The post-pandemic euphoria seems to have died down. Shopify announced on Tuesday the layoff of 10% of its workforce, or nearly 1,000 employees worldwide. The group had gone from 1,900 employees in 2016 to 10,000 in 2021, after an explosion in e-commerce since the Covid pandemic.
However, the Canadian e-commerce publishing and hosting company has revised its forecasts downwards. “Growth is still steady, but it’s not a significant five-year leap forward,” says CEO Tobi Lütke in a letter to employees.
The company expected the strong growth in online sales to continue coming out of the pandemic. “It is now clear that this gamble did not pay off,” acknowledges the CEO.
1.7 million merchants worldwide
While the layoffs mainly concern the recruitment and sales units, Tobi Lütke clarified that they also affect “over-specialized and duplicate” roles.
These job cuts follow waves of layoffs and hiring freezes at other tech companies. Netflix, for example, cut about 300 jobs in June to deal with the loss of subscribers. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Google, have announced that they will slow recruitment until the end of the year.
Shopify has 1.7 million merchants in 175 countries. The company has been established in France since 2018, coming to hunt on the land of competitors such as Prestashop, Magento, BigCommerce and others. Last year, the number of online store creations increased by 61% in France compared to 2019, Emilie Benoit-Vernay, country manager France of Shopify, told ZDNet last year.