Shopify-Fortune

Thought I would post a few interesting points from an article about Shopify that I read in Fortune. Not a particularly enlightening piece I think for those on this feed that follow the company. But, a couple of snippets anyway. I am just going to summarize.

  1. Company is making a big commitment to AI and machine learning. Through tracking all the merchants on its sight, it feels that it will be able to learn what makes a company succeed and grow. It will use this insight to make recommendations to its merchants.

Not a particularly surprising revelation. But, good to hear they are looking to expand their service and increase value to their merchants.

  1. Approx. 10 million small and medium size merchants across their current coverage universe. They have penetrated only about 4%.

  2. Getting into funding for some of its merchants.

This bares watching. Companies can get themselves into trouble with financing arms.

Treepak

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Treepak, when I read your comment, I thought at first that they were going to use machine learning in their router software (firmware) to make it “smarter.” This makes sense to me, and they can test this internally and with beta testers before they go live with it.

I’m not sure what I think of using machine learning to work with merchants. I don’t really know enough about it yet, either - how they plan to do it, and what machine learning is good for in general.

Ed
I assume the idea is that since the clientele is primarily small/medium business, Shopify will have more resources than their clientele to extract useful information from clientele-end customer buying patterns. By interpreting this data for its clientele, it is providing value add. They would be acting as consultant in addition to the services they already provide. They increase the clientele’ sales and they get a piece of that increase.

Sorry, I was reading too many threads on Ubiquiti, and forgot that this one was about Shopify! No routers manufactured here…