Shopify (SHOP +3.29%) has been, and continues to be, one of the greatest enablers of e-commerce. In this clip from "The Rank" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on May 2, Motley Fool contributor Danny Vena discusses the trajectory of the e-commerce company and why it could be a great long-term investment.
Danny Vena: One of the things that has always been attractive to me is the fact that Shopify started out as being the company where, if you wanted to build a website and you just didn't have the technical expertise to do that, you could go to Shopify, you could get a template. They were already pre-laid out, and you go "Oh, I like this template right here" and bam! Everything's up and running. You don't have to spend a lot of time. You don't have to have a lot of expertise. And it has evolved into so much more than that. You still have the ability to set up and maintain an e-commerce website and a business. But then if you look at the list of things that I put up on the slide here, it's gone far beyond website creation and design and payments. You have fulfillment and logistics and cross-docking and inventory control and tracking. And the company can take all of your various sites, where you sell things, be they on social media, if you've got a Facebook (FB +2.74%) store, if you have sales on Amazon (AMZN +0.93%), if you have a pop-up site in a mall, if you've got a brick-and-mortar, and it can bring them all together in one place for you and track all of that data on one dashboard, essentially. So I think that Shopify makes it easy, and that's the biggest selling point to me. If you want to have an e-commerce business, Shopify makes it easy. I think the other thing too is, I remember, several years ago when we first started Motley Fool Live and we were talking in the early part of the pandemic, or just before the pandemic, Shopify really only had about a million merchants worldwide. And over a period of just less than two years it went from a million to 1.7 million. Now, granted, some of that was going to be pull-forward because of the pandemic, but it does illustrate that there is still a lot of demand out there for people who want to sell things online. This was a stock that was hitting all-time highs. You know, we've had the bear market stock correction, the Nasdaq bear market. The stock was currently down 68%, and it's actually down more than that now. So I would say this is a stock that still has all of the opportunity that it has always had. And I don't think e-commerce is going anywhere. This slide shows you the trajectory of e-commerce through 2021 has tripled compared to what it was a decade before. So I'm going to stop the slide sharing there, but I mean really, when you think about Shopify, it is the biggest and it is the best enabler of e-commerce for a reason. And so, this is one that I have really been trying to add to and I will add to as soon as I have the opportunity to do so and it's not restricted for those of us at The Motley Fool who, you know, write about premium items.
