Shopify Stock Upgraded By Legendary Wall St. Analyst

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Since its 2006 launch, Shopify has slowly but surely built an $83 billion software business by "arming the rebels" – the mom and mom shops and upstart digital-native consumer brands hawking everything from floral arrangements to workout clothes online.

But its next big opportunity may be arming some of retail's larger incumbents, from global toy brand Mattel to shoe retailer Steve Madden, and it's a huge piece of the nearly $850 billion market opportunity standing in front of the e-commerce software giant.

That's according to legendary wall street tech analyst Mark Mahaney and his colleagues at the research firm Evercore ISI. Mahaney and company recently upgraded Shopify's stock to an "outperform" rating with a price target of $75 per share. The stock was trading around $64 at the time.

And a major component of the Shopify upside that Evercore sees has to do with Shopify's work in recent years to appeal to large enterprises in addition to small and mid-sized merchants. In interviews with Shopify merchants, Mahaney and team found that the moves seem to be working. In addition to Mattel and Steve Madden, Shopify has also attracted large fast-growing brands like Kim Kardashian's Skims apparel company.

"Merchants were consistently bullish on SHOP's ability to penetrate Enterprise merchants, with the majority believing SHOP has built out the capabilities to address Enterprise merchants needs over the past 3-4yrs," the research team wrote.

These merchants also told the Evercore team that migrating onto Shopify software has gotten easier and that the ability to pick and choose only certain Shopify tools – maybe it's only the Shop Pay checkout feature to start – is attractive.

Then there's Amazon . It'd be fair to call Shopify and Amazon frenemies. Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lutke hasn't been shy about his feelings about how Amazon views sellers.

"Amazon's worldview is that merchants don't matter; factories and consumers matter," Lutke told this reporter years ago in an onstage interview at an industry conference. "Everything in between is Jeff's [Bezos] opportunity," he said, referring to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.