Harley Finkelstein — Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, the Future of Retail, and More

With Prime, there were a couple of things. One of our board members, Bing Gordon, always wanted us to have a loyalty program. We were always wondering, “What could a loyalty program be?” A junior software engineer came up with this idea that we could offer people kind of an all-you-can-eat buffet of fast, free shipping. The finance team went and mo

People always accused us of selling dollar bills for ninety cents, and said, “Look, anybody can do that and grow revenue.” That’s not what we were doing. We always had positive gross margins. It’s a fixed-cost business. What I could see from the internal metrics was that at a certain volume level, we would cover our fixed costs and the company woul

“There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,”