As e-commerce booms during the pandemic, Shopify accelerates

Despite the economic disruptions associated with the coronavirus pandemic, cloud vendors are holding up well as many client companies and their employees work from home.

With stores closed, it's natural that e-commerce would also perform strongly - after all, it's also cloud-based, and folks working from home are shifting their shopping from brick-and-mortar to digital. (You can look at the pre-COVID-19 trend here; it has since become an even steeper curve.)

If you track Shopify's stock price over the last six months, the argument appears to hold up; the cloud's pandemic boom isn't confined to remote-work tooling like Slack and Zoom.

A one-year chart of Shopify's market performance through May 12, 2020

The Canadian phenom helps businesses large and small build online storefronts, offering a reasonable alternative in the midst of a sinking traditional economy. As more businesses must close their stores, a sturdy online presence could be the difference between surviving and going under.

Going beyond online

The public company doesn't stop with just digital storefronts; Shopify also offers a point-of-sale system for businesses that lets owners track sales wherever they happen. While having physical stores open on a regular basis might not happen for some time, a unified approach to your business in-store and online could help retailers, no matter what happens.

In fact, Shopify counts larger businesses such as Heineken, Staples, General Mills and D-Link as customers. One other factor could also be helping explain Shopify's growing success: It serves as an alternative for a growing number of firms and online shoppers who don't want to give their business to online retail giant Amazon.

Having that level of product and customer could help explain why Shopify's fortunes have been on the rise in spite of the pandemic's overall impact on the economy. Let's dig a bit further.

From product to profit