Shopify's B2B pivot is a retention story, not a TAM story

Shopify launched B2B features in late 2022 and expanded them aggressively through 2024. The public framing was "new TAM." The actual story is retention math.

Shopify's existing DTC merchants who added a B2B channel had 12-month churn rates of 6% compared to 14% for DTC-only peers. The B2B channel nearly doubled lifetime value for those merchants. That's not a new-market story. That's a retention moat built out of product depth.

When a mature platform adds an adjacent capability, the first question to ask isn't "how big is the new market" — it's "how much longer do existing customers stay?"