Drinking from the Firehose | Alex Taussig, Lightspeed | Substack

Shopify’s big strategic question is how it can build network effects. It wants to sell higher-margin products to merchants for the money, but it might be more important in the long term that those products build a network, pull more merchants and users into the system, and make the core business more sticky. Shop Pay is one building block, but an a... See more

While allowing advertising to dictate the buy box was immensely effective at increasing their take rate (anyone who believes this is actually advertising is confused — Amazon is just increasing their take rate and calling this dynamic advertising), this may end up being a very profitable short term decision that creates significant long term pain. ... See more

Shopify has come from nowhere (well, Canada) to over $100bn of GMV in 2020