HOW SHOPIFY'S SMALL NETWORK OF BUSINESS CAN TAKE ON AMAZON

HOW SHOPIFY'S SMALL NETWORK OF BUSINESS CAN TAKE ON AMAZON

Shopify is one of those companies that makes the modern internet go that makes offers for businesses of all sizes to set up online stores. From there, you can handle everything from shipping orders to financing loans for expansion. The company went public in 2015 and it has been on a tear during this pandemic as has online commerce exploded. The first quarter posts revenue of $988 million which's a 110% increase from last year but all things are going extremely well for now. a lot of online shopping starts with targeted ads on Facebook, building out its own shopping platform. Facebook and Apple are fighting over how those ads are tracked and served well or as of this week are in midst of nasty travel of epic games about the cut it takes on digital purchases in iOS apps and of course, there is Amazon which dominates online retail. Shopify provides tools for businesses to compete with all of these business giants and that Shopify itself can sometimes act like a giant because it has so many customers to represent. The is a phrase used as 'being the empire vs arming the rebels' which. Shopify did ban Donald trump's store after the January 6 capital riot issue but Shopify doesn't really fit in the same category as of laws and norms like Twitter, Facebook, or other social media platforms. it has a different set of moderation challenges It is worth thinking of whether the enterprise offers the powers of an online store to meet the same standards as the ted talk or YouTube. 

 The history of the company was about 16 years ago the founders wanted to do something simple and sell snowboards on the internet and back in 2005 there were two ways to sell online, you either list it on the market place or at the time eBay was the big one and the advantages of that was it was inexpensive and fairly easy to get up and running. The other way was to spend a couple of grand to have one of these large eCommerce builds. SO they didn't like those options so they wrote a piece of software to sell their own snowboards and within a year like by 2006, it became obvious while the snowboard business was a good idea. So the first 6 or 7 years they focused on building the best, the easiest the most scalable way for anyone with the product to build an online store. and in 2012 they started realizing that a lot of our merchants wanted to also sell offline they either had a store or they wanted to set up a popup store or they wanted in-person cash n carry market deals and they came with those offers. So in 2012, they began to think about this idea of really moving from single-point solution eCommerce to begin multiple channel solution that could be used sell from anywhere you wanted. They went public in around 2015 on the stock exchange and what also happened at that time beyond just going public was some of those merchants that started on Shopify ran their mom's kitchen table. Till today Shopify has 1.7 million merchants they make about 9% of all eCommerce in the USA and in the last quarter they sold more than $30 billion worth of GMV and you are reading here every 28 seconds a brand new entrepreneur gets their first sale on Shopify.

Shopify earns from subscription fee that is 29$ a month to up to 2000$ and they also have a payments business known as Shopify payments powers majority of particularly. They have a fulfillment business and shipping business. If Shopify was considered a retailer then it would be the second-largest retailer in America after Amazon. Shopify's entire business model is predicated on small businesses, they do well Shopify does. So the future of retail is not going to be online nor it will be offline it is not going to be Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or Walmart.com, it is going to be everywhere and the future of retail is going to be about consumer choice. It has always been the retailer retailing to the consumer how to purchase. what Shopify's role in all that is to integrate all of it into a centralized online operating system. So think of a Shopify is the hub of where you run your business day to day.