Shopify Inc. - Class A Subordinate Voting Shares (SHOP)

Revenue splits in two. Platform subscriptions are steady and predictable but smaller. Most of the money comes from merchant solutions: payment acceptance, lending, shipping and other services priced in proportion to a store's turnover. Hence the headline metric is gross merchandise volume across all stores.

Customers range from a single seller to a large brand. Small merchants arrive and leave in bulk, so what matters is not retention of an individual store but growth in total volume. The upper segment is served by a separate product at a higher price point.

The company sold its logistics arm, acknowledging it as capital-intensive and off-profile, and returned to a model without warehouses of its own. Risks are consumer spending, competition from marketplaces such as Amazon where a seller needs no site at all, and dependence on payment infrastructure. No dividend.