Shopify’s Complicated Relationship With Payments
Ah, Shopify and the payments industry. Two great tastes that seem to hate each other.
Very loud word on the street is that Shopify is releasing new checkout and payment APIs and slowly kicking out those who has been trying to circumvent its checkout either for subscription, extended payment plans, financing, etc.
I know very large Shopify merchants whose recurring subscription payments bill dwarf their Shopify bills. Not a good look for the platform. At this point, aren't you just a not-so-great CMS?
In order for this to work out, Shopify needs to just about triple its payment and checkout innovation compared to today. How we can be in 2020 and still not have any whiff of when real tokenization might appear is very odd.
Tokenization is the key to the whole enchilada. If Shopify forces adoption of its payment token, then innovation can resume. But the core is a bit broken, and in the last year have only nibbled at the edges of extending the payment authorization to capture window, and in a way that is still wholly inadequate for many industries.
Will Tobi become everyone's new payments czar as the new CPO?
Will Stripe buy a CMS and try to go after Shopify?
What of real B2B payments? zzz... Bueller?
If Shopify is firmly in the driver's seat for payments (compared to more flexible platforms), is innovation fast and flexible enough for an entire world of merchants' needs? And if innovation is not quite fast enough for "everyone", does Shopify care? Seeing as they are not trying to solve every single scenario out there?
Dylan Whitman shared some thoughts: “I don’t know if I would call it “kicking out.” These guys have been begging for this checkout inclusion forever. That being said it’s certainly a benefit for Shopify Plus because they weren’t getting their rev share on those checkouts…Outside of the economics it’s always a better and more elegant experience for the customer to complete checkout in the native checkout. And I think what’s better for the customer will ultimately win in the long run. And of course the way things were happening from an app to app to system communication standpoint was a nightmare. Duplicate orders, impossible problems with bundles etc. This will be a win for merchants and end customers and if it’s not for the third party apps then they were never viable as independent companies anyways and were just arbitraging a short term gap. My hope is this just puts continuous pressure on innovation within the ecosystem. Find new value to add and stay relevant.” (Bolding emphasis mine)
