ACE-Shopify2012 | 一启教育|17EDU|约克大学与Shopify官方项目|

Corporate Enterprise Program

企业实践项目

数字营销Digital Marketing

Program Overview

Shopify Inc is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Canada founded in 2006. It provides an online e-commerce platform as well a retail point-of-sale system including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools to simply the process of running an online store for organizations. Shopify also extends the capabilities of its platform through an AppStore where app partners have created more than 4000 apps to power Shopify stores. In 2012, Shopify acquired Select Start Studio Inc, a mobile software developer including 20 mobile engineers and designers followed by acquisition of Jet Cooper 25 person design studies in 2013. In 2014 the platform had hosted about 120,000 online retailers and was listed #3 in Deloitte FAST50 in Canada and #7 for FAST 500 in North America. In October 2019 Shopify merchant base surpassed the one million mark. Despite having a merchant base from 175 countries, the majority of Shopify's focus has been in North America. Shopify Revenue was US$ 1.58 billion in 2019 with a total asset of US$3.49 billion. Currently Shopify has more than 5000 employees.

The Growth and User Acquisition team is responsible for growing the business at Shopify and attracting new users. The Growth team focuses on securing new customers to use the platform working with 3 other teams who provide support, develop new products and develop partnership. The Growth and User Acquisition team is the marketing arm of Shopify.

Amir Jaffari

Lead Growth & User Acquisition , Shopify

The growth team focuses on content marketing, paid advertising, email marketing and partnerships to grow the customer base.

To reach the one million merchant milestone Shopify has focused it’s internal operations into 4 areas:

Customer Support: Creating an online store or running a retail business is not easy and Shopify has invested a lot in building an infrastructure as well as a well trained support team to provide 24/7 support to all merchants.
Product team: Shopify has a wide range of offerings to power commerce both online and offline. The product team is responsible for creating new products as well as maintaining existing products. Currently some of Shopify’s main products are the online store, the App Store, and Retail POS.
Partners team: Shopify has benefited from a large and active ecosystem of partners. There are 3 types of partners for Shopify: App developers, theme developers, and agencies that help merchants with design and marketing of their websites. The partners team is responsible for engaging and growing the partner community.
Growth team: Shopify uses a variety of channels to acquire new customers to its platform. The growth team focuses on content marketing, paid advertising, email marketing and partnerships to grow the customer base.

The project is focused on international expansion at Shopify and growing the customer tale globally.

So far the majority of Shopify’s product, support, partners and growth team have focused on English speaking and mostly North American markets. But now Shopify is looking to expand internationally and is evaluating different approaches. There are 3 areas of concerns:

How should Shopify focus its international expansion? Should it use language as a common factor to expand to countries speaking a common language or use geographical proximity as the common factor?
Should Shopify invest in hiring local talent and expanding its office footprint in expansion countries or rely on a digital footprint?
How should international expansion inform product decisions, which areas of Shopify's product team should be involved in the first stage of international expansion.

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