Topic: How To Invest

Q: Pat: I am wondering about Shopify. What do you think? Is it a good stock?

Article Excerpt

A: Shopify Inc., $63.34, symbol SHOP on Toronto (Shares outstanding: 88.9 million; Market cap: $5.5 billion; www.shopify.com), offers merchants of all sizes cloud-based software to design, set up and manage stores across multiple sales channels. They include both permanent and temporary retail stores but also web, mobile and social-media platforms. The software is meant to give merchants a real-time snapshot of their entire business, including inventory, shipping and payments. The company charges monthly subscription fees of $29 to $179. It also charges for each credit card transaction: With the $179-a-month unlimited plan, the fee for each transaction is 2.25% + $0.30. That’s on top of the regular credit card fees the merchant already pays. The company’s revenue jumped 95.4%, to $205.2 million in 2015 from $105.0 million in 2014 (all figures except share price and market cap in U.S. dollars). Excluding unusual items, it lost $7.7 million, or $0.13 a share, in 2015. That, however, is a big improvement over its 2014 loss…