The Post-COVID Blues – Shopify Continues to Lay-off Staff

As this Newsletter has reported previously, all the Big Tech, and some important (for ecommerce) “Smaller Tech” increased their staff during COVID and are now reducing their employment levels. We reported on Shopify’s initial staff reductions last year, however, that company has now revealed that it is laying off 20% of its workforce, impacting more than 2,000 people, and is selling its logistics business to Flexport for roughly 13% in stock. The news comes some 10 months after Shopify announced that it was reducing 10% of its workforce — roughly 1,000 people — and follows a trend that has seen many big technology companies engage in several rounds of redundancies in response to economic headwinds. In a recent blog post, Shopify’s CEO Tobias Lütke refers to “main quests” being its ecommerce software for online retailers and “side quests,” the logistics and delivery arm of the company. Shipping and logistics always goes hand-in-hand with ecommerce, which is why Shopify had been building up that side of its business.

However, despite the downsizing, Shopify recently launched a direct bill pay service. This move reflects the rising popularity of account-to-account (A2A) payments, where funds are transferred between 2 bank accounts without intermediaries such as card networks.