Shopify launched its second annual Black Friday Cyber Monday Live Globe in collaboration with Sphere Entertainment Co. in Las Vegas, where they projected a real-time visualization of purchases made through Shopify merchants worldwide onto the 875,000 sq. ft. Exosphere building. Watch a video of the sphere in action from Tobias Lütke on X.
The data is fed from Shopify's online Live Globe, which shows actual sales happening live for Shopify merchants every second. This is the seventh year in a row that Shopify has shared BFCM real-time data on its online Live Globe, and the second year the company has projected the globe onto the Exosphere in Las Vegas.
This year, Shopify's engineers and data scientists brought the Live Globe into the cockpit of a spaceship overlooking Earth. New features to Live Globe this year include:
- Interactivity in every direction – everything in the cockpit is interactive, from the Globe itself to the Shoppy mascot bobblehead.
- Synthesizer – you can actually see and hear the sales happening in real-time this year.
- VR Compatible – users with an Apple Vision Pro or Quest 3/3S can immerse themselves in the experience.
- Gravity Toggle – users can turn off gravity in the Live Globe environment and watch the built-in physics system take over.
- More Data – additional infrastructure data stats this year like webhooks per minute and CDN requests per minute.
- Easter Eggs – the more you play around in the cockpit, the more you’ll discover hidden features. Did you find the button that links to Shopifreaks.com?
This is absolutely one of my favorite campaigns by Shopify, and I hope that the annual tradition continues year after year.
How was Black Friday for Shopify merchants?
Shopify reported $5B in Black Friday gross merchandise volume across its global network of merchants, up 22% YoY.