Shopify Inc US (NYSE:SHOP) has already seen its share price rise more than 140% so far this year. The cloud-based merchant solutions platform has been growing exponentially and SHOP stock has become somewhat of a market darling as a result. With the shares pulling back this week from above $120 and a price-to-sales ratio of 22, many investors are starting to question whether or not the firm has become overvalued.

I’d argue the opposite and say that SHOP stock is only getting started. The firm is in a great position to continue its upward trajectory over the next year and I wouldn’t be surprised to see another bumper year in 2018 with triple-digit gains. Here’s a look at three reasons the Shopify rally is likely to resume.

Strategic Partnerships

Shopify wrote the book on turning your enemies into allies. You might think that an e-commerce business would fall prey to its bigger and better funded peers Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY). However in Shopify’s case, the opposite is true. The firm has signed partnership agreements with both firms that allow Shopify users to take advantage of both massive distribution channels.

Shopify’s ability to make strategic deals like those ones is one of the main drivers of its success. The company has a clear plan to build out its platform into the ultimate e-commerce dashboard and giving up a small fraction of transaction revenue in order to work toward an overarching plan shows that management is focused on future growth rather than making a quick buck.

A Wide Moat

One of the reasons those strategic partnerships are so important to me from an investing standpoint is that they widen the firm’s moat substantially. Shopify stock may be getting more expensive, but one of the things that makes it a worthwhile consideration is its competitive advantage.As a one-stop shop for small and medium-sized merchants, Shopify has positioned itself as one of the only tools you need to get your business up and running. By constantly rolling out new offerings, the company is growing its ecosystem and enticing new customers, but more importantly, it’s burrowing deeper into its existing customers’ business.

Switching from Shopify to another platform would be a major disruption, especially with Amazon and eBay now included in the Shopify ecosystem. Those high switching costs give Shopify a relatively wide moat and make the stock a safer bet than other tech firms.

Growth Potential

Another big reason the Shopify stock price is likely to rise is the firm’s future growth potential. Shopify has been growing its clients quickly over the past year. The firm’s most recent earnings report confirmed that more than 500,000 merchants now use the platform. That’s a huge leap from the 165,000 merchants it had back in 2014.

Not only has the company been successfully growing its business over the past few years, the firm’s addressable market is huge as well. Because Shopify’s platform is cloud based and the firm is able to quickly add on new services and offerings, the business is extremely scalable. Although the bulk of the firm’s users are small and medium-sized businesses, larger companies are also jumping on board. In the last quarter heavyweights like Visa Inc (NYSE:V), Buzzfeed and Frito-Lay all launched Shopify stores.

As Shopify CFO Russell Norman Jones put it, Shopify’s ability to attract customers from outside its core markets means that the firm is not only growing its slice of the pie, but is increasing the size of the pie itself as well.

The Bottom Line on SHOP Stock

Shopify has been growing exponentially, and that’s the reason the share price has risen so rapidly this year. The company was able to grow its revenue by 75% from a year earlier and the company’s gross profits rose 83% over the same period. All that and the firm hasn’t even turned a profit yet. I think profitability is on the horizon for Shopify and when it arrives, SHOP stock investors will be handsomely rewarded.

The company has a lot of upside and despite what might appear to be a high price-tag, Shopify stock hasn’t a lot more to deliver in the year to come.

As of this writing, Laura Hoy was long AMZN.