Shopify launches retail card reader in Canada in bid to be more flexible

TORONTO Most retailers may be closed due to the global pandemic, but that isn’t stopping Shopify Inc. from expanding its suite of pointof-sale offerings in Canada.

On Tuesday the company announced it is introducing its tapand-chip payment terminal, which will let retailers accept debit and credit card transactions, north of the border, a move that 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 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 offline and online businesses merged is an incredibly powerful set of tools for retailers.”

Shopify was born as an ecommerce 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 farmers’ market or doing a local pop-up event.

“This is the first time Shopify has built a point-of-sale 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, ecommerce 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.

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.

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 Canadian version of the Shopify card reader is being launched in partnership with Interac.

Advanced set of features for managing staff, managing and tracking inventory.