Canadian tech giant Shopify hits $1B in quarterly revenue for the first time

Canadian tech darling Shopify hit a milestone Wednesday, announcing it has crossed $1 billion in revenues for the first time in the e-commerce company’s history.

Ottawa-born Shopify, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, recorded total sales of $1.12 billion in the second quarter of its fiscal year, up 57 per cent year-over-year.

The e-commerce company develops a platform and other services to help its customers, dubbed merchants, sell their products online.

Shopify saw a big spike in sales during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many retailers forced to build out their online presence as public health precautions restricted brick-and-mortar outlets.

The company reported Q2 sales growth of 97 per cent last year, which marked one of the first quarters of business in the pandemic.

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Richard Tse, investment analyst with National Bank Financial Markets, told Global News this week that most market watchers were expecting a slower pace of growth a year after the pandemic boom.

“Last year the pandemic caused a big spike in their second quarter because merchants had to pivot to online to survive. So there’s probably a view out there that it will be hard to repeat. There’s probably no denying that,” he said Tuesday.

“I do think that despite that, a lot of these shifts that we’ve seen in the market are permanent. … So that’s allowing them to actually continue to add a meaningful amount of merchants.”

Shopify says it has more than one million merchants using its platform but does not disclose exact figures.

Gross merchandise volume, the metric that tracks the value of all goods sold on its Shopify-backed stores, was $42.2 billion in the quarter, up 40 per cent year-over-year.

The company also reported a net profit of $879.1 million, a substantial increase over $36 million a year ago, but Shopify said that figure includes $778 million in unrealized net gains on its equity investments in other companies.

Shopify executives will hold a conference call with analysts Wednesday morning to discuss its second-quarter earnings.