As e-commerce expands, Shopify is developing new features to help them capture a larger share of the online retail stores. They are competing with Amazon on many fronts and are expanding their offering to include B2B e-commerce market and Twitter users.
These features come at a good time when stocks are slowing down, and companies are trying their hardest to avoid more selloffs.
Supply chain, inflation, and coming out of the COVID era all have to do with Shopify’s recent decline. In order to confront this challenge, they are choosing to expand their total addressable market and to tap into new areas of commerce. Both areas of change have huge potential.
Although you may have seen this announcement many people are wondering what these announcements really mean:
Shopify said they didn’t want to “just go after direct-to-consumer businesses, big and small, but to now go after wholesale business, which is a huge untapped market.” And not only is wholesale untapped but this new partnership with Twitter would be the first of its kind. Shopify is the very first commerce platform to partner with Twitter.
One feature included in this update brings the ease of the Shopify experience to wholesalers. Here is an excerpt from the announcement explaining this. “B2B on Shopify makes it seamless for Shopify Plus merchants to sell to other businesses on the same platform that they use for D2C. Say goodbye to spreadsheets, one-off invoices, and manual data entry.
For a merchant’s wholesale customers, B2B on Shopify provides a similar online store experience that we know consumers love, but optimized for business buyers with tools that make it simple to purchase products in bulk.”
This is a major upgrade that will hopefully eliminate any pain points that wholesalers encounter while trying to do business. The demand is there, let’s see what portion of the market Shopify captures with these new features.
This partnership is huge for both parties. As twitter continues to grow and expand their shopping ecosystem, they needed a platform that was simple and tested. Shopify was the obvious candidate.
Over the last few years social media purchases have grown exponentially. 98% of consumers plan to make a purchase on social media in 2022 according to SproutSocial. Social media is going to be a huge contender this year and in the years to come. Doing business on social media will become vital and gives you the opportunity to drive demand through the roof.
Here is a brief video from Shopify showing the partnership in action.
This partnership allows Shopify stores to automatically sync with twitter saving tons of time and giving the consumer more ways to reach their favorite brands. This feature eliminates steps that would have just caused unnecessary friction in the buying process.
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These are no small changes that Shopify is making. This is a large expansion of their total addressable market. They are trying to reach more consumers and businesses than ever. While still servicing their existing stores they now give them options for B2B sales and for easier social media advertising and transactions.
Only time will tell if these features were enough to pull Shopify out of their slump. This new direction has large possibilities and could potentially be extremely favorable for them in the years to come.
Sources:
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/social-shopping-2022/