The first quarter-trillion-dollar holiday season

Happy New Year and welcome back to the Platter Newsletter.

I hope you’re reading this with your feet up, coffee (or beer) in hand, relaxing after your first full week back.

Before we jump in, I wanted to share a quick update on Platter and say thank you to this amazing ecommerce community.

In the last calendar year we launched 29 new Shopify stores. That’s almost 3 per month, every month. And that excludes a few others that are not yet published. We partnered with some genuinely awesome brands this year including: Rotten, Baboon to the Moon, BoomBoom, Sidio, Obvi, Onewith, and so many more.

And this week we were named a Shopify Platinum Partner. It’s a HUGE milestone for us! There are fewer than 80 agencies in the world with platinum status. We met with the team at Shopify this week and mentioned how rare it is for a team our size and age to be included.

None of that happens without great people around us. To our team, our partners, the brands we work with, and everyone reading this, thank you for the support. It means a lot to us.

Alright, onto this week’s content.

BIG NEWS THIS WEEK

The first quarter-trillion-dollar holiday season

Online holiday spending in the U.S. reached $257.8B between Nov 1 and Dec 31, up 6.8% year over year, according to Adobe’s Holiday Shopping Report.

Two interesting numbers from the report:

• Mobile shopping drove $145.2B, growing 10.7% YoY, and now accounts for well over half of online holiday spend.

• Buy Now, Pay Later hit $20B, up 9.8% YoY, continuing to play an outsized role in high-intent purchases.

• AI-driven traffic increased 693% YoY, with the majority still coming from desktop

The takeaway for me isn’t how much money people spent. It’s how they spent it.

People are discovering brands using their favorite AI tools, often on desktop. But when it’s time to buy, they’re reaching for their phones and flexible payment options.

For brands, that means your storefront needs to be fast, easy to navigate, and work really well on mobile, because that’s where most of these decisions are being made in peak season.

Read the full report from Adobe.

PODCAST OF THE WEEK

Lessons from Roman Khan on building $200M+ brands

Ben sat down with Roman Raisuddin Khan, who built and operates a $200M+ brand portfolio under Peak21.

This episode goes deep on the unsexy parts of growing a business that determine whether a brand succeeds or fails: operating discipline, cash flow, margins, and supply chain.

If you’re building, acquiring, or operating an 8–9 figure brand, there’s a lot here that most founders and operators only learn after making expensive mistakes.

Watch the episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify.

STORES OF THE WEEK

Creatime

Creatime’s new storefront is a clean, modern take on supplements that deliberately avoids the typical “gym bro” aesthetic, while still performing where it matters.

Old School Labs

Old School Labs is a supplement brand rooted in Golden Era bodybuilding, reimagined to feel more inclusive and easier to shop without losing the credibility that made it iconic.

SHOPIFY UPDATES OF THE WEEK

Greater flexibility for inventory transfers

Merchants can now edit shipment line items at any stage, receive inventory without specifying an origin location, and send inventory to unspecified destinations. Small change, big quality-of-life improvement for ops teams.

Payments and web performance data in Sidekick

Sidekick can now generate ShopifyQL queries for web performance and payments data, and has expanded support for fulfillment and payout queries. A meaningful step toward making data more accessible without living in reports.

See all changes in Shopify's changelog.

Before you go, if you have two minutes to spare, I’d love your input on the newsletter. It genuinely makes my day when people reply or send notes on LinkedIn.

What do you want me to write about this year? What’s helpful for you right now as a founder or operator?

If you have something in mind, reply to this email or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn and let me know.

– Cam