Shopify Plus Stats - Deep Dive - Part 1

Remember, I told in the?last week's newsletter?that we need to study Shopify Plus deeply to understand the medium-term outlook for Shopify? Shrikanth, my co-founder, did just that. But we both are travelling and could manage just 50% of what we planned to get to. So here is part 1 of our deep dive.

• There are about 17230 Shopify Plus merchants – both active and inactive.
• Shopify claims 14000 merchants use Shopify Plus. We could only validate 10250 to be active. Based on our past experience, Shopify counts installed base, which for the purpose of most analyses is irrelevant and tends to inflate the user base count.
• Here's the catch – 7500 of 10250 are very small websites (website ranking of over 1M, indicating very little economic activity). That is 73% of the active Shopify Plus user base or 50% of their installed base.
• Of the remaining 2750 Shopify Plus users, nearly 250 of them are B2C services companies (Education, Finance, Law, etc.)
• Less than 500 new Shopify Plus users were detected between 2020 and today.

I am tempted to draw conclusions but I will reserve it for part 2.?

What I do notice is that the merchant count growth rate for Shopify Plus is 20% (give or take) between the onset of the pandemic and now. The pandemic seems to have resulted in increased eCommerce adoption but enterprise usage has had lacklustre growth so far.

There are two other dynamics we will explore next week:

1. A lot of scaled up websites don't switch from Shopify to Shopify Plus. Why?
2. A good chunk of the merchants seem to use both Shopify and Magento. Why?

With that, I am wrapping up this week's?memo. See you next weekend.