Shopify, Amazon Retail Rivalry Heats Up With Covid-Sparked Online Shopping Boom – Bloomberg

Last February e-commerce company Shopify Inc. replaced the Ottawa, Canada dateline that began its press releases and earnings reports with a strange new one: Internet, Everywhere. The geographical shift came at the insistence of Shopifys founder and chief executive officer, Tobi Ltke, who tends to view such matters through the prism of cold, hard logic. In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, hed made the early, seemingly rash decision to terminate the leases on Shopifys offices in Ottawa and six other cities, declaring that his entire 7,000-person workforce would remain virtualforever. Shopify, he concluded, was now omnipresent, located with its employees and customers in the digital ether. His senior execs were perplexed at the strange phrasing, but they knew better than to argue.

The dateline thing may be a bit pompous and a little too cute, but after an almost two-year run thats turned the quiet enterprise-tech company into a global e-commerce power, Ltke has earned some creative license. Since he started Shopify 15 years ago, the company has sold software that allows about 2 million merchants worldwide to run websitesfree from the complicated embrace of Shopifys chief rival, Amazon.com Inc. For $30 to $2,000 a month, Shopify offers sellers more than a dozen services to run an online store, from the actual e-commerce website to inventory management to payment processing.

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Shopify, Amazon Retail Rivalry Heats Up With Covid-Sparked Online Shopping Boom - Bloomberg