The State of DTC Commerce, 2020-2026
Only a quarter of the Shopify stores trading in 2020 are still trading today
We tracked 688,243 Shopify storefronts continuously from June 2020. By July 2026, 177,038 were still trading. This report is what the survivors did with their pricing and their product ranges over six years - measured on the same stores in both periods, so none of it is an artefact of which merchants entered or left the market.
25.7%
survived six years
Survival rate by category
Three findings
Survivors cut prices in real terms. Matched-cohort prices rose 20.1% while US CPI-U rose 29.5% over the same span. Six years of inflation, and the merchants who made it through effectively cut prices by about 7%.
Everyone widened their range. Not one of the 31 categories with a reliable sample contracted. The median surviving store went from 101 to 136 listed products - and it is genuine turnover, not accumulation: that same store still lists only 19% of the catalog it carried in 2020.
Survival was not random. Consumer Electronics lost 85% of its 2020 storefronts. Libraries & Museums kept 47%. The spread between categories is wider than the story usually told about DTC allows for.
Why most published DTC price figures are wrong
The obvious way to measure price change is to compare the median across all tracked stores in 2020 to the median today. That gives +30.9%. It is also misleading - the tracked population grew from 688,243 to 1,619,433 storefronts over the period, so part of that gap is simply a change in which stores are being measured, not any merchant changing a price tag.
Restrict to the stores present in both periods and the answer is +20.1%. Roughly 35% of the apparent increase was composition, not pricing.
That correction is the point of this report, and it runs in both directions: the same adjustment makes assortment growth look larger, not smaller. Composition bias has to be checked per metric.
The other half of the market
WooCommerce is the larger platform - we track 4.69M live WooCommerce storefronts against 4.16M Shopify - and almost nobody publishes on it.
The State of WooCommerce, 2021-2026 follows 1,828,720 storefronts from January 2021. Only 32.4% were still trading five years later. Where a store was based mattered more than how big it was: Greek merchants survived at 48.0%, American merchants at 30.6% - and that gap holds inside every size band.
Get your category's numbers
The report covers 31 categories. Each one has its own brief - price points, assortment benchmark, survival rate and catalog replacement rate for that category alone.
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Who made this
Nuvv Research is the publishing arm of Nuvv, which maintains a commerce dataset covering millions of Shopify and WooCommerce storefronts and their product catalogs. The figures here are derived aggregates computed on that dataset. We publish the method in full, including the parts that limit what the numbers can support.