E-commerce Trends in 2024: Why Successful Brands Choose Shopify

All organizations question their tech stack and choices. Healthy orgs do that constantly and proactively. Slower orgs usually raise these questions when the pain is starting to become unbearable. Regardless of what kind of organization you are part of, one thing is certain — changing your tech stack is expensive.

Altogether replacing your e-commerce solution — now that’s a huge investment in time and money. Why would anyone do that?

The Renbizz team meets many mid-sized brands and retailers. In the past year we’ve been witnessing quite a few of them migrating from e-commerce platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce (Magento) to Shopify. Shopify Plus, to be exact. In this article we’ll try to understand why they are doing so.

Shopify Welcomes External Innovation

Shopify will collect from app developers %0 (that’s zero percent!) revenue share on every app’s first $1,000,000, annually. Regarding their intentions of growing the ecosystem around their platform, that’s literally putting their money where their mouth is.

As a Shopify app, there’s so much you can do! The documentation for Shopify’s API spans so many topics and areas of the e-commerce merchant and customer journey. It seems that throughout the years they’ve made it possible to extend every bit of these journeys, while maintaining robustness and quality of service.

You can spin up a simple app in a matter of days, and get it deployed to the Shopify app store in pretty much the same timeframe. In 2022, Shopify bought Remix, one of the most prominent full-stack web frameworks around. This is yet another proof of their commitment not only to better merchant/customer experiences, but also to better developer experiences.

Developer experience. If you’re an e-commerce platform and you want your ecosystem to grow, invest in your developer experience. Adobe Commerce’s learning curve is so steep, it took me over a week just to set up a local development environment. With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it feels like they’ve intentionally created a wall of bureaucracy so high that it’s nearly impossible for a startup or an independent developer to cross.

External innovation does not happen in a vacuum. It sits on the shoulders of internal innovation.

Merchant-Led Internal Innovation

Shopify is in the business of making others do good business. Specifically, they make more money when their merchants make more money. The only way merchants make more money is when customers buy, and in order to buy, customers need to complete the most delicate part of the e-commerce journey: the checkout.

Shopify is constantly improving the checkout experience, trying to make it as frictionless as possible.

It started with the transition to one-page checkout — from a multi-touchpoint, slower-loading 3-page experience to a slick single-page experience. One-page is nice. However, there’s still so much friction in manually entering all your details.

What could be simpler than that? One-click checkout. With Shop Pay (150M signed up customers), shoppers no longer need to enter their information, shipping address, or payment details — they click a button. That’s it.

In an off-the-record conversation I recently had with a Shopify employee, I learned they are now working on zero-click checkout. Now that’s a revolution.

In a study they conducted with a “Big Three Management Consulting Company”, they found the conversion rate for Shopify stores exceeds the competition’s — an average of 15% more checkout conversions. That’s many more dollars for their merchants.

It’s Just a Faster Time-To-Market

E-commerce brands that want to grow have to constantly innovate. A crucial part of innovation is the ability to experiment fast and try things out. Scale them if they work, dump them if they don’t.

For these reasons, Renbizz takes pride in the fact we can set up an end-to-end rental offering on a brand’s existing e-commerce in just 2 weeks time, while eliminating any inventory commitment or risk.

Let’s take Nike for example. They wanted to try out a sub-brand for home gym equipment for athletes — Nike Strength. Their brand’s main website does not run on Shopify. Yet they decided to deploy Nike Strength on Shopify Plus. Quicker, easier, cheaper, does not require heavy internal politics and bureaucracy for making changes on an existing live platform.

What’s next?

We’ve seen different reasons why Shopify is the market leader in the world of e-commerce platforms, and what steps are they actively taking to keep their dominance in this field.

For me personally, in my everyday work at Renbizz, I keep getting reassured that we’ve made the right bet on choosing Shopify Plus as the first e-commerce platform on which we integrate our product. I have a hunch that we’re going to see more and more brands making this transition.

If you’re a brand that’s considering making this move, and still have some concerns — talk to me. I’d love to connect and throw in my 2 cents on the topic.