Shopify, the second most popular eCommerce store builder in the world, lays off 10% of staff

Shopify has to go through a reduction in workforce that will see about 10% leave.

„Most of the impacted roles are in recruiting, support, and sales, and across the company we’re also eliminating over-specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that were convenient to have but too far removed from building products,” says Tobias Lütke is CEO and co-founder of Shopify.

In an open letter to the staff, Tobias explains „How we got here„

„When the Covid pandemic set in, almost all retail shifted online because of shelter-in-place orders. Demand for Shopify skyrocketed. To help merchants, we threw away our roadmaps and shipped everything that could possibly be helpful. It was hard, but we know for a fact that more merchants’ businesses survived the pandemic because of the work we did in this time and that’s exactly what our mission is about.  

Shopify has always been a company that makes the big strategic bets our merchants demand of us – this is how we succeed. Before the pandemic, ecommerce growth had been steady and predictable. Was this surge to be a temporary effect or a new normal?

And so, given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix – the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail – would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years. We couldn’t know for sure at the time, but we knew that if there was a chance that this was true, we would have to expand the company to match. 

„It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point. Still growing steadily, but it wasn’t a meaningful 5-year leap ahead. Our market share in ecommerce is a lot higher than it is in retail, so this matters.

Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today and I’m deeply sorry for that.”

Credit photo: Bloomberg