Sitting outside here at Shopify Enterprise Partner Summit enjoying the LA warmth and reflecting on my Shopify journey. Ambaum joined the Shopify Plus partner program in 2016, very thankful for Mac King as he was the Shopify Partner Manager that got us in. Mac’s agency Half Helix just merged with Tomorrow and got a big shoutout from Bobby Morrison yesterday as the conference kicked off.
Shopify has grown up since we joined the Plus program and the emphasis on Enterprise reminds me of my work at PwC. All the large consulting companies are here in LA, especially Accenture and E&Y, they both came out strong for the conference.
Seven years ago Shopify wasn’t ready to tackle Enterprise e-commerce (arguably not even three years ago), but they are now. Here’s why Shopify is poised to excel in Enterprise:
- Shopify is a founder led company. Tobias Lütke is a deep thinker who is trying to bring commerce to the entire world. I don’t work for Shopify, but just doing my part for the ecosystem gives me an immense amount of pride. Even Chamath Palihapitiya is in love with Tobi after his talk at the All-In Summit.
- Almost two years ago, the first Shopify Editions launched and I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Tobi was inspired by the apparel industry and their fall and summer releases. He took that concept and created a six month cadence for new product features. All of a sudden the pace of development on the core Shopify platform went up dramatically and there is now an expectation for future releases, absolutely love it!
- Shopify has 4,000 developers working on infrastructure, core platform features, Hydrogen, POS and more. The other e-commerce platforms have nowhere near this level of firepower.
- Shopify spends 50% of it’s budget on R&D, really an extraordinary number when you think about all the SAAS companies that lead with sales and backfill on product development.
- Shopify has a 66.3B market cap 📈 and BigCommerce has a 700M market cap, a massive valuation advantage for Shopify.
This is pure speculation, but around 2 years ago it feels like Tobi grabbed the reins of Shopify and dug in to improve the core platform. The benefits are showing up everywhere and something as simple as Shopify Editions brought a whole new level of discipline and focus to the company. It’s Shopify’s time to tackle Enterprise, here they come.
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