Shopify Plus share of monthly recurring revenue

Caveats: Shopify Plus share of monthly recurring revenue

• What the number is. Shopify states it as a share of MRR, for example "Shopify Plus contributed $3.5 million, or 17%, of MRR compared with 11% of MRR as of March 31, 2016." (Q1 2017 results release, the first such sentence). MRR is the subscription plan fees in force on the last day of the quarter, so the share excludes variable platform fees, apps, themes, domains and payments. It is not Plus's share of revenue or of GMV. MRR and the Plus share are management's operating metrics: unaudited and not tagged in XBRL.
• Coverage. Shopify first printed a Plus share in the Q1 2017 results release, with March 31, 2016 as a comparative; the 2016 quarter-ends rest on the prior-year comparatives in the four 2017 releases. The last statement is for June 30, 2024: "Shopify Plus contributed $52 million, or 31%, of MRR" (Q2 2024 results release). A search of the eight results releases from Q3 2024 to Q2 2026, the quarterly MD&As, the Forms 10-K for 2024 and 2025 and the Forms 10-Q found no Plus share of MRR, and Shopify has not explained the change. The dataset ends at June 30, 2024 and nothing is estimated after it.
• Rounding. Shares are whole percents. Plus MRR is stated to $0.1 million up to the Q4 2022 release and to whole millions from the Q1 2023 release, so a ratio of the two can differ from the stated percent by about a point. All 30 own-quarter pairs are consistent with the stated share.
• Restatements. After Shopify revised how paid trials enter MRR in the first quarter of 2024, two shares were restated: March 31, 2023 from 34% to 33% and June 30, 2023 from 29% to 30%. The published values are the later ones, and the first statements are in plusSharePctFirst. The shares for September 30 and December 31, 2023 (31% each) were stated before the revision and never restated, so they sit on the old MRR basis (column mrrBasis). Shopify publishes no revised Plus dollar amounts, and the restated March 2023 share cannot be reproduced from the dollar amount first published, even allowing for rounding.
• Contradiction for December 31, 2022. The Q4 2022 release says 33%, the text of the Q4 2023 release repeats 33%, and the table of the Q4 2023 release prints 34%. The dataset publishes 33% because two statements agree. The 34% and the arithmetic on the four total-MRR figures Shopify has printed for that date are in the row note.
• Shopify's explanations. In six releases (Q3 2020, Q4 2020, Q1 2021, Q2 2021, Q1 2022 and Q2 2022) Shopify explains the change from the prior-year share in the same sentence, and the clause is quoted in the row note. A falling share does not mean falling Plus MRR: the Plus dollar amounts as first stated rose in every quarter from Q1 2017 to Q2 2024.
• Other charts are not this measure. Shopify's investor decks chart Plus as a slice of subscription solutions revenue, not of MRR, and still do after the results releases stopped giving the share. Those percentages are a different measure and are not extracted here.
• Price effects. Shopify changed Plus pricing in 2024. Updated pricing took effect for new merchants on February 8, 2024 and for existing merchants on May 8, 2024, unless they locked in their 2023 rate with a 3-year commitment. Part of any movement in the share after the first quarter of 2024 can therefore come from price rather than merchant counts, and Shopify does not quantify it.
• totalMrrUsdM is total MRR as printed in the same release as the share (first publication). It can differ from the latest value in the annual-metrics dataset: 2022-12-31 is 109.5 here against 109 there, and 2023-12-31 is 149 here against 144 there. totalMrrRevisedUsdM gives the revised 2023 totals (114, 135, 137 and 144) from the Q1 2024 release.