In October 2014 I made a decision. One of those pivotal decisions in life that changes everything. I remember things clearly. Not entirely happy at the startup I was working for, standing in front of my whiteboard, writing down the pros and cons, the upsides, the downsides, the risks and the rewards.
I eventually convinced myself that it was the right thing to do.
I also vividly remember sending in my resignation email, only to find out the next day that I was going to be a father, again. What had I done?! As far as I know, resignations also come with an implied “no backsies” clause unless you want to forever be the guy in the startup that once quit and then changed his mind.
There was no looking back. I’d made my bed and now I had to sleep in it. Unfortunately the entrepreneurial life doesn’t include a lot of sleep, so that was perhaps not the best metaphor to use.
That decision was to create a specialist Shopify agency, and now ten years down the line, thankfully I can categorically say that it wasn’t a bad choice.
When we started with the platform in 2014, Shopify was in their 8th year of operation. Since time is linear and I’m a fan of pointing out the obvious, they’re now in their 18th year - as of 2024.
In the time we’ve been working with Shopify, they’ve rolled out loads of new features and innovations.
Some of the highlights for us have been:
The list would be too long if I were to include all of their innovations. Suffice to say, they have and continue to service a prolific release schedule of world-firsts.
Of all the merchants we’ve worked with, I’m not aware of any moving off to another platform. We’ve migrated plenty over from other e-commerce systems to Shopify, but they’ve all seemingly stayed with the friendly green shopping bag… or gone bust.
Sure, clients of ours have looked around, who wouldn’t? We’ve even investigated other e-commerce platforms for them. Ultimately though, none of the alternatives had the same depth or breadth of offering as Shopify.
There are options out there, certainly. Are any in the same league as Shopify and able to provide the stability, versatility and price? Not that we found. Most of them seemed to spend a lot of time comparing themselves to Shopify and declaring how much better they were.
If you’re investigating your options, and they’re all comparing themselves to one; you should probably consider that one.
Going through the spectrum of e-commerce business sizes / stages, it’s clear that Shopify covers a lot of territory from the hobbyists and mom & pop startups all the way through to enterprise.
This isn’t to say that Shopify is the best choice for every single e-commerce business out there, but I’ll quite boldly state that for most, it’s a no-brainer.
This is an area where I believe Shopify really shines. The Shopify partner program is hands down the best I’ve experienced in my career.
In our early days, circa 2014/5, things were a bit different to how they are now though. Back then we were one of a far smaller number of partners, and with the increase in the volume of merchants, so came an increase in the number of service providers.
They then offered an ‘Expert’ tier that allowed for some differentiation between Shopify Partners (which anyone can become) and Experts. This accolade required us to submit five of our stores for them to inspect. They were good enough and we were granted expert status along with a much sought after listing on Shopify’s partner directory.
One thing that was great in the beginning was the personal partner manager support we received from Shopify. It’s completely understandable when the number of partners just no longer allows for this kind of personal relationship but it was so nice in the beginning to have a direct, single point of contact in Canada.
Thankfully we’ve built up enough contacts at Shopify over the years to effectively escalate things or get answers when needed. Honestly and thankfully this isn’t very often.
If you’re concerned about the stability of Shopify from a financial perspective, this infobyte should put your mind at ease.
In 2014, Shopify was valued around $1B.
When they went public in May 2015, their first day’s evaluation came in at $1.27B.
Today (October 28, 2024), Shopify’s market capitalization is approximately $141.7B USD.
Yes, that’s correct. Forget about 10X’ing, they more than 141X’d their value in ten years.
‘Nuff said?
There were already about 120,000 merchants trading on Shopify when we joined in 2014.
I remember using this measure when explaining to prospective merchants how established they were.
Shopify is now sitting with approximately 1.75 million merchants trading on their platform. The 2020 pandemic saw them break the 1 million mark and while growth has slowed since then, they continue to add merchants daily.
Since 2017, Shopify has been the world’s most widely used e-commerce platform. Now with almost 30% of the globe’s online sellers choosing the platform to conduct their online businesses.
With the numbers already given above it’ll come as no surprise that Shopify’s Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) growth is quite impressive.
Since this is a comparison of a decade, I’ll start with their ‘measly’ $12 billion GMV in 2015.
As much as an 11 digit number can impress most people, adding one more digit to it, and then more than doubling it resulted in Shopify reaching over $235 billion in 2023. This was 20% up on 2022’s $197 billion. [Source]
Did I hitch my cart to the right horse? Hell yes, I believe I did.
We’ve had the unique opportunity that only e-commerce offers. By getting in under the hood of hundreds of businesses around the world, we’ve been able to learn so much about how the world works.
Each e-commerce store has its own fingerprint. A unique combination of brand, voice, audience, product, strategy and most importantly people.
While there are challenges ahead for us all. AI attempting to swipe left on entire industries, the world still experiencing financial aftershocks of the pandemic… there will always remain opportunity and there will always be entrepreneurs.
For now I’ll continue to work with those entrepreneurially minded mavericks of the world and help them make the most of those opportunities.
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.