Insights on the global eCommerce & DTC businesses

You need two components to build a successful e-commerce business, the software that runs the online store and the marketing to get customers to come to the store. A large part of what makes marketplaces like Amazon so attractive to merchants is that it provides both components.

The best way for Shopify to grow take rates is to help drive incremental distribution for its merchants. Sure, most of the merchants will get most of their sales by driving their own traffic to their Shopify stores (through their own branding and marketing efforts across online and offline channels), but if Shopify can provide them with incremental... See more

Because Shopify runs the websites of these merchants, it may be able to more accurately track users bouncing between sites and build machine learning algorithms to calculate lookalike audiences for its stores. It may also be able to persist a customer's payment info across stores to make the secondary checkout faster. In short, Shopify has the oppo... See more

In May, Facebook announced Facebook Shops, a tool to set up online stores on Facebook and Instagram. Shopify is one of the partners, allowing Shopify stores to upload their inventory to Facebook. However, assuming Facebook Shops is successful, this partnership benefits those stores and Facebook, not Shopify.