Compare / Shopify vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Shopify
BUSINESS MODEL
Shopify
Shopify charges merchants a monthly subscription fee — $39/month for Basic, $105/month for Shopify, and $399/month for Advanced. Enterprise clients pay more through Shopify Plus.
On top of the subscription, Shopify takes a cut of every transaction processed through Shopify Payments (2.9% + $0.30, similar to Stripe). If merchants use a third-party payment provider, Shopify charges an additional 0.5-2% fee.
The genius of the model is stacking revenue. Subscription fees are the base layer.
Payment processing is the second layer. Then there's Shopify Capital (lending money to merchants), Shopify Shipping (discounted shipping labels), Shopify Email, the app store (Shopify takes 0% on the first $1M in app revenue, then 15%), and Shopify Balance (banking for merchants).
Every new service extracts more value from each merchant.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Shopify
Tobias Lütke was a programmer from Koblenz, Germany who moved to Ottawa, Canada in 2002 because he fell in love with a Canadian woman. He wanted to sell snowboards online through a store called Snowdevil.
The problem was that every e-commerce platform in 2004 was absolute garbage. They were expensive, ugly, and painful to use.
Most required a computer science degree just to set up.
Lütke was a Ruby on Rails developer — one of the early ones, when Rails was still a brand-new framework. Instead of suffering through the existing tools, he just built his own e-commerce platform from scratch.
Snowdevil launched on the custom-built platform, and it worked beautifully. Other small business owners saw it and started asking if they could use the same software.
Lütke teamed up with Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake. In 2006, they launched Shopify as a product — a hosted e-commerce platform that let anyone set up an online store without knowing how to code.
The first year was slow. They had about 100 merchants.
But the product was so much better than everything else that word spread. By 2009, they had launched an API that let developers build apps and themes for Shopify stores, creating an ecosystem that would become one of their biggest advantages.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Shopify
Shopify grew by being the anti-Amazon. Their pitch was simple: Amazon is a marketplace where you're one of millions of sellers with no brand identity.
Shopify lets you build your own brand, own your customer relationships, and control your destiny. "Arm the rebels" became their unofficial motto.
The app ecosystem was a multiplier. By letting third-party developers build apps, themes, and integrations, Shopify created a marketplace of 8,000+ apps that extended the platform's functionality infinitely.
Need email marketing? There's an app.
Need inventory management? There's an app.
This meant Shopify could stay focused on the core platform while the community built everything else.
The Shopify Partners program turned freelance developers and agencies into a sales force. Partners who built stores for clients earned recurring revenue from referrals.
Over 10,000 agencies worldwide now specialize in Shopify development. It's basically a franchise model for tech.
COVID was rocket fuel. When physical retail shut down in March 2020, every small business in the world suddenly needed an online store immediately.
Shopify's new store creation surged 71% in Q2 2020. The stock went from $400 to $1,700 in less than a year.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Shopify
The Amazon problem looms over everything. Amazon controls roughly 40% of US e-commerce.
Every Shopify merchant competes against Amazon, and many of them sell on both platforms. Amazon can always undercut on price, offer faster shipping, and has nearly unlimited resources.
Shopify's entire business depends on convincing merchants that owning their brand is worth more than Amazon's convenience.
The post-COVID hangover was brutal. After the pandemic boom, Shopify's stock dropped 80% from its November 2021 peak.
The company had hired aggressively during COVID, expecting the e-commerce shift to be permanent at pandemic levels. It wasn't.
In May 2023, Lütke laid off 20% of the company — about 2,300 people — and wrote a public letter admitting he had bet wrong on how much of the COVID shift would stick.
The fulfillment pivot was expensive. In 2019, Shopify announced the Shopify Fulfillment Network — their plan to build a warehouse and logistics network to rival Amazon.
They poured hundreds of millions into it. By 2023, they realized it was a money pit that distracted from their core business.
They sold the logistics operation to Flexport and wrote off the investment. Lütke called it "taking the medicine."
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Shopify
Shopify Online Store is the core — build and run an e-commerce website. Shopify POS (Point of Sale) handles in-person retail with card readers and inventory management.
Shopify Payments is the built-in payment processor powered by Stripe. Shop Pay is the accelerated checkout — it saves customer info so returning buyers can check out in one tap.
Shopify Capital provides cash advances and loans to merchants based on their sales data. Shopify Fulfillment Network was their attempt to compete with Amazon on shipping (they scaled it back in 2023).
Shopify Markets handles cross-border selling — currencies, duties, and translations. Shopify Audiences uses anonymized data to help merchants find new customers on ad platforms.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Shopify
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures, Georgian Partners, OMERS Ventures
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.