Shopify Has Forced Payment Vendors to Choose Sides in Platform Wars
I've said before here that we haven't seen a company like Shopify in the eCommerce market in the last 20 years -- while they didn't build their eCommerce payment stack from scratch, they integrated several services (some in-house: Capital, Cash, some external: Affirm, Stripe) into a payment offering called Shop Pay.
Shopify's growth in the SMB market (and increasingly in middle market, with aspirations beyond this) threatens the notion that an eCommerce platform is agnostic to its payments partner.
The difference in the revenue growth of Shopify and the revenue growth of BigCommerce tells this story well. Shopify's growth comes from payments and other merchant services (they hope for logistics in the future) that depend on orders and GMV. BigCommerce, on the other hand, is more of a traditional SaaS player with Monthly Recurring Revenue and Annual Recurring Revenue -- a much slower-moving (and less volatile) model.
Companies like Paypal/Braintree and Adyen worry that a larger Shopify could threaten them.
Paypal, for its part, has never been directly associated with a platform -- this changed last year when Paypal invested in German eCommerce platform Shopware: the investment has helped them enter the North American market. Ostensibly, Paypal sees the writing on the wall. While you can integrate Paypal with Shopify, a world where Shopify dominates in every market is not a hospitable place for Paypal/Braintree.
Similar for Adyen. Adyen has always had more functionality and played more up-market than Stripe. Unsurprisingly, Adyen joined the MACH Alliance earlier this year to plant a flag in an alternative approach to eCommerce platforms in the Enterprise space -- and ensure that if the approach takes off, it will be the dominant provider for this type of eCommerce platform approach.
The wildcard in this discussion? Apple and Google. Mobile dominates checkout - particularly in lower AOV categories. I wonder if Apple sees this as an opportunity to edge out other payment providers in the long term and repeat their move two years ago against Meta when they limited the amount of data that could be shared with apps -- crippling advertising targeting algorithms.
An aggressive Apple could command higher fees in the name of consumer privacy and information sharing (Apple Pay does not share the full credit card number with merchants).
Even if Apple doesn't bet on a platform horse, its position with consumers and hardware distribution gives it an extraordinary amount of leverage with the platforms themselves should it choose to take advantage of this.
