This analysis of the business model that underpins the success of Shopify, the ecommerce software-as-a-service business, seeks to show that core to the business model is the idea that success comes from helping their customers be successful by providing digital products that seek to solve the challenges and meet the needs of modern retail businesses selling on the web. All aspects of Shopify’s business model are designed to acquire and retain high quality small to medium retail businesses as customers who are serious about building successful ecommerce businesses, and supporting them to succeed. This strategic approach could be summed up with the phrase, ‘your success is our success’.
Shopify started life as a single ecommerce store selling snowboards, and was built on the new (in 2004) open source software framework called Ruby on Rails. With 78% of the internet running on open source software (Vaughan-Nichols, 2015), contributing to the development of Ruby on Rails software and its community helped support the Canadain tech start-up ecommerce software-as-a-service platform that became Shopify in 2006 to develop a platform that could grow over the coming decades. The business raised $7m in 2010 and $15m in 2011 in funding, and by 2017 Shopify was hosting “over 325,000 shops for individual sellers and internet giants like Google and Tesla” (Product Habits, 2017), and by 2019 had expanded to 1,000,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries (Shopify, 2019).
The term ‘business model’ requires definition before an analysis can be undertaken. A business model can be described as "a conceptual tool containing a set of objects, concepts and their relationships with the objective to express the business logic of a specific firm. Therefore we must consider which concepts and relationships allow a simplified description and representation of what value is provided to customers, how this is done and with which financial consequences." (Osterwalder et al, 2005).
Understanding business models is particularly important for businesses that rely on technology to deliver value as how transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1989) and innovation are incorporated into the model will greatly impact its chances of success. Over time, the rate of innovation in any given technology falls (Abernathy & Utterback, 1978), and so technology becomes easier to use at scale so reducing the transaction costs, which increases margin, unless and until a competitor product steals market share through new innovation that better meets the customer needs. The objective of the business model of a technology company then, is to deliver maximum value to customers to increase revenue whilst reducing transaction costs to increase margin, and continually innovating to stave off competitors in order to maintain or increase market share.
With this understanding of a business model we are able to use the business model framework (Rayna & Struikova, 2016) to analyse Shopify’s business model to understand if it meets the objectives above.
Shopify provides hosted ecommerce solutions to enable retailers to quickly and easily launch an online business and make that business a success. Developing and maintaining the software-as-a-service platform that enables its customers to set up and run online stores is Shopfy’s core competency.
Shopify’s key resources include: