Q&A（Question-and-Answer Session）is a session after the company's prepared remarks where institutional investors and analysts ask management questions. In this dialogue, you may find some valuable information that might affect the stock price in the following weeks.
Now let's look at some key points from Shopify Q4 2022 Q&A Session Transcript $Shopify(SHOP)$
Q:I wanted to ask about the impact of the price increase of your plans. Obviously, it’s not going to impact Q1 very much. So if you could give us some color on that and the expected cadence through the year, that’d be great.
A:I’ll take that one again. Look, our plan pricing has pretty much remained unchanged since I got here 13 years ago. In the same time, we’ve added significant value to our subscription offering to our merchants. And I – we want to keep making commerce better in it. So I think the price increase reflects a fair value exchange, but it also allows us to keep solving really, really tough problems and empower more people to become entrepreneurs.
And so it’s still early days. We’re watching this closely, but I think people view Shopify as incredible value whether you’re just getting started or you’re a much larger merchant on Plus or CCS. And so again, the value to cost ratio across every single Shopify product and Shopify plan is very much on the side of value. And so I think that – I think merchants understand it. And I think that the merchants that pay for Shopify every month believe they’re getting incredible value from us
Q:I wanted to ask about your relationship with Amazon. I’m curious how that’s might be evolving and how are you thinking about managing relationships with merchants and agencies that are interested in using Buy with Prime?
A:Look, we’ve said this before, but anything that’s going to make our merchants more successful, help them sell more, help them to convert more of their browsers into shoppers and buyers, we think it’s a great thing. We have a long history of partnering with technology companies, PayPal for example, was something that many years ago we integrated with because we thought it would help our merchants sell more and we continue to integrate with PayPal.
When it comes to Buy with Prime, we think any company that’s going to make their infrastructure available to merchants to sell more is a great thing. We like it. We’re in talks to the Amazon now to make that work, but it has to be done in a way that we think is important for merchants to have a relationship with their end consumer. And so there’s no update at this time. We’re still talking to Amazon about that. But again, anything that’s going to make our merchants’ lives better and make sure their business is future-proof, new technology that comes out, we want to make available to them.
Q:Just a quick question for you, Jeff. As we think about OpEx, I guess, first, how much of the risk impacted the 4Q operating expenses? And then you mentioned low single digits up in Q1. Is that the right way to think about the pace of spend in Q3 through Q4?
A:Well, you alluded to the reduction in force that we had earlier in the year, but also keep in mind that in the latter half of last year, we added the employees from Deliverr. For me, when you think about putting it in context, the operating expenses, we mentioned in the prepared remarks that Q4 versus Q3, when you look at it, was essentially flat when you pull out the onetime charges related to real estate and the legal and the severance. It grew barely from Q3 to Q4. And as we talked about in the guidance, it grew just – we anticipate to grow just a little bit from Q4 to Q1.
And so from our vantage point – and this is on top of, obviously, we delivered very strong growth – and Harley alluded to this earlier. We delivered very strong growth in Q4, and we obviously see growth in Q1 on a revenue basis as well. So you’ll have two successive quarters where you’re growing the top line and keeping operating expenses essentially in line. So we’re trying to be very mindful of what we’re doing to some of the comments that we’ve all made on this call. But that being said, we’re going to continue to invest where we should, but we’re being careful on OpEx.
The above Q&A are highlights that are edited for brevity. Click here for the full Shopify Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript.
If you want to know more details, you can click here to re-watch the Shopify Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call
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