"(Shopify) Fourth-Quarter Revenue Grows 71% Year on Year Fourth-Quarter ... to $128.9 million, driven primarily by the growth of Gross Merchandise ..." "Fourth-Quarter Gross Profit Grows 78% Year on Year" [1]
Shopify custom storefronts are growing explosively.
There is nothing in EBay's financial releases which indicates they are doing this well in this area, moreover, the non-Ebay branded interfaces are somewhat of inconsistent with their core business model.
Shopify is SaaS product that's like Wix + Stripe, it's growth is driven by the personality cults that made use of Facebook ad networks to convince others that they can make millions dropshipping or printing tshirts.
$128.9MM Q4 is ~$500-$600MM annum. At $30/mo that's maybe 1 million paid users.
$637MM was eBay's marketing budget for one quarter.
The only thing going for Shopify right now is the huge margins and cash accumulation they're doing. Which is pretty fantastic, and they're smart enough to know how precarious that position can be so they then reinvest back into other things, like a POS in an already very crowded POS market.
eBay in the beginning was also doing gangbuster numbers. Then they too invested that money into things and grew into a major corporation.
And that's the whole point. Those bets either pan out or they don't.
And when they don't it completely obliterates the margins on a long enough time line.
$5 Billion dollar valuation, 70% YOY growth, $580M sales last year, will blow past $1B in sales soon - that's 'crushing it'.
FYI those are market, i.e. public valuations, not fantasy VC hype valuations.
"At $30/mo that's maybe 1 million paid users."
1M users at $30 a month is spectacular at that rate of growth. (Though thats not actually how their revenue model works entirely)
... and they just secured the government of Ontario's Marijuana program worth billions.
While 'Dropbox', a YC darling: "Dropbox is filing for a $500 million IPO—but also saying it may never be profitable" [1]
"(Shopify) it's growth is driven by the personality cults that made use of Facebook ad networks to convince others that they can make millions dropshipping or printing tshirts."
No, there is quite a lot cost to 'switch over' to another platform, even for small companies, and they have tremendous buy in.
Shopify is basically sucking in the massive long tail and mid-market of companies who don't want to handle so many of those issues - while EBay and Amazon have failed to do that well.
They are in a spectacular position, and if they continue on this trajectory for a couple of years they will not only blow past Dropbox, they will probably eventually leap frog Stripe once the later's actual numbers start to come public.
If anything, YC darlings Stripe and Dropbox are in precarious positions, because both are heavily commoditized markets, and neither of them have a distinct competitive advantage.
Shopify custom storefronts are growing explosively.
There is nothing in EBay's financial releases which indicates they are doing this well in this area, moreover, the non-Ebay branded interfaces are somewhat of inconsistent with their core business model.
[1] https://www.shopify.com/press/releases/shopify-announces-fou...