Shopify, an ecommerce platform that helps small merchants set up stores online, announced Thursday that it has raised $100 million in a Series C round of funding to expand into the world of offline retail.
Seven years after launching, Shopify now serves as a platform for 80,000 active online stores, which collectively have processed more than $1.5 billion in payments in the year to date. Revenues and customers have doubled year-over-year for the past four years, according to the company. But it's another statistic that is driving the company's direction now: Shopify has found that 30% of its merchants sell items offline as well through pop-up shops, farmers markets and other options.
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"The future of retail isn't actually online verses offline. We believe the future of commerce is just commerce," Harley Finkelstein, chief platform officer at Shopify, said in a recent interview. "We want to shift from being an ecommerce company to being a commerce company."
Shopify took some steps to embrace offline commerce earlier this year with the introduction of a point-of-sale system that works on the iPad and more recently, an experimental project called Popify, which is part of an effort to see how consumers engage with some of Shopify's online merchants in a bricks-and-mortar environment.
With this latest round of funding, which is in addition to $22 million raised in two previous rounds, Shopify aims to invest in new products that will help it become a starting point for merchants to set up businesses online and offline. The Canadian startup also plans to grow its staff from 320 currently to more than 500 employees by this time next year, expand its offices in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa and invest in potential acquisitions.
While this is a certainly a sizable funding round, Shopify's shift in strategy means it will increasingly be running up against other well-funded competitors. Perhaps the most notable of these is Square, a company valued at more than $3 billion, which offers point of sale features for merchants and now operates an online marketplace as well.
Image: Shopify