Shopify is looking to add another flywheel to its business. That flywheel is buyers. By “buyers” I mean consumers - shoppers. If the world is a marketplace, there are buyers and sellers ;-)

There are two reasons to add a buyer flywheel:

1. To feed their merchant flywheel. If they add value to buyers then, more merchants sign up and fewer of them churn.

2. To increase their GMV growth rate.

Doing anything with buyers is brilliant. It doesn't need to be a marketplace. Why? It's completely blue ocean territory.

No one else is in the platform business is even in the ballgame here. Also, most other providers don't have the willingness or the capital to chase them.

Chuck Gorman shared some thoughts: “If they can address this effectively it will be a game changer, and if they do it cost effectively/cost controlled for merchants they could see exponential growth in the adoption of their platform in my opinion…The question will be can they deliver this at scale without creating significant incremental and/or exponential costs for merchants.”

It's an interesting thought experiment but will not remain so for long. I expect each quarter you will see new features in their Shop app. Moreover, this allows Shopify an entry into the marketing tools space. If Shopify is able to drive more sales, they will charge an extra transactional fee. (Wait, it's coming...)