If you look at the last six blogs we’ve written, four of them have been about Amazon. This week, we’re taking a break from Amazon and spending some time with our very favorite storefront: Shopify.
Earlier this month, Fortune reported that Shopify is the “best performing company with a $1 billion market-cap.” In layman’s terms, that means Shopify has over $1 billion dollars on hand with no debt.
Pretty darn awesome.
Even before Shopify became a big name, we’ve considered it the best storefront out there. Why? Well, we have a post from April explaining how its mobile interface, customer support, robust development budget and other factors make it so awesome. Check it out if you want a bit more info, besides incredibly growth, about their awesome product.
Well, if WBX Commerce needed a reason to sing Shopify’s praises (we don’t), their recent growth report encouraged us to write a bit more about how great they are.
The Shopify Story
First off, let’s talk a little about the company. For those of you who haven’t heard much about it before, Shopify offers a computer software platform for online stores, similar to other big names like WooCommerce or BigCommerce. It was founded back in 2004, by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake after they had tried to set up an online storefront for snowboard gear. Dissatisfied with the results, Lütke began building his own ecommerce platform.
Since then, Shopify has perfected what CNET deems a “clean, simple and easy to use” interface. In 2014, Lütke was chosen as CEO of the year by the Canadian Globe and Mail.
Obviously, we aren’t the only ones who love it.
Shopify continues to see explosive growth. Investors who bought stock in its initial public trading back in May of 2015 have seen a 500% return on investment. Shopify has built its user base up to 500,000 merchants in 175 countries, which is a 67% increase over the same quarter last year. It’s revenue, according to an article in The Motley Fool, is up 75%.
To give you a sense of the size of a company that builds a platform that is often hidden to consumers, let’s take a look at some more numbers. In the past year or so, 131 million people have bought something through Shopify’s storefront… most of them probably without realizing it.
In early August, The founder and CEO of Shopify, Tobias Lutke, voiced his amazement as his company’s growth. “People are selling billions of dollars worth a month now on the platform — which is crazy,” he said. “This has been working incredibly well.”
Incredibly well, indeed.
We spend a LOT of our time thinking about Amazon, but we also know there’s a whole other world of ecommerce beyond it. One vast continent of this world is your webstore, and as we’ve said before it is very important.
Fortunately, there are tools that make setting up and selling through your own store simple. Shopify may be just one country on that continent, but we think it’s the very best one. At WBX Commerce, we feel privileged to work with Shopify, an absolutely amazing store cart that we know has a bright future.
