Shopify

In the dust of crumbling brick-and-mortar retail, it’s easier than ever to set up an e-commerce store.

If it seems like everyone is an entrepreneur these days, you may be right. It’s not something in the air; the rise in self-propelled e-commerce is due, in part, to new software innovations around online check-out. Behind this swell is Canada-based Shopify, the plug-and-play platform that enables nearly any seller to monetise products quickly and easily. Hosting goods through Etsy now seems like a throwback to the past: Shopify is powering millions of transactions from shoppers – and facilitating literally billions of dollars in purchases in a matter of days.

As brick-and-mortar retail declines, e-commerce is picking up the slack. By the end of 2018, one in every five purchases in the UK was made online. By 2022, global e-commerce sales are expected to reach $5.8tn (£4.6tn), with billions of shoppers spending online. Shopify’s cloud-based platform is one of the more seamless solutions to stand up an online store and facilitate payment processing and shipping (even guiding users through dropshipping, which has dramatically impacted manufacturing businesses in China).

Enabling direct-to-consumer commerce, Shopify has the potential to upend the traditional retail sector. That means disrupting thousands of jobs, millions of square feet of retail space and, perhaps most importantly, expanding commerce possibilities between countries around the world.

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Image credit: Piero Zagami and Michela Nicchiotti.