Shopify update on Black Friday

https://www.shopify.com/press/news/shopify-merchants-achieve…

No news yet on the Cyber Monday or the combined 4 day mega event but here’s the read out for Black Friday…

Black Friday continues to be one of the most important days of the year for Shopify’s more than 600,000 merchants, and 2018 was a record-breaking year for North America’s busiest shopping day across stores on our platform.

Total sales across Shopify stores exceeded $573 million USD for this year’s Black Friday alone, and sales had surpassed Shopify’s 2017 full-day total by 2:30 PM EST. At peak, Black Friday sales volume was over $870,000 USD per minute, and the average price for a single cart order was $86.37 USD…

As a side anecdote, I placed an order for some wine at a wine merchant online yesterday (please don’t judge), during their cyber Monday sale (that was in full swing all over Singapore). The website is a Shopify powered site that I had used previously with a credit card and the ordering couldn’t be easier. I didn’t even have to log in and leaving aside the add to cart clicks as I was browsing and shopping, the actual purchase/check out was literally 1 click (ONE). (Made Amazon and eBay feel like DOS programming by comparison).

The Shopify powered online purchasing experience has now beaten the Singapore IRAS tax website for the most simple execution I have ever experienced. I thought the Singapore IRAS site was doing well with a 4 click online tax return process to pay your 14% taxes, a year in arrears, by instalments. (I wouldn’t be surprised to know that Singapore IRAS is powered by Shopify). Come to think of it - Shopify should offer the IRS their services to simplify the US tax reporting process (for a small fee for Shopify plus of course). I feel another email to Tobias and investor relations coming on!

A

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“Black Friday sales volume was over $870,000 USD per minute”
Sounds good but wasn’t the peak over $1M per minute last year?
Something like that as far as I remember, but now Black Friday seems to start on Thanksgiving (just like the Christmas decorations go up earlier each year) and goes on to Cyber Monday and possibly beyond then it’s difficult to tell whether Shopify grew revenues significantly over 2017.
I hope they did!
Cheers, PB.

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Hi PB,

Sounds good but wasn’t the peak over $1M per minute last year?

Now that is a good memory. But the $1M per minute was comparing over 4 days where the article Ant pointed to was over Black Friday. So I saw where they are saying that cyber Monday was the biggest ever in the U.S.

Merchants using Shopify’s platform achieved their biggest holiday season yet, with the four days comprising the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend accounting for $1 billion of GMV with a peak of $1 million of orders processed per minute.

https://seekingalpha.com/pr/17075654-shopify-announces-fourt…

Andy

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Well there are 2 sources. At first I thought that there was a possible splicing of 2 news flashes - the bfcm total from one and the peak from the other
(Both available here).

https://www.shopify.com/press/news

But if you look at the final bfcm news release from Shopify where it talks about the bfcm total - even tho the text doesn’t mention the peak rate, there’s a graphic in there that does and it’s still the 870k rate…

https://www.shopify.com/press/news/bfcm-2018

Ant

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