Introduction
Shopify is an all-in-one commerce platform that has helped businesses to grow. Initially, the organization started off as a store that was selling snowboards online. Nevertheless, the existent ecommerce solutions at the time did not allow for the organization to be successful, a factor that foresaw the development of Shopify’s ecommerce platform. Currently, the organization powers more than 1.7 million businesses in the whole world. Shopify has done this by creating a platform that allows diverse businesses of variant shapes and sizes to use the platform whether selling their wares online, on the go, or in retail stores.
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The organization has allowed businesses to be better or commerce to be better for businesses by allowing some form of independence hence making it rather easy to start, run, as well as grow and nurture a business.
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The organization has also enabled its clients to build their businesses on a long-term scale, and this has meant their investments have been for the purpose of the planet, communities, and for people alike.
The organization has equally been committed to social impact initiatives and sustainability such as offsetting and reducing carbon emissions, enabling a future that is both sustainable and equitable through building programs and products that support the organization’s merchants and teams, as well as choosing renewable forms of energy (Bloom et al., 2021).
The organization has achieved this through the very fact that it believes that commerce has even more voices, thus the organization has reduced barriers for business ownership through making commerce better ( Donthu & Gustafsson, 2020 ).
The organization has facilitated over one million transactions for merchants on an international scale by allowing them to sell and deliver their products.
In striving to make the supply chain even faster, Shopify has done all the best to develop an online store infrastructure that is both powerful and fast.
With the recent infrastructure upgrades which have been automatically enabled in all online stores, the organization has become even faster ( Kuzminykh et al., 2020 ).
The first improvement is relative to its network infrastructure which has expanded Shopify’s point of presence.
This means that the organization has expediently reduced the time taken for traffic to reach its servers.
The organization has also added automatic support for its WebP image format which is highly optimized for its online stores.
The organization has overseen the above gathering from the understanding that site speed is a form of competitive advantage which has a direct influence on an organization’s conversion rates.
Shopify has committed to help businesses succeed with lightning-fast and immersive online stores.
The organization has further distinguished the features of fastness as the catalyst for powering businesses, henceforth their devotion to overseeing Shopify’s stores running fast by default.
Shopify has granted merchants the freedom to have additional tweaks in the bid of enhancing their results even more from the current performance. The organization further lends professional help to its merchants should they need to optimize their store’s performance, as well as lending recommendations which are best fit or which are tailored to the unique market and business that the merchant is involved in ( Kuzminykh et al., 2020 ).
However, the organization has still not been able to deliver on a number of supply chain perspectives, especially in relation to transportation. This has resulted a number of negative effects and other imminent repercussions that are yet to happen.
As of the year 2019 alone, merchants operating with Shopify shipped over 1.1 billion packages which travelled or covered a distance of more than one trillion kilometres.
The distance when approximated means that the products were taken around planet Earth for over 25 million times.
The same distance when approximated can measure up to the distance from the Sun to the Neptune and back for over 100 times. Estimates from Shopify have thus shown that for every package that it shipped emitted about a full kilogram of Carbon fuel into the air or atmosphere ( Kuzminykh et al., 2020 ).
Whereas the calculation is not exact science, the team involved in the estimation took into consideration some factors such as the travel method utilized, the weight of the package, and the average distance travelled. This has gone against Shopify’s goal of sustainability which is generally engagement in activities that enable the ecosystem to make decisions that are climate conscious.
It may also lead to a number of implications such as the loss of merchants who are conscious about the impact of the environment and could also raise a global sustainability movement.
Recently the organization has attempted to curtail the problem above. Shopify has done that through an application known as Offset suited for its merchants.
This application has lent merchants the ability or option of neutralizing shipping emissions from their activities. It has also enabled them to tell their customers on their businesses efforts towards maintaining an environmental friendly business environment (Bloom et al., 2021).
The application has gone further to calculate emissions generated from merchant’s shipments, and thereof calculated as the monthly costs of that business’s costs. The price is usually low and is utilized towards its sustainability funds which go to forest protection.
Also, from the application’s dashboard merchants are able to offset emissions from shipping from all of their orders. However, despite the innovative capacity of the application to calculate the emissions, the organization still needs to seek for alternative means of combatting its carbon fuel emissions.
In other circumstances, the supply chain relative to transportation of commodities has been affected by late deliveries.
This has been experienced more so with products which must be travelled internationally, and thus might necessitate entrance into other borders.
Usually, the means of transport may be slow resulting into late deliveries. In other cases, customs and boundary checks may also impede the fastness of delivery of a product (Bandara et al., 2020).
Alternatively, some limiting laws such as bans on exportation of certain goods out of a country, or importation of certain products into a country have also slugged its delivery and in some situations led to failed deliveries (Bloom et al., 2021). This is not good on the part of Shopify citing that it fails to honour its promise to both the client and merchant.
It may also lead to losses on the part of the organization in a case where it fails to deliver on its part and it had expended shipment costs.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, Shopify is a successful ecommerce platform.
can be argued from the number of merchants that have trusted the organization to deliver through selling, and the number of sellers that have trusted the organization through buying.
The organization has also expended efforts in the view of overseeing that it delivers on time, and makes the deliveries even faster.
Nevertheless, the organization’s supply chain is also marred by a number of challenges as analysed above.
The first challenge that it needs to tackle in the bid of creating a travel improvement plan is the need to ensure sustainability through cutting down the amount of Carbon fuel released to the air per unit package.
The organization should also strive to make improvements to its current international supply chain. The need for making such improvements is in the view of ensuring that it delivers both fast, and sticks to its mandate towards sustainability.
References
Bandara, R., Fernando, M., & Akter, S. (2020). Explicating the privacy paradox: A qualitative inquiry of online shopping consumers. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services , 52 , 101947.
Bloom, N., Fletcher, R. S., & Yeh, E. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on U.S. firms (No. w28314). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Donthu, N., & Gustafsson, A. (2020). Effects of COVID-19 on business and research. Journal of business research , 117 , 284.
Kuzminykh, I., Ghita, B., & Shiaeles, S. (2020). Comparative Analysis of Cryptographic Key Management Systems. In the Internet of Things, Smart Spaces, and Next Generation Networks and Systems (pp. 80-94). Springer, Cham.
