thank you. Can’t wait for the next one!

By all indicators, it was another record BFCM for ecommerce brands. Early numbers: Black Friday $11.8B spend (up 9.3% year over year) and Cyber Monday hit $14.2B [src: Adobe] Shopify merchants alone generated a record $14.6 billion in sales over the weekend, up 27% from last year. [src: Shopify] *** For Shoplift, here's what we saw flowing through our platform: Early November: 47% jump over October (pre-holiday shopping is really building) BFCM weekend: 3.8× our pre-BFCM November average (A whopping 564% increase over pre-November averages!) *** Most platforms tell merchants to pause testing during peak traffic. We built Shoplift so they wouldn't have to. The best time to optimize your store isn't when traffic is slow. It's when you have millions of real shoppers giving you signal about what works. Want to keep testing right through the holiday? Email sales@shoplift.ai or ask your agency about moving to Shoplift

All smiles around here. Traffic spiked 5× overnight, and things kept on truckin'. I wanted to share what it takes to keep A/B testing running flawlessly when you're serving as many as 1M visitors per hour and processing as many as 90K orders per hour. There's zero margin for error. What made the difference: - Native Shopify integration (no third-party code injection) - Redundant failovers across our entire stack - Real-time monitoring with automatic scaling We wrote about the architectural decisions behind this in our blog(comments for link) The reality is that BFCM is when even the most robust platforms face their biggest test. Being purpose-built for Shopify isn't just about features. It's about architecture that can handle the moments that define a merchant's entire year. Our merchants ran tests straight through the weekend because that's exactly when they have the most valuable data. No pausing campaigns. No crossing fingers. Just continuous optimization during the highest-traffic days of the year. Peak traffic: 10.2k requests/sec. Downtime: 0 seconds. That's the standard we're building to.  Come join us! We are hiring.

Our very own Teddy M. was just named a finalist for the 2025 Smarterships Partner Awards. 🎉 Huge thanks to Sara Pereda and the entire Smarterships community, Gorgias for sponsoring this award, and of course Teddy who shows up for our hundreds of Shoplift partners every day.

Your BFCM peak is fast-approaching, and you’re already seeing 2-10x the normal page traffic. Page load times go from an average of 7.5 seconds to 10.6 seconds. Conversions drop from 2% to 0.2% on pages that can’t handle the load. You simply can’t afford downtime, and your A/B testing tool may be part of the problem. We built Shoplift's architecture to withstand the traffic demands of peak sale periods. No data loss. No degraded functionality exactly when you need it working. We wrote a technical article on how we designed for BFCM instead of hoping it works. Check it out at the link below.

Sites utilizing Shoplift hit an average of 0.37-second First Contentful Paint. That's 3.6x faster than sites that use A/B testing tools that need constant network requests. Three architectural decisions that made this possible: The entire test executes on page load. No waiting for external scripts. No dreaded flicker or layout shifts. Test determination happens in the browser. No server round-trips. No coordination delays. Event processing using queues. Mobile user goes through a tunnel? Data queues until the connection returns. Eliminating network dependencies doesn't just make things faster. It makes the whole system more reliable. For our full technical breakdown, check out the link in the comments:

"Luxury brands should never discount during BFCM. It cheapens the brand." Sounds logical, but it’s not always the whole truth. Our partner, Gamma Waves, told us about when a quiet luxury fashion brand ran a tightly controlled 24-hour Cyber Monday promotion. 30% off a curated collection. Digital channels and owned customer lists only. The results they saw flip the myth: - $475K in one day - 20% higher AOV ($520) - 37% of customers returned for repeat purchases - Many became full-price loyalists with 5-7 subsequent orders - Return rate remained consistent at 3.08% These weren't deal-seekers. They were brand-seekers. The truth: Luxury brands can discount during BFCM when the promotion feels intentional, elegant, and brand-appropriate. Keep it short. Use on-brand campaign codes. Focus on digital storytelling. Treat it like a private event, not a clearance moment. The mistake isn't participating in BFCM. It's participating in a way that contradicts your brand identity. Read how smart brands are busting BFCM mythology. Link is in the comments! Huge thanks to Sarah Gallagher and everyone at Gamma Waves for helping us create this. 🔥

"BFCM is too critical to experiment. Save testing for slower periods." This thinking explains why 17.9% fewer brands test during November and December. When the stakes are highest, merchants play it safe. But our data tells a different story. Brands testing during BFCM are 18% more likely to identify statistical winners compared to other months. While 20% of testing brands see significant winners January through September, that number jumps to nearly 25% during BFCM. The reason? Higher traffic volume means faster time to statistical significance. Tests that take weeks to conclude in March reach significance in days during November. You're not just getting results faster. You're getting more winning results. While 17.9% fewer brands test during the year's most critical period, the ones who do consistently see more impactful outcomes and capture optimization opportunities that only exist at peak traffic. That's asymmetric upside. Your cautious competitors are leaving money on the table. Stop playing it safe. Start testing when it matters most. Read why BFCM is actually the BEST time to test, as well as other myths debunked with the help of our partners at Boom Labs, Gamma Waves and 10SQ | Shopify Premier Partner. 💰 Link is in the comments!