National Post (National Edition)
SHOPIFY POSITIONS ITSELF FOR POST-COVID COMMERCE.
Post-COVID commerce
TORONTO • Most retailers may be closed due to the global pandemic, but that isn’t stopping Shopify Inc. from expanding its suite of point-of-sale offerings in Canada.
On Tuesday the company announced it is introducing its tap-and-chip payment terminal, which will let retailers accept debit and credit card transactions, north of the border, a move the comes just a week after it unveiled a new POS software system.
In an exclusive interview with the Financial Post, Shopify director of retail Ian Black said that the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing traditional retailers to be more flexible, and they are turning to technology to make it happen.
“Sophisticated retailers are using technology that blends the offline and online world and builds direct consumer relationships across all of those channels,” Black said.
“Retail, for the next 12, or 24 months, is going to continue to be a challenging environment to operate in, and having the flexibility and resilience of having your off-line and online businesses merged is an incredibly powerful set of tools for retailers.”
Shopify was born as an e-commerce company, but they’ve had a hand in physical retail since 2013, when the company first introduced a point-of-sale kit including a cash drawer, receipt printer, card reader and the software to make it all work.
To hear Black tell it, though, that system was just prologue to the more powerful software platform that the company launched last week. He said the old software was really just built for small merchants going to a farmer’s market or doing a local pop-up event.
“This is the first time Shopify has built a point-ofsale system specifically for retail stores,” he said. “So it has an advanced set of features for managing staff, managing and tracking inventory and reporting on your business. Those are advanced features that Shopify POS has never had before.”
But if this latest version of the software is new, the underlying vision has been kicking around for a while.
Among Shopifolk, the idea of “omnichannel commerce” is something of an obsession; the dream is that innovative merchants will have a single, strong brand relationship with consumers across physical retail, e-commerce sales through the company website, plus maybe extra sales on Amazon.com or through ads in Instagram stories.
In the omnichannel way of thinking, the physical retail store might be mostly a showroom, or a space for events to strengthen the brand relationship with customers, which will lead to more sales online or through other channels.
The value of merchants straddling the worlds of e-commerce and physical retail was emphasized last week when Shopify reported its first-quarter earnings. The company disclosed that over a six-week period from mid-March to the end of April, retailers that used its omnichannel services lost 71 per cent of in-store sales due to COVID-19 shutdowns. However, Shopify observed that those same merchants were able to replace 94 per cent of those lost in-store sales with e-commerce orders.
“We knew that this is how modern commerce worked, but even we were surprised to see the ingenuity and adaptability on the Shopify platform,” Black said.
Black said that as stores open up, he hopes that point-of-sale software will allow merchants to do curbside transactions and contactless sales, and give stores the flexibility to straddle the online and physical worlds.
One of the major selling points of using the Shopify tap-and-chip card reader is that it integrates seamlessly with Shopify software to give a single, unified view of a merchant’s business.
Shopify announced their card reader almost a year ago, at the company’s annual Unite partner conference; for the past six months, the device was only available for merchants in the United States.
This follows Shopify’s normal pattern; the United States remains the company’s biggest market, so new products are introduced there first. The company started its Shopify Capital loans program in the U.S. before expanding it, and the nascent Shopify Fulfillment Network only exists south of the border for now.
But Black said that the company tries to get products to Canadian merchants as quickly as possible, and for much of the past year, the company has been doing the certification work to integrate their device into Canada’s payments infrastructure. The Canadian version of the Shopify card reader is being launched in partnership with Interac.
“For us, the survival and success of Canadian retailers is deeply personal. We want to walk into a store in our neighbourhood or purchase from a store that we know is Canadian, and feel proud that we’ve supported them.”
Shopify said they will be giving away 3,000 devices to Toronto retailers, as part of a partnership with the City of Toronto and Digital Mainstreet, an organization that helps Toronto businesses get online.