News / Shopify axes staff and bleeds red ink as e-commerce slows

© Davide Bonaldo

The fizz is going out of e-commerce. Shopify, which rode the wave of the pandemic-induced surge to become Canada’s most valuable company, now finds itself mired in red ink and forced to lay off 10% of its workforce, having to scale back to a significantly lower growth curve.

Within two days, management announced 1,000 redundancies and tabled a $1.2bn deficit.

When he announced the staff cuts on Tuesday, company founder and CEO Toby Lütke acknowledged that his reading of the growth trajectory ...