Shopify

They sold the logistics business to Flexport at a massive loss after spending billions building it out, and now they want credit for margin improvement. That capital destruction should weigh on how we think about management's capital allocation judgment going forward.

Shopify's merchant solutions revenue is quietly becoming the real story here. Payments, capital, shipping, and balance are all compounding together and creating a flywheel where merchants genuinely can't leave without ripping out their entire financial infrastructure. The take rate expansion over the last six quarters has been consistent and I think the market still isn't pricing in how sticky this gets.

Valuation is still the problem I can't get past. Even after the multiple compression from the 2021 highs, you're paying somewhere around 10-11x forward revenue for a company growing at 20-25% in a macro environment where consumer discretionary spending is under pressure. The GMV growth is directly tied to whether merchants are selling things, and that's not guaranteed.

The Shopify Audiences product for ad targeting is an underrated piece of the puzzle. They're using aggregate purchase data across their merchant network to build lookalike audiences for Meta and Google ads, which helps merchants improve ROAS. No other e-commerce platform has the data density to offer something like this.

Serious question for people who follow the competitive landscape closely — how much of a threat is WooCommerce and headless commerce setups to Shopify's SMB base at this point? I keep seeing devs on forums talking about moving clients off Shopify to avoid the transaction fees.

It's interesting that Shopify's international revenue growth is consistently outpacing North America now. They've been pushing hard in Europe and APAC with localized payment methods through their Markets product, and the GMV numbers from outside the US are starting to matter at the consolidated level.

Shopify announced expanded integrations with YouTube Shopping, allowing merchants to tag products directly in live streams and Shorts. This builds on existing partnerships with TikTok Shop and Instagram and positions Shopify as the back-end infrastructure layer for social commerce regardless of which platform wins consumer attention.

Shopify's move upmarket with Shopify Plus is underappreciated. They now count brands like Kylie Cosmetics, Allbirds, and Gymshark as Plus merchants, and the average revenue per Plus merchant is multiples of standard plans. Enterprise was supposed to be Salesforce and Adobe Commerce's moat and Shopify is just walking right in.