A book on Shopify's first 20 years

How did the company become so successful and what are some of the lessons?

I have been waiting some time for this day, Oct. 8. My book The Shopify Story has finally been released. It can be found in most bookstores and as an audio book on Audible.ca.

Why a book on Shopify?

The company has grown rapidly over the past 20 years to become the second largest e-commerce company in North America. So, we might ask: how did it all come about and what are some of the lessons for people in the realms of business, entrepreneurship, investing, working for a tech company, policy making and so on?

Also, it would be good to see more of an entrepreneurial culture in Canada and the world. After all, the improvement that we have seen in living standards over the past two centuries had a lot to do with entrepreneurs introducing new products and tools. Perhaps a book on Shopify can help contribute to "unternehmergeist," to use Professor Schumpeter's term for "entrepreneur-spirit."

Some random factoids about Shopify:

Approximately two-million entrepreneurs around the world are selling merchandise from Shopify’s platform. Add in their employees, as well as those employed in Shopify’s ecosystem, and the workforce associated with Shopify’s platform is approximately five-million people, which makes it the largest in the world according to a study by Deloitte.

When Shopify did an IPO and went public in 2015, it proceeded to beat analysts’ expectations for 24 consecutive quarters. Not surprisingly, its stock price rose strongly (up 5,000% by the high in late 2021) and Shopify met the demand by issuing 7 more rounds of new shares, raking in nearly $8-billion dollars (including IPO receipts). That’s a lot of rocket fuel that still sustains Shopify.

Shopify started out as a company earning revenues mainly from subscriptions taken out by entrepreneurs. In 2013, it added its own payments processing, Shopify Payments, taking 2% to 3% of merchants sales as payment for the service (just like VISA and Mastercard do). This became the main source of growth for Shopify: its revenues from payment processing rose rapidly and quickly surpassed revenues from subscriptions, to now comprise more than three-quarters of the total.

Links:

The Shopify Story (listing on Indigo Chapters)

The Shopify Story (reading sample from audio book on Audible.ca)