Shopify Q2 2021 Results - Growth And Questions

SaaS
Written By Rick Watson

Shopify released its Q2 2021 results in late July 2021. Here are a few observations:

  1. Strong subscription growth is good for them (even relative to merchant solutions (mostly payments)). Reporting good retention, and likely there is reason to believe it with MRR and other metrics continued strong.

  2. Important question for me: Is the Shop app is the “Prime” of Shopify? - Shop supports in-app purchases (118M registered users) 23M MAUs I think they view this as a key strategic asset, and almost as important a crown jewel as their developer ecosystem itself. If this can get to over 10% of merchant GMV, you can essentially never leave Shopify.

  3. Not going to make a full-stack payments competitor. Hard to meet Paypal at their strength. Best when integrated to Shopify, compete on their own turf.

  4. I am somewhat concerned by Shopify’s ability to grow in all these new areas. R&D is not quite growing fast enough. R&D spending is 16% of revenue previously 19%. I’d like to see that number north of 20% for the growth phase that they are in.

  5. No mention of B2B. What is the future here? Do they even view this as a big opportunity?

Rick Watson

Rick Watson founded RMW Commerce Consulting after spending 20+ years as a technology entrepreneur and operator exclusively in the eCommerce industry with companies like ChannelAdvisor, BarnesandNoble.com, Merchantry, and Pitney Bowes.

Watson’s work today is centered on supporting investors and management teams incubating and growing direct-to-consumer businesses. Most recently, in partnership with WHP Global, Rick was a critical resource in architecting the WHP+ platform, a new turnkey direct to consumer digital e-commerce platform that powers AnneKlein.com and JosephAbboud.com.

Watson also hosts a weekly podcast, Watson Weekly, where he shares an unbiased, unfiltered expert take on the retail sector’s biggest players.

In the past year alone, Rick has spoken at many in-person and virtual events as well as podcasts on topics ranging from retail/ecom to supply chain/logistics and even digital grocery including CommerceNext IRL, ASCM Connect, and Retail Innovation Conference.

https://www.rmwcommerce.com/
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