Co-founder and CEO Tobi Lutke has positioned the company as an invaluable provider of cloud-based commerce solutions to small- and medium-sized businesses, along with a growing number of larger enterprises such as Tesla Motors and Procter & Gamble. Shopify helps users sell their goods across multiple channels, including online retail marketplaces such as Amazon.com and eBay, social media giants such as Facebook and Pinterest, and standalone websites and brick-and-mortar stores. In addition, Shopify provides crucial back-office services such as sales tracking, payment processing, and inventory management. It’s a comprehensive commerce platform that, along with a growing list of integrated third-party apps, provides users pretty much everything they need to run their business.”Shopify is exactly this: the only platform you need to build your empire,” reads a letter from Lutke on Shopify’s investor-relations website. “Shopify is the first thing our merchants log into in the morning and the last thing they log out of in the evening. It’s at the heart of their business — a responsibility that we take very seriously.”Moreover, Shopify has only just begun to fulfill its massive growth potential. The number of businesses using its platform is still just a tiny fraction of the 10 million merchants with fewer than 500 employees in its key markets, as estimated by consulting firm AMI Partners, and the 46 million such merchants worldwide. With so much growth still to come, Shopify appears poised to deliver strong gains to investors in the years ahead.

Source: Top Online Retail Stocks to Buy in 2017 — The Motley Fool