One of the top e-commerce platforms just continues to grow and help merchants succeed. In this clip from "The Rank" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 21, Fool contributors Jason Hall and Connor Allen discuss Shopify's (SHOP 0.28%) major strengths and how it's set up for further business expansion.
Find out why Shopify is one of the 10 best stocks to buy now
Our award-winning analyst team has spent more than a decade beating the market. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*
They just revealed their ten top stock picks for investors to buy right now. Shopify is on the list -- but there are nine others you may be overlooking.
Click here to get access to the full list!
*Stock Advisor returns as of March 3, 2022
Jason Hall: Shopify is just such a wonderful business and I almost say it's the anti-MercadoLibre (MELI -0.15%) or the anti-Amazon (AMZN 2.29%) but in terms of the way that it's growing, it is the anti-Amazon. It's arming the rebels, building the platform to allow merchants to succeed. When you build a platform like this, you say, "Yeah, we're going to target small to medium-sized businesses."
People would think you have to be out of your mind. Because these businesses fail all the time and there's massive amounts of churn and all of that and yet Shopify has consistently helped fix problems and provide tools to help merchants compete with the e-commerce giants that are continuing to dominate.
I just think it's sometimes underappreciated how much it continues to solve problems. I think that's the big thing. It rolls out more tools all the time. They give its merchants more capabilities to lower their costs, to improve their ability to transact, to give them better data to use. Then at the same time, it does things to make it easier for customers, for shoppers across all of the different Shopify merchants' websites to transact with more confidence.
Like Shop Pay, for example, you click on that button and the merchant has your information for payments and shipping and all that stuff, so it removes that transactional friction. I think there's opportunities to continue to do more. They can do better with analytics, they can do better with providing marketing and an ad platform. There are a lot of ways the company can continue to grow. You get overseas, massive international opportunity. This is still very largely a North American story.
Connor Allen: Years ago I looked at Shopify, and I think it was less than $100 a share at the time and I thought it was just going to be a dropshipping business of people ordering things from Alibaba (BABA 0.88%) and reselling them here in the U.S. because that's all that I knew Shopify was being used for at the time. I didn't see the potential. I didn't see what it could be in the future.
Now you have publicly listed companies working on Shopify's platform and that's where everything changed right there for me. It was when I actually saw that this isn't a platform that just small, Joe down the street is selling peanuts. This is, billion-dollar companies are on this platform. The potential is really large and that's where my mind shifted on this company. I'm a bull now, big time.
