Shopify paid $450 million for warehouse robots. It sold them for $12.7 million.
Shopify set out to give merchants Amazon-grade logistics, buying 6 River Systems and Deliverr. In 2023 it sold logistics to Flexport for a 13% stake, and 6 River for $12.7 million.
Transcript
Shopify paid about $450 million for a warehouse robotics company in 2019. In 2023 it sold it for $12.7 million.
In June 2019, Shopify announced the Shopify Fulfillment Network, pledging over $1B of investment over five years. The idea: give small merchants Amazon-grade logistics, and the last reason to surrender to Amazon disappears.
Shopify bought 6 River Systems for its warehouse robots, for about $450 million. In 2022 it bought Deliverr, in a deal valued at about $2.1 billion.
In 2022, Shopify's network was still offered only to a subset of merchants in the United States. On May 4, 2023, Shopify announced it would sell most of its logistics business to Flexport, for a 13% equity stake and no cash, alongside a 20% workforce cut. The stock surged.
Building what your rival does best means running a different business from the one you know. One case does not prove software companies cannot run logistics. Shopify paid a lot to learn it could not, this time.
The records behind this video
Every figure in the video comes from this Decision Record, each with its sources.
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