Evidence of meeting #68 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was store.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chief Platform Officer, Business Development, Shopify Inc.
Fifty-five thousand are currently actively selling every day.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
Is that 55,000 retail operators across Canada only?
Chief Platform Officer, Business Development, Shopify Inc.
No. That's in 100 countries; 5,000 are in Canada.
Chief Platform Officer, Business Development, Shopify Inc.
Plus a 2% transaction fee.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
Thank you. And that 2% transaction fee is on top of any bank charges or transaction fees relative to payment.
Chief Platform Officer, Business Development, Shopify Inc.
Correct. You can expect that some large companies, like the Foo Fighters, for example, won't want to give me 2% of what they are making. So there is a plan at $179 per month with no transaction fee, just to be clear.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
Clearly with 55,000 companies operating through your platform around the world, the retailer establishes its own pricing. It establishes where the competitive positioning is online.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
I'm just curious. When you talk about $750 million last year to $1.5 billion this year in terms of transactions, is that your total retail transactions accumulated across all 55,000?
Chief Platform Officer, Business Development, Shopify Inc.
That's correct.
Chief Platform Officer, Business Development, Shopify Inc.
It's mostly a long tail as well, so it's not a Pareto—
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
No, no, I understand.
Mr. Hamilton, you talk about being an e-commerce adapter. How many salespeople do you actually have on the road?
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
And the 35 just go from school to school, build a clientele, and then they turn the clientele around and point them to the online application and where they can find the right package?
Director, Marketing, S-Trip
Yes. They typically find the influencers in the schools. Those influencers then tell all their friends. Then all their friends are directed to the website.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
In your case, how do you market yourself? Is it strictly through your sales representative, or are there social media applications?
Director, Marketing, S-Trip
Yes, it's all about sharing stories, where a story travels, and we use social media and video to share those stories.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
How do you select your tour routes? Obviously, it's partially through experience with the tours. Last year's tours were good, some were bad, and you make your changes. How do you shop for new tour routes?
Director, Marketing, S-Trip
We get a lot of customer feedback to understand what they want, and where they want to go. We typically find with students that at their age it's their first trip. It's not so much about where they go as much as about whom they go with and what they do when they're there. So we focus not so much on, “We should start going to Peru”, for example, but more on what we should do when we go to Cancun. We should now offer a volunteer excursion, because that's what everyone wants or we should offer a surf camp, because that's what everyone wants.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
Thank you.
Mr. Bouchard, I'm just curious about your business model. What is the predominant type of product or goods that you're shipping? Are these hard goods only?