Shopify beats earnings forecast as e-commerce businesses grow

Shopify reported revenue of $978 million in last week’s Q4 earnings report, up 94% year-over-year, and adjusted earnings of $1.58 per share – easily surpassing analysts’ expectations of $1.26 a share.

The company and its sellers benefited from the large shift to online buying in 2020, including significant growth during the holiday season. With consumers spending a total of $120 billion on the platform last year, Shopify-powered websites saw some of their best traffic and sales.

Despite the reopening of brick-and-mortar stores, the direct-to-consumer marketplace expects revenue growth to continue in 2021 – good news for e-commerce business owners. In their earnings’ call, Shopify said it expects this year’s growth to be higher than any year prior to 2020.

With such growth, it’s no surprise that FE International saw a 25% increase in the volume of Shopify app acquisitions over the last three quarters. A listing of Shopify businesses currently up for acquisition is available on the FE website.

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Audio recordings of text posts provide no SEO benefits

While adding an audio version of website text is an accessibility best practice, it neither improves or hurts a page’s SEO. The clarification came last week during the Google Search Central SEO hangout call.

While Google processes photo and video differently from text, it does not do the same with audio. Thus, there is no direct benefit. However, an indirect benefit could come from greater traffic due to the increase in accessibility. 

Additionally, Google clarified that it does not view audio as duplicate content, so including a recording of text on the page will not hurt SEO, either.