But you'd never search for products on the e-commerce company's website. Instead, the company is a backend for entrepreneurs to build their own shopping website.The approach to building an e-commerce empire is quite different from Amazon, Ebay, or other online giants, where users can easily search for what they want.
And then we've been quite vocal over the last couple of years about internationalizing Shopify so that it's not just for English speaking entrepreneurs, but for entrepreneurs all around the world.
That is a huge advantage for sellers because you know, then they're not losing on every single sale. We want to empower people to grow their business in a very fruitful and meaningful way and that's why we've gone with a monthly subscription revenue model.Does that monthly fee change based on how many sales you're driving or anything like that?depending on what the needs are for your business.
I think Amazon plays a very unique role in helping them acquire customers, but it doesn't help them acquire relationships and it doesn't help them grow their business in that same meaningful way. I don't know if I've given them repeat business or not, but the businesses that I'm buying for online, tend to be the direct to consumer experiences. I do know who they are and I do know their story and I do like feeling special.REUTERS/Chris Wattie
We want to be the enablers. We want to be the people that are powering the next way of great entrepreneurs. And in the process of doing that, I think we feel very comfortable on how things net out at the end of the day. So, I think it's just a matter of philosophy and I think it's just a matter of what the approaches and on what people's appetites are. Our approach and our appetite is very uniquely entrepreneurs first.
So, we want to go and build a relationship with Amazon, build relationships with Walmart and eBay and these other marketplaces because we believe that our entrepreneurs should be leveraging them to the best of their ability — the same way we've gone and built those relationships with Facebook and Google.
And when I joined Shopify some time ago, it feels like a million years ago, we were a small company and we had a lot fewer merchants and we had just explosive growth over the last three or four years.The billionaire cofounder of Shopify says he intentionally slowed the company's growth — and it was the key to managing the 'crushing' stress of being a CEO