Shopify is a Canadian cloud-based multi-channel e-commerce company providing merchants with online services to start and manage their businesses as fast as one day. It allows sellers to create online store quickly and w/o code using its online store builder. It competes with other e-commerce companies such as BigCommerce or SquareSpace.
A. Shopify Pay — This is Shopify’s checkout button for online stores. It offers an accelerated checkout option for customers by allowing customers to save credit card information, along with other data. Shop Pay is remarkably similar to Amazon Pay and Apple Pay. Sellers can enable Shop Pay just like you would any other options for third-party providers on your Shopify website.
B. Shop Pay Installments — More recently, Shopify integrated Pay with Affirm to offer Pay later option at check out, which will let merchants offer their customers more payment choice and flexibility at checkout, helping merchants boost sales through increased cart size and higher conversion.
C. Shopify Balance — gives merchants access to critical financial products to start, run, and grow their business, including the Shopify Balance Account, Shopify Balance Card, and rewards such as cashback and discounts on everyday business spending like shipping and marketing. The key hook is that as soon as a customer has paid on the e-commerce store a merchant would have that cash available immediately. This will be instant and without fees, unlike most business bank accounts that take days and charge fees.
D. Shopify Capital — Providing loans ranging from $200 to $1 million to merchants. Shopify has already distributed over $1 Billion in loans. Since Shopify has access to all the sales (and subsequently CashFlow) data, their risk underwriting can be more accurate than traditional banking
Shopify is exemplary in the FinTech space due to its simple interface and all-in-one shopping cart system that all experience levels can understand. It offers unlimited product support, a full online store, themes, marketing, apps, and abandoned cart recovery. Shopify ensures you don't need a 3rd-party tool to make the story any better. It's major edge in the eCommerce marketplace is low upfront costs for an entrepreneur to get their online business up-and-running.
a) Shopify costs less in the long-run. As low as $9/month to get started. The recommended monthly subscription to get costs $79/month b) One-stop shop to get your online business up-and-running. Hosting, domain names, plus the others noted above. c) Quick startup and easy to understand d) Excellent customer support e) You can sell on multiple channels with easy intergrations with Amazon, Etsy and Facebook f) You can run your entire POS system through Shopify
a) Some add-ons can get pricey b) Tough to migrate away from Shopify because of the nature of the one-stop SaaS system. E.g. Website design doesn't follow you to another platform c) Coding language is not universal - It uses its own template language called Liquid. This language is less commonly known it may require more costs in finding a Liquid developerß
It is only the start and something BIG is in the making! Shopify has been growing at a remarkable rate. This is a company that started in 2005 and is hostine more than 1 million business across the world. With increased ease and use of ecommerce the trend is bound to continue. The pandemic has been a blessing rather than curse for anything and eveything that was virtual; people in lockdown were shopping for all their needs and wishes online. Although this was fairly familiar with the younger generation - we have seen a marked change in adoption and comfort of ecommerce all across the population. Shopify makes its easier for any sized business to capture these markets for a profit by taking away the hurdles to worry and manage their online presence. As the popularity of cryptocurrency and alternative means of finance grows SHopify will be able to offer an even larger customer pool to its audience.
"Shopify’s stock surged about 190% during 2020. During the same year, it also posted total revenue of $2.93 billion and a net income of $319 million. This was Shopify’s first year of profitability. However, Shopify’s success is not all attributed to the pandemic. It has been growing at a rapid rate for years. Since 2016, Shopify has grown revenue at an annual rate of about 70% per year. More recently, Shopify’s stock is up close to 40% so far in 2021"
Source:
https://investmentu.com/shopify-stock-forecast/
https://medium.com/fintech-kellogg/shopify-and-embedded-fintech-stack-412351ccd2b1
Contributors:
Tyeson Demets
Maria K. S.
Jake Shin