Shopify Launches ‘Shop’

Shopify has introduced a new app called ‘Shop’ –– and with it potentially an entire brand-new organization –– that they intend to compete straight with Amazon.

The app is a brand-new brand and an entirely new business design for Shopify. From early indications, the business appears to think this brand-new company might be bigger than ‘Shopify’ itself and maybe the next phase in an overall rebrand of the business from ‘Shopify’ to merely ‘Store’.

For many years, every Shopify vendor has had its own store, with its own presence, accessed via the web or through their own app. Today Shopify has altered that –– constructing their app that permits you to purchase directly from their community of brands & & retailers all in one place.

Shopify’s ‘Chief Item Officer’ teased the launch yesterday, calling it ‘one of Shopify’s most significant products ever’, before exposing the launch totally today.

From that alone, you can see how high priority this is within Shopify. They have launched a brand-new Twitter account for it: twitter.com/shop, and a website at https://shop.app –– both further indicating their enormous ambitions for this.

The app launch also follows their rebrand of Shopify Pay to ‘Store Pay’ (and, naturally, their NYSE share ticker is simply ‘SHOP’). Simply put, they’re attempting to own the word ‘Shop’ as a brand-new brand, and location this app at the center of western commerce a little like Tmall or JD.com did in China.

Shopify will no doubt be hoping the app takes space on users’ house screens, taking a few of the attention they use presently to patronize Amazon, eBay, Depop, and even merchants’ own apps, instead of shopping directly through their walled garden.

While the app is called ‘Store’, the idea is more similar to a ‘Shopping mall’ –– something familiar to anybody who’s gone shopping online in China, by means of Alibaba’s Tmall, or JD. While Shopify’s earnings for 2018 was a little over $1billion, JD’s 2019 earnings were $83 billion. If ‘Shop’ allows them to push into other markets, it might assist in opening some of that income too.

The app also includes plan tracking, purchase history, updates from stores you follow, product suggestions from stores you have actually followed, or previously bought from. The app has been in production because 2018, with a previous MVP called ‘Arrive’ focusing simply on the bundle tracking part of the journey.

For now, they aren’t pressing item recommendations from competing retailers within the Shopify ecosystem unless you have revealed a prior interest, but –– just as Google and Amazon make big amounts of their profits through enabling the seller to promote to consumers –– no doubt Shopify will present functions like this in the longer term.

There’s no word on whether sellers and brand names utilizing alternate eCommerce platforms can access to offer through ‘Store’. In the meantime, it’s likely Shopify would maintain that as a competitive advantage for their own customers, however –– if the aspiration to rebrand the entire business towards ‘Shop’ is as it plans to be –– it’s likely they would open up direct access with time to others, and perhaps even allow huge brands such as Nike, Adidas, or luxury services such as LVMH or Kering to go virtually ‘DTC’ via the app, as they do by means of China’s online mall apps.