When you need help setting up an online shop, Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) is the place to go and is widely considered the leading e-commerce company. Over the years, it became a powerful ecosystem that’s helped millions of merchants all over the world.
Shopify is loved by merchants because it’s easy to setup an online store. The simplicity has won Shopify a significant proportion of small-to-medium sized businesses. Meanwhile for larger online storefronts, Shopify Plus has gained enormous traction.
The success has also translated to a strong balance sheet that has enabled the company snap up other firms to support further growth. One such is Checkout Blocks and here’s why that is so important to the future of the e-commerce giant.
Shopify Acquires Checkout Blocks
Over the last few years, Shopify has been very acquisitive as part of its aims to enhance existing offerings and the utility of the platform. These acquisitions are crucial to amplify its technology portfolio, upgrade merchants’ services, and make logistics even simpler.
A recent acquisition was Threads.com, a Slack alternative. which is designed to help Shopify strengthen business communications.
Another Shopify acquisition was Checkout Blocks, which provides a no-code solution that allows Plus merchants to tailor their checkout processes and boost customer satisfaction as well as sales. Because retention and customer loyalty are so crucial to compounding growth, this is a potential game-changer for Shopify.
Other optimization features offered by Checkout Blocks include AI recommendations, custom content, discounts, and personalized order status pages, among others.
The one common thread among these acquisitions is they are designed to make merchant experiences more seamless so in turn their end-customers have frictionless buying journeys.
These moves spotlight Shopify’s growth path through acquisitions and complement the platform’s logistics, automation, marketing, and mobile sales channels.
Shopify Is Investing in Advanced Technologies Like AI
Shopify has been making continuous efforts to integrate artificial intelligence into its technological infrastructure and merchants’ utility. Shopify expects to use AI technologies to provide customers with personalized purchase options and contribute to the company’s efficiency of operations and decision-making by its clients.
It leverages artificial intelligence to insightfully capture the customer behavioral patterns and needs so that it can successfully target and promote products to customers that they are most likely to shop for as well as adjust price strategies.
In addition, Shopify is integrating AI into customer service support. By using AI technology in chatbots and self-service tools, Shopify ensures that merchants get timely help with minor problems that may otherwise take a lot of their time to resolve, enabling them to focus on the growth of their businesses.
Plus, Shopify is incorporating AI to support and strengthen business parameters. The company’s ‘Shopify Magic’ offers many AI-based facilities at different stages of the workflow, which may demystify processes such as, marketing, creating stores etc. Furthermore, the effectiveness of developing generative AI is manifested in Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick. Shopify has been leveraging the advancement of AI to enhance efficiency and experience for merchants and consumers.
The company will continue to work on expanding the accessibility of its state-of-the-art, AI-driven features, such as the Sidekick assistant.
Plus, the recent acquisitions of AI-focused companies such as Checkout Blocks demonstrate Shopify’s commitment to improving AI capabilities.
How Is Shopify’s Financial Performance?
Rising inflation rates and fluctuating consumer spending in recent years have slowed Shopify’s growth trajectory.
While Shopify has seen some weakness last year, a revival of sorts took place in the most recent quarterly results. The company’s fiscal second-quarter 2024 revenue grew 20.7% year-over-year to $2.05 billion.
Management reported adjusted EPS of $0.13, compared to a loss of a $1.02 per share a year prior. The company reported a net income of $171 million compared to a loss of $1.31 billion a year ago quarter.
Gross merchandise volume increased 22% year-over-year to $67.2 billion, while gross payments volume came in at $41.1 billion, compared to $31.7 billion.
Management now forecasts revenue to grow at a low-to-mid-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis in the current quarter. Also, the gross margin is expected to be higher by approximately 50 basis points compared to the Q2 2024.
Is Shopify a Buy?
Shopify share price is up 65% year-to-date and that has translated into loftier multiples. For example, the price-to-earnings ratio now is trading at 78x, an elevated figure by any benchmark measure.
The only thing that would alleviate fears of it being heavily overvalued is if growth rates were forecast to be very strong and indeed that is the case with 83% annualized net income growth expected over the next five years. As such, Shopify is actually trading at a low PE ratio relative to future earnings growth forecasts.
With that said, a discounted cash flow forecast reveals Shopify is fairly valued at this time and analysts seem to agree with that assessment.
But for the bulls there is lots to cling onto, not least the top line forecasted growth of 23% annually and the ability of the firm to drop $1.2 billion to net income from $7.7 billion in sales.
Is Shopify a buy? On the dip, it will provide an even more compelling reward to risk ratio but certainly there are good reasons to buy even without a pullback.
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