Abstract

Ottawa, Canada-based Shopify, a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) e-commerce solution provider, helped entrepreneurs, small to medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises to set up their e-stores. The company offered a web builder along with various templates, secure payment options, Search Engine Optimization, analytics, and many more features to facilitate the setting up of online stores. The Shopify web builder was user friendly; even people with no coding or e-commerce experience could easily set up their online stores. Even though Shopify offered a feature rich solution to e-commerce merchants, it was criticized for the cost that merchants had to incur to set up a website of their liking. Despite the cost concerns that many people had, Shopify was hosting close to 377,000 online stores by 2020 and boasted customers like Budweiser, the World Wildlife Fund, General Electric, Amnesty International, Tesla Motors, Encyclopedia Britannica, Foo Fighters, and GitHub.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand how to comprehend business objectives, system functionality, and information requirements of an e-commerce site
• Examine whether the features offered by e-commerce solution providers have a bearing on the quality of the e-commerce website.

Keywords

Online store; web builder; e-commerce; cloud-based SaaS; establishing an e-commerce presence; objective of setting up the e-commerce site; information requirements of e-commerce website