Tech stock laggard Shopify is running low on ideas. In recent weeks the Canadian ecommerce company has split its stock, extended a tie-up with buy now, pay later company Affirm, pushed into business-to-business sales and partnered with Twitter to launch a new sales channel. But nothing has changed the post-pandemic shift in consumer shopping habits.
In the first quarter of 2022, US online sales topped $231bn, according to Department of Commerce data. That is 14 per cent of total sales. Compare that with the first quarter of the previous year when ecommerce accounted for close to 17 per cent of the total.
Shopify’s pandemic-related growth spurt has come to an end. In 2020 and 2021 it signed big deals with Walmart and Meta. Its payment option was added to TikTok too. Last year, it reached a $212bn market value and was briefly Canada’s most valuable public company. Since then its share price has fallen 80 per cent.