Case Study: The Economist rapidly tests ideas and grows revenue with Shopify Plus

How The Economist Uses Shopify Plus to Test Ideas, Delight Its Audience, & Invent the Future

The Economist, led by innovation head Ron Diorio, needed to modernize a 180-year-old brand by creating new revenue streams and deeper ways to serve a discerning, global audience without sacrificing editorial quality. The challenge was to rapidly test and scale new commerce and learning products while forming new consumption habits for readers who expect insight and high standards.

The team partnered with We Make Websites and adopted Shopify Plus as a flexible, integrated ecommerce platform to launch Learning.ly — a curated, editorially vetted marketplace of on-demand courses — and to prototype other offerings (wine clubs, niche books, merch) quickly and globally. Shopify Plus removed technical friction, enabled fast time-to-market (weeks), risk-free experimentation, and easy cross-channel selling, yielding new revenue opportunities, stronger audience engagement, and a repeatable way to validate and scale future products.

The Economist

Ron Diorio

Charge of Innovation