How The Leading E-Commerce Platform For Small Businesses Is Expanding Its Retail Footprint

After Amazon, Shopify is the largest supporter of US e-commerce sales. As the Covid-19 pandemic brings more sales online, here's how Shopify is offering more services to keep merchants in its ecosystem.

With the Covid-19 crisis forcing more retail online, e-commerce sales have seen a massive spike in 2020. At the same time, a range of models beyond traditional e-commerce sites are gaining traction, including more tailored marketplaces as well as social platforms, which are making themselves more shoppable.

As competition for e-commerce shoppers grows more intense, so does the fight to secure sellers for these online platforms. E-commerce platforms and tech providers that make money by hosting more merchants (thus driving more transactions) are looking for new ways to engage sellers and keep them in their ecosystems.

Canada-based Shopify is one e-commerce software provider whose profile and revenues have risen as online shopping has accelerated.

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The company leads the market for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enabling merchants to build their own brands and bring them online using Shopify’s infrastructure. Currently supporting over 1M merchants, Shopify estimates that its platform powered 5.9% of all e-commerce sales in the US in 2019, ranking second behind Amazon.

Now, faced with increased competition, Shopify is expanding beyond its foundations as a front-end e-commerce experience provider.

Specifically, the company is playing across more areas of the small merchant’s value chain — from merchandise planning to order fulfillment — to help keep sellers in Shopify’s ecosystem.

In this report, we examine how Shopify is expanding its offers in marketing and sales channels, payments and finance, and order fulfillment to make itself more valuable to merchants and assert its preeminence in the retail sector.