Shopify Statistics, Revenue and Usage Figures 2024

Looking at the top Shopify statistics is an excellent way to determine just how powerful this platform really is.

Although the number of ecommerce platforms has increased drastically over recent years, Shopify has remained one of the most popular, and well-known names in the industry.

In this article, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about Shopify’s revenue, market reach, growth, usage, and more.

By the time you’re done reading you should have a clear understanding of what makes Shopify so successful, and how far it’s come.

We’ll also aim to keep this article up to date as the ecommerce landscape and Shopify continues to evolve, providing you with the current figures and insights.

Let’s dive in.

What is Shopify? Key Facts and Insights

Let’s start with some basic facts about Shopify as an ecommerce tool. Founded in 2006, Shopify is a Canadian ecommerce company that offers would-be merchants everything they need to sell offline, and online.

Not only can you use Shopify to create your own custom ecommerce store, but the platform also supports multi-channel selling, making it easy to increase your revenue.

Interestingly, Shopify initially started life as a very niche service, designed for selling snowboarding equipment on the web.

However, it rapidly evolved into a complete, all-in-one ecommerce platform, offering a variety of features, such as payment gateways like Shopify Payments: Shopify POS for point of sale solutions, and international sales tools like Shopify Markets.

Shopify also offers email marketing tools (Shopify Email), tax calculation and VAT calculation tools, shipping solutions, and integrations with social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, as well as links to Amazon, Ebay, and more.

Quick facts:

Shopify has generated over $700 billion in total sales since the platform was released in 2006. As of 2021, the company had also contributed more than $319 billion to global economic activity, making the company a major part of the online economy. (Source: Shopify)
Currently, around 4,248,567 live websites are built with the Shopify platform. The total number of Shopify customers as of 2023 (including companies that used the platform previously) is 6,746,209. (Source: BuiltWith)
Shopify is currently used by online sellers in more than 175 countries worldwide. Approximately 63% of the stores using Shopify belong to owners in the US. However, Shopify has a massive presence worldwide. (Source: Shopify)
At the end of 2022, Shopify’s gross merchandise volume (GMV) increased by 13% to $61.0 billion, up 17% on a consistent currency basis. Total revenue also increased 26% to $1.7 billion compared to the prior year in Q4 of 2022. (Source: Shopify)
Shopify ranks number 4 among the top 5 platforms for ecommerce selling worldwide, following behind WooCommerce, Squarespace, and Woo Themes. The platform has a market share of around 11% currently. (Source: Yaguara)
Shopify now has around 9,600 employees after laying off about 20% of its workforce in the middle of 2023. The company announced it was reducing its staff number to refocus its company in the main mission of driving ecommerce growth. (Source: CTV News)

Shopify Revenue Statistics: How Does Shopify Make Money?

Shopify isn’t just a platform that drives revenue opportunities for business leaders, it’s also a highly profitable venture itself.

The company makes money in a variety of ways. First, Shopify charges users either an annual or monthly fee for subscription plans to the platform. Secondly, Shopify also offers a variety of optional ecommerce features and services to users.

According to Shopify’s earning report from the first quarter of 2023, the company earns around 25% of its total revenue from subscriptions.

At the end of 2023 Q1, Shopify’s total subscription revenue was $382 million, an increase of 11% from the previous year.

Merchant solutions, which covers the revenue earned from the sale of ecommerce tools and services, such as currency conversion tools, shipping, and payment services, increased 31% compared to the previous year in 2023, to approximately $1.1 billion.

Shopify’s earning report from Q1 in 2023 also shows:

Total revenue increased in 2023 by 25%, to a value of $1.5 billion compared to the year prior, an increase of 27% in constant currency.
Monthly recurring revenue increased 10% in Q1 of 2023, to $116 million. These gains were achieved by more merchants converting to full-priced subscription plans after testing Shopify using trial solutions.
Shopify Plus contributed to $39 million, or around 34% of the MRR, compared to around 30% of MRR in 2022. Over 5,300 businesses now use Shopify Plus.
Gross profit increased 12% to $717 million compared to the previous year. This was driven by a higher mix of revenue from merchant solutions such as Shopify Payments.
Over two thirds of Shopify’s revenue (75% of earnings overall) was accredited to transaction fees, merchant services, and payment processing fees, earning the company around $1.126 billion in the first quarter of 2023 – an increase of 31% from the previous year.

According to Macrotrends.net, Shopify annual and quarterly revenue has significantly grown year after year for some time. In 2020, the total Shopify annual revenue was around $2.929 billion, an increase of 85.36% from 2019.

This revenue increased every year following up to the first quarter of 2023. Though the revenue reported in 2023 is only $1.058 billion currently, this only accounts for a single portion of the year.

Shopify Stock Insights and Business Structure

At the time of writing, the Shopify market cap from an investment perspective is around $82.74 billion. This makes Shopify the 189^th most valuable company by market cap worldwide, even at a time of economic downturn.

Shopify shares are valued at around $59.65 per year, according to Google. This is a significant increase since Shopify’s first IPO in 2015.

When Shopify entered the investment market for the first time in 2015, “SHOP” shares were offered to the public at a price of $17 per share on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and New York Stock Exchange.

In November 2021, Shopify stock prices achieved an all-time high of $169 per share.

As a crucial player in the ecommerce world today, Shopify is one of the top ecommerce platform providers for many of the top 1 million sites only.

It currently supports 27% of the top million ecommerce stores through regular Shopify and Shopify Plus subscriptions. Shopify’s biggest rival, WooCommerce, supports around 23% of this market.

The structure of Shopify as a business has also evolved over the years. In 2006, the company was launched by three founders, Daniel Wienand, Tobius Lutke, and Scott Lake, all of which wanted to create their own unique ecommerce platform for a snowboarding brand.

Now, Shopify is a publicly traded company, primarily owned by shareholders. Over 66% of these investors are institutional groups such as Bailie Gifford (5.94%) and Morgan Stanley (5.59%).

Around 0.19% of shares are held by company insiders, and Tobias Lutke owns around 6% of the brand.

Lutke himself is valued at around $5.3 billion, and possesses a 40% voting stake in the company, through a founder share structure established by the company in 2022.

Alongside the 9,200 staff working for the company, Shopify supports over 700,000 Shopify partners, app developers, and designers.

These partners have generated around $12.5 billion in revenue for Shopify. Additionally, the company has created around 3.6 million jobs worldwide.

Shopify Usage Statistics and Demographics

Over 6.7 million stores have been created using the Shopify platform since its inception, according to Builtwith.com, and more than 4.2 million stores are still active today.

Interestingly, Shopify has achieved substantial growth in the last few years, thanks in large part to the influence of the COVID pandemic on the ecommerce landscape.

Since 2020, Shopify store numbers have increased by more than 200%, and 2.5 million new stores have been developed.

These stores are situated in more than 175 countries worldwide, with the majority positioned in the US. Builtwith.com estimates more than 2.675 million stores exist in the US. Other popular regions for Shopify include:

The United Kingdom: 184,657 stores
Australia: 133,423 stores
Brazil: 117,843 stores
Germany: 105,976 stores
Canada: 102,141 stores

The Motley fool found US Shopify stores generated a little over 10% of all US ecommerce sales in 2021. Shopify also has a strong presence in Latin America and Europe.

Mexico, Chile and Brazil are home to a large number of Shopify stores, and 11 of Shopify’s top 20 countries are positioned in Europe.

Expanding partnerships with aCommerce has also helped Shopify to branch into the Asia-Pacific market in the last few years.

While the Shopify platform is only used by 7,735 stores in China at present (the world’s largest ecommerce market, worth $3.3 trillion), Shopify is investing in strategies to enter the Chinese market.

In 2022, it launched a partnership with JD.com, an Alibaba competitor.

As a highly flexible solution for Ecommerce, Shopify appeals to businesses of all sizes, from small boutiques to celebrity-led brands. Some of the best-known brands using Shopify include:

Kylie Cosmetics, operated by Kylie and Kriss Jenner using Shopify Plus
Eyewear by David Beckham and the Victoria Beckham stores
Adele’s merchandise store for British customers
Gym Shark, Decathlon, Fitbit, and the LA Lakers

By revenue, some of the top most successful Shopify stores, according to Yahoo Finance include:

KKW Beauty (Value: $1 billion)
Kylie cosmetics (Value: $1.2 billion)
Gymshark (Value: $1.3 billion)
Fitbit (Value: $2.1 billion)
Penguin Books (Value: $3.67 billion)
Hyatt Hotels (Value: $8.35 billion)
Red Bull (Value: $12 billion)
Whole Foods Market (Value: $13.7 billion)
Lindt & Spruengli (Value: $21.9 billion)
Kraft Heinz (Value: $49.7 billion)
Nestle (Value: $290.44 billion)
Sephora (Value: $410 billion)
Tesla (Value: $690.99 billion)

Shopify ROI: Conversion Rates for Shopify Stores

Clearly, Shopify earns a significant income as one of the biggest ecommerce platform solutions in the world. However, it also offers exceptional opportunities for financial growth to the businesses it serves. Notably, building a lucrative presence in the ecommerce world is difficult.

While the global ecommerce market is expected to grow to a value of $7.4 billion by 2025, only around 10% of ecommerce businesses achieve success.

According to ecommerce analysts, a conversion rate of 3% is usually an indicator of a “successful” online store. However, the average conversion rate for Shopify stores is around 1.4%.

This might seem poor, but there’s still significant opportunities for Shopify stores to thrive.

According to Littledata.io, the top 10% of all Shopify stores – those heavily invested in marketing, branding, and generating sales, achieve an average conversion rate of around 4.7%. Littledata.io also found:

The highest conversion rate seen on Shopify is approximately 8%.
The top 20% of Shopify’s online store users have conversion rates of over 3.2%
The lowest-performing 20% of Shopify stores have a conversion rate of around 0.4%
On mobile devices, Shopify stores have an average conversion rate of around 1.2%
On mobile devices, the top 10% and 20% of all Shopify stores have a conversion rate of around 2.7% and 3.9% respectively.

In general, success rates for ecommerce websites usually fall around 10%. This means about 9 out of 10 of every business created in the ecommerce world don’t deliver consistent revenue.

Indeed, some studies show that the majority of online stores fail within the first 4 months of online trading.

Although it’s difficult to get an exact picture of the success rate of every Shopify store, experts believe around 5 to 10% of all Shopify sites are successful.

Additionally, while all ecommerce stores do face some challenges succeeding online, more than $700 billion in sales have been made through Shopify sites over the years.

A report in 2019 found that during that year, Shopify store owners actually achieved a higher increase in sales than most ecommerce store owners in general.

Compared to the global ecommerce market, which grew at a rate of 21%, Shopify stores saw a 50% sales increase in 2019.

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Additionally, Shopify is home to some of the most successful companies in the world, including:

Colourpop.com
Jefreestarcosmetics.com
Fashionnova.com
Reddressboutique.com
Gymshark.com
Cupshe.com
Omaze.com
MNML.LA
Yeezysupply.com
Kith.com

It’s also worth noting that over 50% of Shopify stores see regular repeat purchases from Shopify customers.

More than half of all consumers on Shopify have purchased from the same store twice. This is crucial when we consider that the majority of a company’s revenue often comes from repeat buyers and loyal clients.

What’s more, Shopify customers do make decent purchases on average. In one report during 2020, researchers found the top 10% of the best-performing stores on Shopify earned around $226 in revenue per customer.

While this only accounts for a fraction of Shopify sellers, the majority still earned an average of $72 per customer.

Shopify Plus Statistics: How many People Use Shopify Plus?

As mentioned above, one of the main ways Shopify earns revenue in the ecommerce world, is by selling subscription-based access to its software.

Shopify merchants using “Shopify Plus” are generally those with the highest sales numbers, and biggest business structures.

While Shopify plus stores are a significant source of income for Shopify, the Plus subscription isn’t ideal for everyone.

Subscription prices for Shopify Plus start at $2300 per month, making the pricing in accessible for smaller businesses.

However, Shopify Plus customers do get access to a host of extra features, such as additional API calls, customizable checkouts, and unlimited user accounts.

According to BuiltWith, of all the stores Shopify Powers, around 41,137 have been created with Shopify Plus. Around 32,028 of those stores are still active today.

The majority of all Shopify Plus stores belong to retailers in the United States (19,419), while the second biggest market is the United Kingdom, with 2,020 live Shopify Plus sites.

Notably, while the number of Shopify Plus stores may seem low, ecommerce statistics show these stores account for about 5% of the top 1 million websites online.

Furthermore, Shopify’s own reports indicate Shopify Plus stores were responsible for about 34% of the company’s monthly recurring revenue during the first quarter of 2023.

Shopify Payments and Shopify App Statistics

While Shopify earns a portion of its income through sales of subscriptions to online businesses, a significant portion of the company’s income comes from other merchant services.

Sales of apps, Shopify themes, and Shopify’s payment service have increased drastically year-over-year.

Builtwith found over 1.5 million Shopify merchants use the ecommerce platform’s integrated payment solution to manage online sales.

Shopify’s most recent earnings report also found the total Gross Merchandise Volume processed using Shopify Payments reached a value of around $27.52 billion. This is an increase of 25% compared to the last year.

Alongside Shopify Payments, Shopify gives merchants a variety of excellent native and third-party tools they can use to boost their online performance.

These apps can help with everything from SEO, to increasing Shopify traffic and managing sales, or inventory.

There are currently more than 10,000 apps in the Shopify app store, and the most popular options generally belong to the world of “marketing and conversion”, followed by store management tools, store design apps, and shipping and order apps, like dropshipping.

The most installed apps on the Shopify marketplace are the Facebook and Instagram channel apps, used to allow companies to connect with customers across a variety of social media channels.

Shopify hasn't grown its Theme Store that much, but rather they focus on curating a collection of quality themes with multiple style variants.

Essentially, Shopify has maintained a list of 100 themes that they update every year. Many of the themes have two or three style variants that are drastically different from the original design, so we would argue that Shopify actually offers about 300 theme designs.

Shopify Growth and Marketing Statistics

We’ve already discussed some aspects of Shopify’s incredible growth over the last few years, as well as some of the marketing tools Shopify vendors use to increase sales.

However, it’s worth diving a little deeper into this segment. Since its launch, Shopify has made a number of strategic acquisitions to develop its market position.

Shopify has purchased a host of well-known companies, including Oberlo for dropshipping, the UX agency Jet Cooper, and the ecommerce recruitment company Dovetail.

The most recent Shopify acquisition took place in October 2022, when Shopify purchased Remix.

Remix was the first acquisition made by Shopify since the $2.1 billion purchase of Deliverr, the fulfillment technology provider. The Remix acquisition was intended to help Shopify improve it’s ecommerce store design and development toolkit.

As Shopify continues to evolve, its customers are growing and transforming too, leveraging a range of tools to increase sales.

For instance, as shoppers in the ecommerce market spend more of their time on their mobile devices, Shopify store owners are now investing more time and money into developing more responsive, intuitive sites. Around 79% of all Shopify traffic now comes from a mobile device.

Here are some more interesting facts about Shopify store growth and marketing:

As of 2021, around 75.5 thousand Shopify stores were selling clothing items or garments, making fashion one of the biggest industries for Shopify sellers. This might have something to do with the increasing number of print-on-demand tools and other resources available to Shopify vendors. The second largest category for online sellers was home and garden. (Source: Statista)
Over 57% of Shopify stores in the United Kingdom use Instagram as part of their marketing and sales tactics. Instagram has quickly become one of the most popular platforms among Shopify merchants, even out-performing Facebook, and Twitter. (Source: Storeleads)
In 2020, more than 457 million people purchased items from a Shopify store. This represents an increase of more than 52% in just one year. Part of the reason or this may have been the massive increase in online buyers in the ecommerce world, during the pandemic. (Source: Backlinko)
While social media marketing and sales are popular tools for Shopify store owners, email is still one of the best ways for companies to get customers. Shopify stores using email marketing achieve an average conversion rate of around 4.29%. This makes email even more valuable to store owners than search engine optimization. (Source: Shopify)
Shopify made waves with its Global ERP Program, which gives ERP partners more access to the app store and direct integrations. Essentially, it lets larger companies like Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft, and Acumatica develop and integrate their own solutions to merge into the Shopify ecosystem. This is primarily to help out high-volume merchants that want to improve their control of data and workflows on a daily basis.

Shopify’s Biggest Competitors

Shopify websites might make up a significant portion of the ecommerce landscape today, but there are still a variety of platforms other companies use for online growth.

In the online shopping world, there are a number of popular ecommerce platforms to choose from, with WooCommerce (WordPress) standing as Shopify’s biggest competitor to date.

According to Statista, there are almost 6 million websites using WooCommerce to facilitate online sales in the world today.

Additionally, WooCommerce powers around 23% of the top 1 million websites online. From the perspective of the larger ecommerce market as a whole, WooCommerce is responsible for around 38.74% of the entire landscape.

What’s more, WooCommerce owns around 94% of the ecommerce plugin market, as a crucial app for WordPress.

The closest competitor to WooCommerce in the plugin industry is the Ecwid plugin. Unfortunately, Shopify’s “Buy Button” plugin only powers around 19.781 websites.

Let’s explore some other insights into Shopify’s biggest competitors:

BigCommerce, another major competitor to Shopify, boasts a similar feature set, and an excellent range of customizable features. BigCommerce hosts nearly 46,000 live ecommerce websites today, with a market share of around 0.2% of all the top 1 million hosted sites. (Source: Builtwith)
Another direct competitor to Shopify, Squarespace has been growing in popularity in recent years. Though it’s still widely recognized as a traditional website builder, with less focus overall on the ecommerce market, it has introduced a variety of online shopping features. Squarespace powers over 2.8 million websites in total, and has an overall market share of 14.67% in the ecommerce market. (Source: Builtwith)
Wix has also made significant moves in the ecommerce space over the last few years. Once again, Wix is considered an overall website builder more than an ecommerce platform. However, it does provide a variety of online shopping tools. Over 8.5 million websites are powered by Wix, though only a small fraction are online stores. (Source: Builtwith)

More Interesting Facts about Shopify

At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of how many Shopify users come from different countries, as well as how effectively the functionalities of the Shopify platform have driven its growth rate.

However, there are still plenty of great insights out there for people who want to learn more about Shopify websites, and the platform itself.

Shopify suggests that for every $1 of revenue it earns as one of the world’s most popular ecommerce platforms, merchants using the service can earn around $40.82. Although there aren’t a lot of statistics from other vendors to back up this claim, we can see plenty of evidence that Shopify stores can be extremely successful. (Source: Shopify)
The average Shopify store checkout completion rate falls at around 45.2% for desktop buyers, and around 58.7% for stores for the top 20% of Shopify’s successful vendors. While mobile checkout rates are a little lower, at around 44%, they still represent exceptional results for potential online sellers. This indicates that as many as 1 in 2 customers who reach the Shopify checkout page are almost guaranteed to make a purchase. (Source: Littledata.io)
About 7.1 billion average monthly browsing sessions on Shopify take place utilizing mobile devices, according to Shopify. The same market trends report also found that around 66% of the orders that take place on Shopify merchant stores utilize mobile devices. This corresponds with the growth of mobile commerce overall. (Source: Shopify)
Aside from making strategic acquisitions to encourage growth, Shopify also partners with a wide variety of other sales channels and stakeholders. Some of the biggest partnerships Shopify has invested in over the years include collaborations with TikTok, Google, Walmart, Alibaba, and Facebook. (Source: Shopify)
It took Tobias Lutke around two months to develop the code for the first online store he would create before establishing the Shopify platform. The site was known as “Snowdevil” and the name was eventually changed to “Jaded Pixel” a couple of years later. It wasn’t until 2006 that Shopify became the ecommerce platform we know today.
While Shopify’s precursor store, Snowdevil, was developed using the Ruby on Rails open source application framework, Shopify has since created its own template language. The “Liquid” language is still based on Ruby on Rails, but it does have some unique features. (Source: Github)
From a search engine optimization perspective, Shopify stores have a number of ways to stand out online. Even the Shopify platform is designed to be optimized for the search engines. According to a popular SEO tool, Semrush, around 1.6 million websites are constantly linking to Shopify. (Source: Semrush)

Learning from Shopify Stats

Looking at the Shopify statistics above, it’s easy to see that the platform has made a significant impact on the ecommerce market.

As Shopify, and the ecommerce landscape continues to grow, the potential for store owners will only continue to increase.

At present, ecommerce is becoming an increasingly popular solution for buyers around the world. Around 80% of consumers completed a purchase online in 2020 alone.

What’s more, as of 2021, ecommerce sales accounted for around 20% of the total retail sales made around the world. In the next 3 years, experts predict around 25% of retail sales will come from online stores.

Like any ecommerce platform, Shopify has various pros and cons to consider. It’s just one of the many tools companies today can use to establish an online presence, earn revenue, and pave the way for rapid growth.

However, Shopify has continued to prove itself as an incredibly powerful solution for sellers, year after year.

We’ll continue to update this article in the years ahead, as the statistics around Shopify evolve. Make sure you check back whenever you want to learn more about the growth of Shopify, and the potential it offers to online retailers.