Shopify hosts an ever growing number of shops, many of which will fail, and that's not an indication of anything wrong with the platform. By making it easy to start a business online, there is bound to be high-turnover. It is more important for Shopify to increase the number of the best sites on the internet. To that end, Shopify is steadily increasing the number of sites listed in the top 1M sites and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

As of this writing, Shopify powers 19% of the top 1M ecommerce sites. That's 2nd to Woocommerce at 28%, with Magento trailing behind with at 10%. The plurality of sites use 'other' ecommerce platforms, and there are dozens listed.

Most consumers don't yet have any reason to seek one platform over another. While it seems unlikely that Shopify will build a marketplace, they have introduced consumer facing features that help consumers checkout faster and track purchases conveniently. As some shoppers show a preference for Shopify sites, pressure will build for businesses to switch or start with Shopify.

Likewise, Shopify is working to help establish new channels for merchants to drive traffic and sales. By developing partnerships with Tiktok and Youtube, Shopify is helping merchants overcome the challenges that will be presented by privacy-focused tracking changes coming next year to Apple devices. That's an enormous benefit to merchants and it follows Shopify's vow to help arm the rebels.