Given its strong momentum, Shopify Inc. aims to be the “de facto platform for sellers,” says Russ Jones, the web-based e-commerce platform provider’s chief financial officer. The statement came as Shopify released financial results from another strong quarter.
Shopify’s first quarter revenue totaled $127.4 million, a 75.2% increase from $72.7 million in the same period in 2016. Within this, Subscription Solutions revenue grew 60% to $62.1 million. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), or the value of goods sold via its clients, rose 77.8% to $4.8 billion for the quarter ended March 31, compared with $2.7 billion a year earlier, Canada-based Shopify said today.
“Retail is shifting headlong toward the vision we laid out two years ago—of inspiring entrepreneurship with multichannel commerce—and we fully expect to continue leading this industry transition for years to come,” Jones says.
Among those changes is the dramatic shift in consumers’ browsing behaviors. Mobile devices accounted for 69% of traffic and 59% of orders for Shopify merchants at the end of March, up from 62% and 51%, respectively, at the same time a year earlier.
Shopify’s platform launched in 2006 and Shopify went public in 2015. Twelve e-retailers ranked in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000 use Shopify’s e-commerce platform, including BHFO Inc. (No. 470), Leesa Sleep LLC (No. 499) and Bourbon & Boots Inc. (No. 986).
Shopify last month announced a number of updates and new tools to its offerings, including Shopify Pay, an online and in-person payment method for Shopify merchants. The mobile and desktop commerce version of Shopify Pay enables shoppers to store their card information with any Shopify merchant and then pay without re-entering their payment data at any retailer that uses Shopify as its e-commerce platform.
“We believe Shopify’s value proposition for merchants both small and (increasingly) large has never been stronger, and we expect momentum from deepening partner relationships,” Colin Sebastian, e-commerce investment analyst at Robert W. Baird, wrote in a note to investors.
For the first quarter ended March 31, Shopify also reports:
- Subscription revenue for its software of $62.1 million up 60.5% from $38.7 million a year earlier.
- Revenue from what Shopify calls Merchant Solutions, which includes shipping and payment processing services for which it takes a cut of each sale, increased 92.1% to $65.3 million from $34.0 million, mainly driven by the growth of GMV, Shopify says.
- GMV processed through Shopify Payments grew to $1.8 billion, which accounted for 38% of total client GMV processed in the quarter, versus $1.0 billion, or 37%.
- Net loss of $13.6 million compared with a loss of $8.9 million.