Shopify to expand checkout platform beyond its own merchants, in a first

Shopify is starting to share the love.

The Canadian e-comm company will offer its one-click checkout system to all merchants on Google and Facebook—not just Shopify partners.

• Shop Pay will be available to all sellers on Facebook and Instagram this summer, and on Google later this year.
• This is the first time Shopify has widened a service beyond its own users.

Why? Shopify wants its platform to be “the preferred checkout for all merchants,” it said in a blog post. How it's making its case:

• “According to studies, cart abandonment averages 70%, with nearly 20% occurring because of a complicated checkout process,” noted Carl Rivera, Shopify’s VP of product.
• Compared to the typical process, Shopify boasts that Shop Pay is 70% faster, with a 1.72x higher conversion rate.

And Shopify isn’t concerned that a broader base means retailers will drop the platform.

“You now need to reconcile inventory across eight or nine channels. You now have to handle shipping and fulfillment across eight or nine channels. And so as the complexity increases, the value of using Shopify as the central retail operating system also increases,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein told Bloomberg.

+ 1: Last week, Shopify teamed up with Affirm to offer a buy now, pay later option for all US merchants.—KM