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Comment by rublev | Hacker News Reader

We are a public company, no guessing required. Here is the relevant press release and quote:

> Gross Merchandise Volume (“GMV”) for the third quarter was $3.8 billion, an increase of 100% over the third quarter of 2015. GMV processed through Shopify Payments grew to $1.5 billion, which accounted for 39% of GMV processed in the quarter.

https://press.shopify.com/releases/shopify-announces-third-q...

That is really low, for context a teeny tiny ISO does $1 billion in processing volume a month, so your comparable to one of the hundreds of 2 to 4 employee ISOs out there.

forgive my ignorance but in this context what does ISO stand for?

Independent Sales Organization [1], Shopify for example is partnered with Stripe who is an ISO. Neither push big volume so their platform costs are much higher than their competitors.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account

Really? Stripe doesn't have big volume? That seems... surprising

Not at all. It only depends on your definition of big volume.

Source: By some metrics my company is > 1% of Adyen... or Stripe... or whatever competitor we decide to use at the moment.

If a single company can be as much as 1% of an entire payment provider, they gotta be quite small, right? Well, that's what I think every day when I see news about them :D

Actually, I gotta retract from my other comment.

It seems that both Adyen and Brainsomething processed over 50B last year whereas Stripe didn't.

Stripe didn't publish numbers (I'd dare saying because they are very small and that would scare big companies away), but the valuation at 5 Billion dollars indicates that they are less than 1/10th of the aforementioned providers.

Conclusion: Stripe = The hype underdog with strong marketing :D

There are 2-4 employee companies processing $1B+ per month? Source please.

No written source to provide, but I know of a 2 person shop that provides merchant services (ISO) processing ~$400MM/month. Not $1B, but is certainly possible I suppose.

Moyta: Where did you get that $1B per month figure? That seems very very high.

Cheers to the CEO of Shopify answering a question on Hacker News and on Black Friday - that is awesome!

I appreciate that Shopify took a slightly more conservative approach to growth resulting in less feast / famine.

Their RoR stack might have gone out of fashion but it seems like they consistently made the right decisions considering a lot of their customers rely on the Shopify platform for their livelihoods and not just to express their opinions in 140 characters.

Fashion? Fashion is a terrible way to make a technical decision. I'll take a Rails stack over the JS framework(s) of the millisecond any day.

THIS, even rails is not cool anymore. It just fucking works

It's not terrible. It is an important factor when considering the pool of devs that know said technology. It's the reason why I've chosen PHP for some projects in spite of my abject hatred for it (for purely aesthetic reasons mind you.)...lots of devs are very familiar with C-like languages.

Except Rails took off with the same fashion and hype and hipsterism. It's just older.

nobody buys at the same rate as black friday all year round. doesn't extrapolate to the entire year.

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