Shopify President Harley Finkelstein has placed his bet on small businesses ahead of the busiest shopping season — Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). In an interview with Fox Business, he called small businesses the backbone of American economy. With BFCM 2022 just a day ahead, Shopify has high hopes from its merchant partners to turnaround fortunes in an otherwise struggling economy.
“It’s quite clear, especially post-pandemic, that small businesses are the backbone of the entire economy. They’re very, very important,” Finkelstein said in praise of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Both Shopify and Finkelstein are based in Canada, though they help the merchants from all across the globe to sell products online. “The only constant in commerce is change — and that things are just happening so rapidly, including offline retailers moving online now,” the Shopify President said.
There are a lot of unknowns, especially right now in this crazy economy. But despite the current realities, there are still some real bright spots. We believe that Black Friday and Cyber Monday will still be one of the most anticipated events of the year.
Harley Finkelstein, President, Shopify
Here’s how Shopify is helping small merchants:
1. Creating Brands
Shopify not only helps these merchants set up online stores and sell products across the internet, but also helps them create a brand of their own. After success online, most of these small merchants set up physical stores as well. And that’s beneficial for all — shoppers, sellers and the economy.
Starting tomorrow, the shoppers of the United States will shop both online and offline to mark the holiday shopping season. BFCM is falling on November 25 to 28 this year. Black Friday is the Friday, that comes next to when Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States. It marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Stores, both physical and online, offer discounts and sales to customers. The shopping season starts either late night on Thanksgiving or early morning on Black Friday. These appealing sales continue until Monday, which is called Cyber Monday.
2. Boosting Economy
According to Finkelstein, the ongoing microeconomic conditions in the US are not in favour of the merchants. However, there are “some real bright spots” too.
“There are a lot of unknowns, especially right now in this crazy economy. But despite the current realities, there are still some real bright spots. We believe that Black Friday and Cyber Monday will still be one of the most anticipated events of the year,” he said.
As per the International Council of Shopping Centers, Black Friday has been America’s busiest shopping day every year since 2005. Apart from the US, it is highly popular in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
Finkelstein claimed that Shopify merchants will enjoy a lion’s share during the BFCM 2022 sales. “Every minute or so, a new entrepreneur gets their first sale on Shopify,” he said.
3. Entrepreneurship Devotion
Calling Shopify “an entrepreneurship company,” Finkelstein added that it is devoted to “celebrating and recognizing the power of entrepreneurship on this incredible global stage.”
With its base in Canada, the multinational e-commerce company offers a platform for merchants to sell locally produced products online. Apart from the platform, Shopify also provides essential tools that help merchants “start, grow, market, and manage” their retail business.
“We’re really the place that businesses get started,” Finkelstein claimed. He added that Shopify makes “it really easy for new businesses to get started. Then, once they get started, they find it really easy to scale something.”
The best part about Shopify, he added, is that “every minute or so, a new entrepreneur gets their first sale on Shopify. So we’re really the place that businesses get started.”
4. Incredible Support
Shopify supports its merchant partners throughout their entrepreneurial journey. Finkelstein said that his company offers “economies of scale to the millions of stores on Shopify — which allows them to level the playing field in a way”. With the support of Shopify, merchants could do all that they could not do independently.
Finkelstein added that instead of “keeping economies of scale for ourselves, we give those economies of scale to the millions of stores on Shopify — which allows them to level the playing field in a way that they could never do on their own”.
“Now you’re seeing a lot of really great businesses that started only a few years ago becoming the largest brands in their particular industry,” Finkelstein said, giving credits to Shopify for merchants’ success.
5. Exceptional Customer Support
In August, Shopify invested in Gorgias, a company that is known for building customer service tools for e-commerce websites. With this, the company raised $30 million to take its overall valuation to $710 million.
The new $30 million investment was made by Shopify and Transpose Platform. Gorgias already has investors like SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin, CRV, Alven and Sapphire Ventures’ Rajeev Dham. According to Tech Crunch, Gorgias’ current funding is $72.4 million.
In 2020, Gorgias was helping over 4,500 online stores with customer support tools based on live chat, phone, email, SMS, messaging apps like WhatsApp and social media. It now has over 10,000 stores under its name. Steve Madden, Princess Polly, Olipop and Marine Layer are among some of its prominent clients. Most of its associated companies use Shopify to sell their products.
Gorgias has a staff of 245 employees with physical offices in cities like Paris, San Francisco, Toronto, Sydney, New York City, Belgrade and Charlotte.
6. Helping Small Businesses Scale
One of Shopify’s merchant partners, Authenticity50 co-founder Jimmy MacDonald explained how the Canadian e-commerce company helped him scale his Washington-based business.
Authenticity50 sells bed sheets, blankets, pillows and towels on its website based on Shopify. It was started in 2015 from Camas 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 the 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.
7. Easy Setup
Jimmy claimed that after easy setup using Shopify, his website traffic spiked from 100 to more than 12,000 within minutes. The easy setup was completed without any technical issues. “Most sites would break under that load. Yet Shopify handles that with zero issues at all,” he said.
“Shopify gives you the backbone to spin up [an e-commerce] website really quickly and really easily — and it looks really good, too,” Jimmy added.
Jimmy was referring to the incredible support provided by Shopify, which helped Authenticity50 prepare the right blueprints. Shopify takes pride in providing free guidance to all small business owners registered with the e-commerce platform.
Even though there are e-commerce giants like Amazon, which provide shoppers everything that is being sold on the internet, Jimmy believes that more of buyers are not inclining towards small brand websites powered by Shopify.
“They [Shopify] power some of the largest brands out there, but their services work just the same for small mom-and-pop shops and start-up businesses like ourselves,” he said.
8. Global Impact
Shopify is helping merchants from more than 175 countries. The count 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 of 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 ever-evolving business world. Some of the most popular brands with their websites based on Shopify include Netflix, Allbirds, Heinz, Gymshark, Tupperware, FIGS and FTD.
The multinational giant has also created five million jobs across the globe. In 2021, Shopify recorded global economic impact of more than $444 billion in 2021. It was 45 percent more than 2020. As many as 600 million shoppers bought products from Shopify merchants in 2021. It was almost 31 percent more than 2020. While 2020 recorded 457 million consumers shopping from Shopify merchants, 300 million consumers did that in 2019.
9. Capturing Physical Market
While Shopify enjoys a lion share in the online retail business, it is also helping merchants capture in-store market with offerings like POS Go. In September, Shopify launched an updated version of its point-of-sale (POS) system. Shopify POS Go is a handheld tool that resembles a smartphone. With the launch, Shopify aims to establish a foothold in the hardware market. POS Go will enable retailers to offer wireless checkout anywhere in the store. It doesn’t need to be connected to a computer or mobile phone.
POS Go comes with a card reader, inventory tracker and a built-in bar code scanner. With this, merchants are able to manage staff and payments irrespective where they are-online or store. Shopify POS Go app can be customised to manage store and provide better services to customers.
