Shopify Pulled a Full-Body Faceplant on Cyber Monday (You Had ONE Job) - Shares Dip -6%

Crowdstrike that you? 

So it appears, Shopify, the platform that handles 10% of all U.S. e-commerce, decided Cyber Monday was the ideal time to completely check out. In a blink of an eye, the company gave every ecom-bro a double dose of “get rekt” with a full backend outage, login failures, and POS systems completely bricked… all the works. Basically every digital storefront from your cousin’s Etsy-core candle side hustle to major retail brands got treated to a surprise episode of online bondage. And not the fun kind (not that I know).

(Source: Giphy) 

Naturally, shares dropped nearly 6% as a result. To twist the knife even more, Adobe Analytics is estimating $14.2B in Cyber Monday online sales… up 6.3% YoY… which means this was the day where Shopify just had to stay upright, breathe steadily, and not spontaneously detonate. And yet here we are. 

(Source: CNBC) 

For instance, thousands of merchants lit up Downdetector by late morning. Shopify eventually jumped on the mic and said it “fixed an issue with the login authentication flow,” which really just means some poor bastard fat fingered a button they wish they hadn’t. Meanwhile, the U.S. consumer is out here hitting new PRs in spending. Black Friday clocked $11.8B, up 9% YoY. Cyber Monday’s shaping up even larger. Americans may hate everything about the economy, but apparently they still love cart abandonment games and free shipping thresholds.

The good part is that overall, Shopify’s own weekend numbers weren’t bad… $6.2B in Black Friday GMV, up 25% YoY. But analysts were already lukewarm heading into the week, and an outage on the biggest e-commerce day of the year isn’t exactly the kind of thing that restores confidence. Meaning now, we’ve got: a record-breaking shopping cycle, a platform running a third of modern retail, and an outage at the single worst possible moment. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Talk about fumbling the bag. Of course, we’ll see what the damage really is once the Cyber Monday tally comes out… but for now, Shopify just gave us all a perfect example of what “you had one job” really means. But hey, traders seem to be chilled out this morning as Shopify is up 2.5% in pre-market. How long that lasts though is anyone’s guess. Meaning, place your bets accordingly, friends. Until next time…

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.