3 Things I Learned from Shopify CFO Chat at Goldman Sachs Event

Jeff Hoffmeister CFO of Shopify spoke with a Goldman Sachs analyst yesterday at their Communacopia & Technology Conference event, and I pulled a few interesting things out of the transcript -- though I still have no idea what a Communacopia is:

1 - In logistics, Flexport continues to be a solid partner of Shopify and the preferred solution for Shop Promise. That said, Shopify still wants to allow merchants to use Buy With Prime if this option is better for them, as long as all the data flows into the Shopify Admin.

It will be an interesting test of -- if merchants think consumers will trust a "generic" Shop Promise badge more than the Prime badge, or is it more of a... people will have both?

Since both programs (Shop Promise and the new Buy With Prime app) have not yet launched formally within the new partnership, it remains to be seen what the best strategy is.

Shopify's CFO also obliquely referenced the "differences" between Ryan Peterson the CEO of Flexport and Dave Clark, indicating perhaps that some interesting stuff went down there ;-)

2 - Shopify POS continues to gain momentum, particularly due to the fact that Shopify signed a partnership with Quickbooks after Quickbooks POS was discontinued.

Don't know how it's possible I missed a piece of significant Shopify news from April. It's a big company! 😂 The Quickbooks partnership is fantastic for Shopify POS I would imagine (in much the same way that Shopify was helped by taking Amazon Webstore customers when Amazon shut down that product).

the partnership gives Shopify access to a different stream of customers than their traditional Shopify merchants.

3 - Regarding the Enterprise market, Shopify is approaching it from 3 angles.

a: Shopify Plus. Some Enterprises really don't need what traditional Enterprise software is all about. Their business doesn't demand that. Plus is for them.

b. Hydrogen and Oxygen.

Essentially, this is pulling the front-end off of Shopify Plus, using Shopify's hosting and React-based front-end technology.

and finally

c. CCS.

He didn't go into this too much, but primarily right now I find that CCS is about two things. One is Shop Pay Accelerated Checkout. In much the same way you would think about Apple Pay, Paypal, etc. The other part is is Shop Checkout, which is the full-fledged customizable Checkout which then flows into the Shopify backoffice (if you want it to) or your own systems.

I would expect that Hydrogen and Oxygen are in the mix here for CCS as well, so there can be overlaps between all the approaches.