"BFCM"... That's what Shopify calls the hazy credit card memories of the past 4 days. Now that Black Friday/Cyber Monday is over, we want to highlight another winner (besides omnichannel commerce and shopping on your phone, which we covered yesterday): Shopify.
- $900M of online shopping went through its ecommerce pipes on Friday. Since $7.4B total was spent online on Black Friday, that means Shopify handled 12% of all US online shopping.
The Force... 'An energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.' It's almost like Obi-Wan knew Shopify would empower brands to manage their own ecommerce. Companies that want to sell online have 2 key options:
- Use a middleman, aka a platform like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, or Dick's Sporting Goods. They'll take a cut of the transaction.
- Do it yourself. For Allbirds, Kylie Cosmetics, and — even Tesla until recently — Shopify invisibly handled their website, managing the behind-the-scenes of ecommerce from payments to order management.
- FYI, Adobe and Salesforce do this back-end work too (also without you even noticing), snagging monthly software subscription fees for it.
Wall Street sees what Shopify is doing, and likes it... Shopify isn't profitable — never has been. But when you own a growing share of a growing market, investors are usually happy. That's why the stock price has grown 8x bigger the past 3 years. The hope is that soon Shopify won't have to spend so much on marketing to grow — then it'll be able to sit back, charge companies monthly ecommerce fees, and get profitable.