Shopify focuses on B2B to restore momentum

• Shopify unveils new tools to compete with Amazon and recover its fortunes.
• The Canadian-based company’s shares plunged 75% last year, wiping out more than $130bn in market value.
• It is targeting a “huge untapped market” for business-to-business transactions.

Shopify is targeting a “huge untapped market” for business-to-business transactions as it unveils new tools to compete with Amazon and recover its fortunes following a severe stock sell-off.

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Shopify claimed on Wednesday that its push into business-to-business sales would unleash prospects “multiple times bigger” than its current strategy. The solutions are designed to make it simpler for merchants to sell in bulk and to link with enterprise resource planning software used by businesses to manage procurement.

“It is an opportunity for us to expand our [total addressable market],” Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, told the Financial Times. “Not just go after direct-to-consumer businesses, big and small, but to now go after wholesale business, which is a huge untapped market.”

Shopify, an Ottawa-based provider of software and services for independent retailers, was eager to announce growth opportunities following a year in which its shares plunged 75%, wiping out more than $130bn in market value and erasing the gains it made as one of the largest beneficiaries of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Its collapse has been more severe than ecommerce competitors like Amazon. Inflation, supply chain insecurity, and the impact of Apple’s privacy restrictions on targeted advertising have had a negative impact on direct-to-consumer firms who utilise Shopify, according to ecommerce data analyst PipeCandy. In the past six months, traffic growth for DTC decreased 18 percent.