SSHOPShopify Inc. - Class A Subordinate Voting Shares

Shopify gives a merchant a ready-made online store and earns less from subscriptions than from those stores' turnover.

Revenue splits in two. Platform subscriptions are steady and predictable but smaller. Most of the money comes from merchant solutions: payment acceptance, lending, shipping and other services priced in proportion to a store's turnover. Hence the headline metric is gross merchandise volume across all stores.

Customers range from a single seller to a large brand. Small merchants arrive and leave in bulk, so what matters is not retention of an individual store but growth in total volume. The upper segment is served by a separate product at a higher price point.

The company sold its logistics arm, acknowledging it as capital-intensive and off-profile, and returned to a model without warehouses of its own. Risks are consumer spending, competition from marketplaces such as Amazon where a seller needs no site at all, and dependence on payment infrastructure. No dividend.