Ecommerce has surged as a result of the coronavirus. Shopify reported earnings yesterday morning and the results were incredibly impressive. Stores on the Shopify platform sold over $30 billion in goods last quarter for a 119% increase from the prior year. As MarketplacePulse reports, this growth helped (Shopify surpass ebay in total merchandise sales for the quarter)[https://www.marketplacepulse.com/stats/shopify/shopify-gross-merchandise-volume-gmv-42].

Shopify processed a little over $60 billion in transactions in 2019 and has done over $47 billion in the first half of this year alone. Notably, Shopify isn't a single shopping destination. There are millions of stores on the Shopify platform selling on their own sites, via social media accounts, using Buy Buttons, and other easily enabled integrations. This strategy is the complete antithesis to the strategy of Amazon, ebay, and virtually all other large ecommerce companies.

Rather than centralizing listings, Shopify has taken an approach that enables merchants to build strong brands of their own. The focus is generally not on Shopify. Most customers are hardly aware of what backend ecommerce platform is being utilized. This allows for stronger relationships between the brands and their own customers, where the relationship can be nurtured.

After years of centralizing trends on the internet, perhaps a more open decentralized trend is beginning to form. The numbers from Shopify certainly suggests that may be the case.