Shopify is helping local merchants sell online products across the globe. In the recent Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2022 sale, the Canadian e-commerce platform recorded $7.5 billion in merchants’ sales. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein spoke of the company’s trade secrets at VOICES 2022, an annual event hosted by the Business of Fashion.
“When you give the right people the right tools at the right time, incredible things happen. If you aggregate all individual, independent Shopify merchants, they will be the second largest retailer in America,” Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said in an interview with BoF’s Rahul Malik.
VOICES is a series of roundtable events that are being hosted in Milan and Paris. As part of the event, the best global entrepreneurs from companies like Valentino, Bulgari, Prada, Jacquemus, Isabel Marant and Coperni came together to share valuable experiences under the Chatham House Rule. Finkelstein spoke at length about how Shopify is driving entrepreneurship with the best of technology.
Shopify Effect
According to Finkelstein, it is the Shopify Effect that emphasises using commerce as a force for good. To build and maintain that force, Shopify uses its technology and empowers a global network of over two million merchants. The company’s base of merchant partners represents 10 percent of e-commerce worldwide. Apart from empowering entrepreneurs, Shopify also takes pride in promoting conscious consumption among users.
Finkelstein’s words at VOICES explained the importance of strategic imperatives that helps a business survive in an uncertain socio-economic environment. Price rise and changing consumer spending behaviour has affected e-commerce business worldwide. However, the $7.5 billion BFCM sales record by Shopify merchants hints at the company’s incredible results.
The cost of failure is the lowest it’s ever been for entrepreneurship. 20 years ago, to start a business venture you would have had to take out a loan, mortgage your entire life. Now people can try things — if they work they can scale, and if they don’t they can try something else.
Harley Finkelstein, President, Shopify
At the event, Finkelstein answers some crucial questions that not only give insights into Shopify’s incredible results but also convenience us to set up an online store using the platform. Here are three reasons why you must set up a Shopify store.
1. Economic Growth
Shopify’s aim is not just commercial but to help the economy grow at a larger scale. It empowers entrepreneurship to make full use of it in economic growth worldwide. “Entrepreneurship enables us to do amazing things, it gives us leverage and scale, and it is the greatest tool to solve a problem. Last year 5.4 million business registrations were filed in the US — that’s the highest in 20 years,” Finkelstein explained.
“New entrepreneurs get their first sales on Shopify every single minute — that’s the whole purpose, the whole mission of the company. Our technology and code base drove $7.5 billion in business on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the real story with that $7.5 billion is how technology enabled people to self-actualise, to commercialise a hobby, to sell something that is meaningful to them to the rest of the world,” he added.
ALSO READ: Small Businesses Backbone of Economy: Shopify President
Merchants from more than 175 countries have their stores built on Shopify. The count of total Shopify stores may reach up to millions. According to the report published by Fox Business, Shopify is the second-largest online retail platform in the US, followed by eBay and Walmart. This fact was compiled by aggregating online sales of all Shopify merchants based in the US. This stat was based on eMarketer’s report in 2021.
Shopify provides the right toolkit to merchants to help them become independent retailers. With this, even the smallest of merchants meet the challenges of the ever-evolving business world. Some of the most popular brands with websites based on Shopify include Netflix, Allbirds, Heinz, Gymshark, Tupperware, FIGS and FTD.
2. Community Development
Shopify also takes pride in using technology to drive community development worldwide. “In 2021, Shopify supported 5 million jobs. Those are jobs in local communities for manufacturing, retail and technology,” Finkelstein claimed.
In the same year, Shopify recorded a global economic impact of more than $444 billion. It was 45 percent more than the figures in 2020. As many as 600 million shoppers bought products from Shopify merchants in 2021. It was almost 31 percent more than the figures in 2020. While 2020 recorded 457 million consumers shopping from Shopify merchants, 300 million consumers did that in 2019.
“For many of our sellers, entrepreneurship was not done out of passion — it was entrepreneurship by necessity. In 2012, Ben Francis created Gymshark out of his college dorm room. It is now a categoric leader that competes with companies like Nike. Heather Hasson and Trina Spear founded Figs following a coffee shop conversation about why frontline healthcare workers can’t have great fitting, good-looking, comfortable scrubs. They are now a publicly traded company that completely changed the hospital scrubs industry,” Finkelstein said.
“We’ve never seen businesses scale like this before — the technology makes it possible, but it’s the entrepreneur who is driving. Shopify is the story of 2 million entrepreneurs,” he added.
3. Risk Cushioning
The Shopify president added that Shopify provides entrepreneurs with the essential cushioning to take a leap of faith. “The cost of failure is the lowest it’s ever been for entrepreneurship. 20 years ago, to start a business venture you would have had to take out a loan, mortgage your entire life. Now people can try things — if they work they can scale, and if they don’t they can try something else,” Finkelstein said.
One of Shopify’s merchant partners, Authenticity50’s co-founder Jimmy MacDonald explained how Sopify helped him scale his Washington-based business. Authenticity50 sells bed sheets, blankets, pillows and towels on its Shopify store. It was started in 2015 in Camas city of Washinton and the growth has been tremendous over the past seven years. The business was started by Jimmy and his wife Steph. The couple takes pride in making US-made products available from coast to coast using their Shopify store.
“It took us a few years to put the supply chain [details] together and Shopify was also picking up steam at around that time,” Jimmy said, recalling the initial days of business. Authenticity50 joined the Shopify platform in 2016.
“Shopify gives anybody who is willing to put in a little bit of effort essentially enterprise-level resources to manage an online store,” he said.
Finkelstein also spoke on the creator economy and initiatives like Shopify Collabs that directly connect merchants on its platform with content creators.
“To quantify it, the creator economy is a $100 billion per year economy, with a 4 percent participation rate — meaning 96 percent of creators don’t participate in it. Shopify Collabs is one way we leverage technology to connect incredible content creators with incredible brands,” he said.
Today, every brand is trying to get a content creator, and every content creator wants their own creator brand. And so we created this AI-powered “matchmaking” service that connects great content creators, in certain verticals with great brands’ verticals, and ultimately both sides are able to monetise and grow, and it leads to really great success,” the Shopify president concluded.
