Shopify Statistics For 2022: What You Need To Know

2040 is the year when it is estimated that 95% of all purchases will be through e-commerce. Not surprising given that the e-commerce industry is growing at a rate of 23% YOY and 94% of the global internet users have purchased at least one product online.

What has helped the growth of e-commerce? The reasons are many. One among them is utilizing e-commerce technology solutions to build online stores that provide great user experiences. Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, OpenCart, Ecwid, Squarespace, and Prestashop are all the popular e-commerce software solutions that enable easy setup of online stores in a matter of a few hours.

Shopify is one such popular standalone cloud-based e-commerce building platform known for its ease of use and value for money. Such is the popularity of Shopify that it is used by 1.75 million e-commerce sellers in 175 countries. It all started in 2006 when Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake wanted to open an online store Snowdevil to sell snowboarding equipment in Canada. Not satisfied with the existing e-commerce platforms, Tobias Lütke built a platform and named it Shopify. Thus Snowdevil was the first online store to be launched using the Shopify platform. It was written in Ruby as an open-source template language called ‘Liquid’.

In 2015, Amazon closed its Amazon Webstore services and allowed its merchants to migrate to Shopify thus cementing it as the popular e-commerce platform for online businesses. By 2017, Shopify announced integration with Amazon that allowed its store owners to sell their products directly on Amazon.

Today, big corporations such as Nestle, Pepsi, Tesla, Budweiser, The Economist, Sunday Somewhere, Penguin Books, Foo Fighters, and Heinz have their online stores built on Shopify. It is the third-largest retailer behind Amazon and eBay. So basically, Shopify provides the perfect platform for anything from apparel, consumer goods, cars, to music and fashion.

Number of Shopify stores (by country) for 2021

Shopify is the second-largest trusted e-commerce platform for businesses and has over 17% of the market share. WooCommerce comes first at 26% and Wix at third at 13% of the market share.

The above chart on Google Trends shows you the results for Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix worldwide for a 2-year period. Even though WooCommerce is the top leader in e-commerce, it cannot beat Shopify in popularity.

When we talk about the countries where Shopify is used the most, it is dominant in the U.S. with nearly two-thirds of its websites based there. Europe accounts for 17% of Shopify’s supply market.

This image by Statista clearly shows the dominance of Shopify in the U.S. followed by Europe (the U.K in particular). Australia in the Oceania continent has also a good number of merchants who prefer to build their stores on Shopify.

Device access capabilities

Have you ever observed the ease with which you can share images through social media platforms such as WhatsApp or Telegram? It gives you the option to select images stored on your mobile device. Also, you can use your mobile camera to click a picture through WhatsApp and send it across to your contacts. Ah, talking of the contacts, WhatsApp can easily access the contacts saved on your device so that you can forward your text, images, or videos to anyone in your contact list.

Critics put Shopify as one of the best e-commerce platforms and it is the favorite go-to platform for all dropshippers. The number of dropshipping stores is around 13% of all the Shopify stores. Dropshipping is made popular in Shopify due to various necessary apps available for integration such as the Oberlo dropshipping app available in the Shopify App Store.

Top website categories on Shopify

Clothes occupy the top category among the products sold in the Shopify stores. Around 76 thousand Shopify stores operated in the apparel segment followed by the home & garden with 34 thousand shops.

The top websites on Shopify are-

Whether it is drop shipping or direct selling, apparel has always been the top category for online stores in the e-commerce segment followed by jewelry & watches, and then the home & garden. We can correlate the similarities even in the Shopify stores.

Shopify revenue for 2021

Let’s see some astonishing Shopify revenue statistics for 2021.

2019 and 2020 have been incredible years for Shopify. Its revenue tripled and GMV doubled. The number of merchants using Shopify nearly doubled in these two years.

Shopify was the one to benefit from the after-effects of Covid-19. The pandemic hastened the process of setting up online shops for many entrepreneurs who were until then content with a physical store. The peak that started with Covid-19 continues even today and Shopify’s increasing quarterly and yearly revenues are proof of it.

The total revenue for 2021 was $4,611.9 million with a 57% increase over 2020. Of this, the Subscription solutions revenue was $1,342.3 million dollars, a 48% growth from the previous year. The Merchant solutions generated a revenue of $3,269.5 million, a 62% growth from 2020. The gross profit was $2,481.1 million, a 61% growth over the previous year.

The fourth quarter saw revenues of $1,380.0 million, a 41% increase from the fourth quarter of 2020. The staggering growth in the fourth quarter can be contributed to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales across major countries of America, Canada, and the U.K.

Shopify Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) for 2021

The third option of converting Shopify store into app is custom app development. Here, you hire mobile app developers or the services of a mobile app development company to build an app as per your needs.

The Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) or the revenue of volume of the goods sold through thousands of Shopify stores stood at $175.4 billion. Again this was a 47% increase over 2020. Of it, the fourth quarter of 2021 saw a GMV of $54.1 billion, an increase of $12.9 billion over the comparable quarter of 2020. This was a clear 31% increase over the fourth quarter 2020 GMV.

Some other Shopify statistics:

Conclusion

With over 500 billion buyers through its stores, Shopify has indeed seen impressive growth. The post-pandemic world has opened newer opportunities for its success and this clearly shows in its numbers!