Shopify Sales Soar In Q4

Cloud-based, multichannel commerce platform for SMBs Shopify yesterday announced strong Q4 and FY 2016 financial results.

Shopify brought in $130.4 million in total revenue in Q4, up 86 percent year on year. In the same period, Shopify’s revenue for its Subscription Solutions segment grew 63 percent to reach $56.4 million.

Shopify now hosts over 375,000 merchants on its eCommerce platform, with over 133,000 net new merchants selling on Shopify in 2016.

Merchant Solutions revenue grew a whopping 108 percent to $74 million, driven primarily by the growth of gross merchandise volume (GMV), the company said. GMV per merchant grew 25 percent year on year in 2016. Likewise, average revenue per user rose 15 percent to $1,243 in 2016.

“Our work at Shopify is to help entrepreneurs thrive in a space that’s changing all the time, and we did our job especially well this past holiday season,” said Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO of Shopify. “That eight of our 10 top sellers over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend were merchants that had upgraded from lower-priced plans reminds us that today’s startups become tomorrow’s superstars.”

For the year, revenue grew 90 percent to $389.3 million, with Subscription Solutions revenue growing 68 percent to contribute $188.6 million across 2016. Again, Merchant Solutions revenue was the star growth sector of the year, up 115 percent to $200.7 million in 2016. GMV for 2016 hit $15.4 billion, up 99 percent over 2015.

In addition to bringing on new merchants in 2016, Shopify has also integrated a number of new sales channels for merchants to use, like Facebook Messenger and Amazon. During the year, Shopify also launched Shopify Capital, providing merchants working capital for growth, along with Apple Pay for the web. By the end of 2016, over 150,000 of Shopify’s merchants offered Apple Pay at checkout.

Looking forward, Shopify expects revenues to hit in the range of $120 million to $122 million in the first quarter of 2017. For the full year of 2017, Shopify projects revenues in the range of $580 million to $600 million.