
Shopify grows Q3 revenue 93% - Oatseller
https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/11/09/e-commerce-platform-vendor-shopify-grows-q3-revenue-93
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dangrossman
Developers that always wanted to have their own side business, take note. This
is the kind of opportunity you should always be looking for: a rapidly growing
platform, full of small businesses with money to spend if you can help them,
and a developer-friendly interface for you to do so. Shopify has a highly
trafficked app store that makes your additions to stores plug-and-play, and
they'll even take care of billing for you.

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throwaway956
Asides from the general warning against building a (long-term) business on
someone else's platform, I'd caution against developing for Shopify in
particular.

Vague, inconsistent and non-obvious guidelines with regards to themes and apps
and sudden (and unannounced) changes in policy have bitten my company in the
past. I wouldn't go as far as to say that Shopify are hostile to developers,
and some are clearly very successful, but I now approach the Shopify platform
by being constantly ready to write off any time invested in building for it.

To be fair, you can say precisely the same about building for Apple's App
Store and the Google Play Store, and others. But Shopify is certainly equally
capricious.

(Throwaway, because I still have apps and themes in the ecosystem.)

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drchiu
I'm curious to know as I'm not knowledgable about how Shopify has messed with
developers in the past. What kind of tactics or things have Shopify done that
has been developer unfriendly?

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throwaway2999
I personally had shopify sit on the 'approval' process for my app for a month.

The day before they rejected it, they added similar functionality to my own.

I think they were waiting for their own update to drop. I don't believe they
'stole my idea' but its still kinda shitty.

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drchiu
If you don't mind my asking (and for the benefit for other developers here),
what kind of functionality was it?

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cdnsteve
Shopify is a great Canadian success story.

However their stock is currently taking a beating. It has lost 21% on the TSX
over the past month.

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rstupek
They aren't making any profits (loss of $4.7 million last quarter). Revenue
does not equal profit.

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goodJobWalrus
Do you know, were they ever profitable?

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pen2l
I don't understand how can they not be. I mean, compared to stuff like
Snapchat or whatever which has dubious monetization schemes, Shopify is
solidly built and offers a service that so many are willing to actually pay
for. Maybe it's the costs of building things in the beginning? I really think
they'll be fine... until at least Amazon or some other big player gets in
their turf.

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davefp
I think they're simply ploughing all their revenue back into growth through
sales/marketing. If they wanted to they could turn down the customer
acquisition spend and ride their recurring revenue to a tidy profit.

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jacquesm
That depends. In the case of shopify probably yes, but you'd have to look very
closely at the life-time value of those customers. There is a small
possibility that if they turned down the rate of acquisition that the
retention would be just poor enough that they would not make it to
profitability, or alternatively that they would be profitable only for a short
while.

This can be quite hard to establish, especially for companies that have raised
significant capital (Shopify raised $120M+), they can keep that from happening
for a long long time.

For companies that have not raised significant capital, if they're able to
finance their growth out of their income stream then yes, they can convert to
profitable overnight.

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siscia
The financial statement is way more interesting of the article...

They are spending ~10M for developing the platform and ~18M for sales and
marketing.

If they had completely shut down the the marketing side they would have bring
around ~14M of profit this quarter.

They have around ~150M in the bank, so they can keep growing like this for
other 3 years.

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guiomie
So you are saying the marketing resulted in no revenue?

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siscia
Hummm... No...

I am just exposing fact that weren't so obvious at first sight...

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PostThisTooFast
You don't "grow" revenue. You don't exist a new service. You don't die germs.

You use transitive verbs when you want to direct them at an object.

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mikesickler
"Grow" is both transitive and intransitive.

