Which online store system is the one with the largest total merchandise transaction volume and the world's largest growth rate?

Technology is advancing with each passing day, and the e-commerce ecosystem is changing every year. Alibaba, Amazon (Amazon), JD.com, and Pinduoduo are all familiar platforms, but in the past few years, there has been an independent online store system that has made the e-commerce ecosystem surging.

In 2021, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development released a report on the development of global e-commerce, ranking the major e-commerce companies according to the total value of global merchandise transactions. The data from 2019 to 2020 pointed out that the top four are still Alibaba, Amazon, JD.com and Pinduoduo, but the fifth place has actually become Shopify! The top four are all store platforms, so Shopify has also become the largest independent website and online store establishment platform / online store system in the global merchants' total merchandise transaction volume. In addition, in the past two years, Shopify's growth rate has also greatly surpassed other platforms, ranking first in the world.

Picture: 2020 global e-commerce rankings. Image source: UNCTAD report

A few years ago, Shopify was a small, obscure Canadian e-commerce company. But in 2020, Shopify's market cap has quietly surpassed $130 billion, with a total transaction value of $119.6 billion, or 40% of Amazon's sales. The biggest difference between Shopify and Taobao, Amazon, and eBay is that it is not a direct-to-consumer platform, but a platform that provides services for sellers. When you open the Shopify website, what you see is not a dazzling array of products, but an invitation to start an e-commerce business, focusing on sellers rather than buyers. Through various services, Shopify connects its own platform with "independent" stations and forms a closed business loop, giving birth to a new e-commerce ecosystem.

What is an "Independent Site"? To put it simply, it is to let the merchants leave the platform and have independent domain names and pages. The traffic, brand, and data are all owned by the merchants, just like the official websites of some big brands. Shopify's independent station is like turning the stores on Taobao into independent brands and owning their own websites, but the actual power behind it is still Shopify.

More and more sellers are also starting to leave traditional e-commerce platforms and turn to Shopify. With the rising tide of business exodus, Amazon, Alibaba, JD.com, etc. have all tightened their nerves.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has finally realized the threat of Shopify since the end of 2020, and formed a secret team called "Project Santos" to start researching and replicating the Shopify model to prevent the tide of merchants from getting worse. In 2021, Amazon will also have Selz (Australia's independent website building platform) to enter into an acquisition agreement.

Of course, in addition to Amazon, other e-commerce giants are also eyeing this ever-expanding market. For example, the news of Alibaba's recruitment of Shopify independent station operators has begun to circulate in the industry, which seems to reveal the signal that it will provide independent station services in cross-border business. In addition, JD.com was also revealed in the first quarter of this year that it is deploying the independent station service market, and plans to further expand the possibility of cross-border going overseas through SaaS services.