Shopify President Finkelstein on E-Commerce in Metaverse

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein speaks with Emily Chang about post-pandemic trends in e-commerce, how the company can be a way for merchants to work around the supply chain crunch, and what the future of shopping online – and in the metaverse – might look like.
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OK Harley it had to happen at some point but why did it happen
now. Well look I think just let’s just level set here for a

second I think we are sort of in this new normal post pandemic.
But I don’t think there’s anything average about what Shopify

and merchants are building. I think that 2020 will forever have
an asterisk by it in history books. But as things begin to

settle into sort of this new post pandemic trend our merchants
and shop they’re growing at an extraordinary speed. Emily it

took us 15 years for the merch our merchants to get to two
hundred billion dollars of GMV filled GMV and just 16 months

double that GMV was up 35 percent for the quarter 41 billion.
When you look at revenue we hit one point one billion in revenue

up 46 percent. So what we are seeing is more merchants come into
Shopify. They’re launching more merch and getting larger on

Shopify and they’re taking more of our services. And I think
what is becoming clear in this new world is that we are really

building the essential Internet infrastructure for commerce and
we expect Q4 to grow substantially faster than the retail sector

overall. OK. How is the supply chain issue challenges that seem
to be smiling everyone. How. How is that affecting Shopify and

all of the businesses that rely on you. Yeah. So we did not see
a material impact from supply chain. We saw that inventory

levels and delivery times had not changed materially from Q3
last year to this year. What I would also say is on the supply

chain it seems like every single year the small businesses and
the merchants that you Shopify they seem to always face these

new challenges whether they’re you know things like the pandemic
or a supply chain in this case. And what we noticed is that our

merchants are really really good at being resilient.
We also have a very diversified merchant base across verticals

geographies channels and many of those soaps source locally and
have room in their margins to absorb some of these shocks. You

have to sort of remember that most of the merchants on Shopify
they use the direct to consumer model which we think is going to

be the mainstay in retail. They’re not like these big box
retailers operating on razor thin margins. And so when you

combine the fact that a lot of them do have a direct
relationship with the end consumer. A lot of the make their own

products.
We have not seen a major slowdown. Now that being said if supply

chain does become a long term issue I think merchants will need
Shopify more than ever before to find efficiencies to go direct.

I’d mentioned on the call earlier today that we saw brands like
Loxley Tan and Mujib and Spanx and Dockers and Tupperware and

FTD 100 year old flower company all signed up for Shopify this
past quarter. We’re seeing them go direct more in a way they

haven’t they haven’t done in the past.
Shopify is a huge partner of Facebook now. Mehta What do you

think. What do you think of the new name the Metaverse Future
and how influential will Metta be in the future of commerce.

Look Facebook has been an amazing partner to us. I actually kind
of like the new name. I think I know there’s some people are

unsure about it. I think it’s a great name I think and it better
articulates what they’re at least what I saw today and their

developer conference what what they’re planning.
The key for us though is that we do.

We believe that the future of retail is going to be retail
everywhere. We think it’s going to be online offline. We

announced a partnership a week ago with Spotify. Now we’re
embedding commerce right into Spotify. So artists who are also

entrepreneurs can sell more easily. We’ve a partnership with
tech talk but when Facebook launched Messenger we were the

launch partner for commerce for the launch partner for Instagram
Commerce. And on Facebook we’re now putting Shopify pay into

Facebook for both shot by merchant and non Shopify merchants. So
if the metaverse is a place where shopping happens and commerce

happens we’re really fortunate that Facebook has has been
incredibly he’s been a great partner for us over the years and

we suspect we will be the launch partner for commerce inside of
Facebook.