Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in for Reunite Stream. These are unprecedented times. This is going to be one of the most challenging and most crazy chapters in all of our lives. I was hoping to get together in person with all of you, but this is not longer no longer something we can do.
And I don't think any one of us expected to spend our 2020 like this. Shopify exists to make commerce better for everyone. That's our company mission. Right now, we are dedicating ourselves to trying to get as many SMBs to survive as possible. We have looked far and wide into our road maps.
We look for everything that might be helpful right now. And I've tried to pull as many things forward as we could, trying to get them out of the door, shipping them, rolling them out, So that things that these ships can be helpful to you and your business. What we celebrate in this company is entrepreneurship. We get to talk with amazing entrepreneurs every day on the phone, on chat, on e mail, on text and in any other way. We know what you guys are going through.
It is an extremely trying time and only the most adaptable will make it. But entrepreneurs are the kind of people who make the most out of what they got. They are not the people who need things to be just so. They are people who can see opportunity when everyone else sees despair. I hope that's a hopeful note.
There's also an incredible amount of opportunity around. Today, my team is going to tell you about the things we've seen, the things we found and the things we are we have shipped and the things that we will ship soon. I think it should be a fun little time. I think you're going to enjoy it. And thanks again for joining us, and let's go to Reunite.
Hello, and welcome, merchants, partners and friends of Shopify. Welcome to the live stream. I hope you're all staying physically and mentally healthy these days. And of course, welcome to my co host, Vanessa. Vanessa, how are you doing these days?
I'm doing pretty good. How are you, Craig?
I'm doing well, although I got to say, I'm long overdue for a haircut. Soon, if we do this, I'll start looking a little bit more like you with hair down to my shoulders.
Well, like I had bangs like before this started. Now I have to swoop them like this. So you're not the only one, Craig?
Yes, yes, of course. And as you can see, we're speaking to you all from our homes. I'm in my basement in Canada. My son's upstairs trying not to make too much noise. My dog is actually at my feet because he loves to bark, especially when I get packages.
And I've been getting a lot of packages recently. I don't know if it's just me, Vanessa, but it seems sometimes it's like hourly that I'm getting these packages arriving at my doorstep.
Yes. And they always ring the doorbell when your kid is asleep.
Yes, exactly, exactly. My dog loves it when they come. So today, we'll be speaking about some of the changes to Shopify in 2020. Some changes you may have already seen and some others that are coming up over the coming months. And we'll be bringing on the people that have been working hard on these projects to talk about what they built, why they built them and hopefully do a few demos for us.
But before we jump into that, maybe Vanessa, we should take a step back and talk about some of the things we've been seeing at Shopify, some of the trends in the data that we've been looking at. Can you share some of those with our audience?
Yes. I mean, whenever we talk about trends, like I love to start from the first human element of like, what do you experience? I think we're all in our homes right now. We're all resorting to online shopping a lot more. I know for me, I mean, like I haven't been in a grocery store in probably 8 weeks now.
So yes, yes. So, it's I think one thing that is really amazing is we're seeing a lot of growth in merchants who probably weren't thinking about going online before all of this. I know that the local grocery store that I go to a lot down the street, they are now online on Shopify, so I can order from them and then do curbside pickup. So I kind of get a lot of my groceries that way. So it's kind of unbelievable to see like not just in the numbers, but I think all of us feel this really personally too that people are starting to go online a lot more.
For us at Shopify, we're seeing a 45% increase in people buying from stores they have never bought from before. So that means like you're not just, hey, I used to buy online, I'm now buying online from people who have I've never shopped from before. They're not just repeat purchases, which is huge growth for kind of online shopping as a whole.
It's funny, I think we talked about the trend being almost like a Black Friday, Cyber Monday, very early in the year as we are looking at some of the data.
Yes. And I think we're going to continue to see more and more trends change, especially as stuff continues to evolve over the next little bit. I know for us, we're going to actually be posting a lot of these insights and trends so that people can kind of stay abreast on it, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. So in case you don't follow them today, like, check it out, especially if you're a store owner, we're going to try and make sure that this data gets to
you so that you know how
to action on it.
And it's a good plug for those to also mention that if you're watching us live and want to participate, go on one of your favorite social networks of choice and use the hashtag Shopify Reunite. And you can ask us questions, you can tell us what you love, tell us what you like to see more of. And of course, we'll be a little bit busy for the next hour, hour and a half, but we'll try and get to you right afterwards if you have any questions.
And then I also know that you guys all probably signed up through the website shopify.com/reunite. So you don't have to worry about taking notes during this next little bit. It's going to be jam packed. So stay till the very end. There's going to so much exciting stuff we're going to talk about.
But you don't have to worry about taking those because everything that we do talk about here will be posted a nice little package for you on the website. So check that out after the event.
Absolutely. So let's jump in and let's introduce our first guest, who's Michelle, who works on our payment team. Michelle.
Hi. How are you?
I'm doing well. So money, these days getting access to money is really tough. Governments have been trying to facilitate this. Traditional banks and lenders have been trying to facilitate it, but we're hearing from our merchants that there's a crunch on cash these days. Now we have a program called Shopify Capital, which not all of our viewers might know about.
Can you give us a little bit more background on what Shopify Capital is and how we're trying to help our merchants these days?
We launched Shopify Capital because we saw just how difficult it was for a lot of merchants to get traditional financing. There's a lot of red tape, a lot of paperwork. It took a long time. And many of you need capital to purchase inventory because you've got a large purchase order or to invest in marketing. So with our program, eligible merchants are able to apply for Shopify right within their account.
And once you're approved, you get funding as little as a few days.
And now when we talk about this, we're actually able to fund businesses, but traditional banks and other lenders actually can't as well, right?
Yes, absolutely.
We have a view into how your business is doing. We know how dedicated you are to your business. So a lot of that data we don't need to ask you for. We are able to see how your business is performing and see what you can afford on a regular basis.
So not a lot of paperwork. Merchants can get an offer for capital and how fast will they see the cash within their bank account?
And just as few as a few days. And the other really two really key things is that we don't actually check your personal credit history and we don't want to own a percentage of your business as well. Like that really matters to a lot of businesses.
That's amazing. Now these days we've been announcing a few things around Shopify Capital, both in terms of amounts and in terms of where it's available. Can you shed some more light on those?
Yes. So when Toby started Snow Depple, the snowboard store that is now Shopify today, he saw how important it was to get financing. And recently we heard from Charles and Janelle, who run Manic Mermaid out of Tacoma, Washington. Before COVID, they sold their products almost exclusively from their physical store. Though they were financially set for normal situations, the impact of COVID put a major strain on their finances.
So when they discovered that they were eligible for Shopify Capital, they jumped at the opportunity and used the funding to give them breathing room to help move their business forward. We know that funding can go a long way. So over recent weeks, we've actually expanded the program outside the United States to include the U. K. And Canada.
And we've actually committed an additional $200,000,000 to the program. And so far, we've already provided $1,000,000,000 in capital for you, our merchants.
That's incredible. So $1,000,000,000 of money has been given out to the Shopify merchants to further their businesses along. I absolutely love that. This is really an example of where we're putting our money where our mouth is and really trying to support as many merchants as possible. Now how big are these amounts?
Are we talking about 100 of dollars, 1,000 of dollars?
They're as low as $200 to as high as $1,000,000 Look, we really want to make this quick and easy, accessible funds when you need it most, especially times like today.
That's awesome. So that's on the merchant side, but increasingly we're also starting to hear about financials problems on the consumer side. I've been reading a lot about potential problems with consumer spending, especially as unemployment started to reach some really scary levels. Now and now here's the challenge, I think, for our merchants that kind of depend on consumer spending. Is there something we can do to kind of help address this because a lot of them are using credit cards and credit cards often charge really, really high rates.
So how do we help our merchants that are looking to sell products to consumers that might stop thinking about buying things as they start worrying about taking on debt?
Yes. So consumers are always looking for flexible ways to pay. They want to be able to better manage their monthly budget, understand where money is going. So really excited to let you know that we're working with a partner to announce installments which will be available in Shop Pay later on this year in the United States.
Installments. So in other words, instead of paying for the entire item upfront, you can actually split the purchase over several payments. Is that how it's working?
Yes, absolutely. So when a consumer or a buyer is ready to check out through Shop Pay, they can choose to pay in installments at no additional cost to them. Their payment is split into 4 equal parts and they pay that over time. There's no interest and no fees at all.
That is amazing. So I can just imagine this is going to be hugely, hugely impactful for our merchants, both that are selling larger ticket items, larger priced items as well as those that are offering smaller priced items because it really just improves the conversion rate for those merchants.
Yes. And that's the idea. We believe that this will enable merchants to sell more, enable you to sell more, increase your cart sizes and inevitably increase conversion rate because there is that new choice of how a consumer wants to pay.
And what I love again, and I think you mentioned a few times, but it just bears repeating, this doesn't add any additional interest to consumers as they think about splitting their purchase over multiple periods of time. So multiple months, multiple weeks, I guess?
Splinta for over months. So if you were to do $400 that would be $400 split into 4.
Okay. So that's amazing. So installment, a incredible new feature that's coming to Shopify. Is this coming out sometime this year?
Later this year.
Okay. So later this year. And so our merchants that are thinking about how they can improve conversion and how they can help get their buyers to buy more on their sites and not have to worry about potential credit card issues that they might have, they can actually now start using installments by the end of this year.
That's correct. And just to add to that, it is integrated into Shop Pay. So with Shop Pay, we already have 40,000,000 users worldwide, 4 times faster checkout and 2 times higher conversion rate than regular checkout. So you already get to take advantage of what exists today with Shop Pay. And now with installments, they'll just be even better.
Yes. So we started sharing some of that data around Shop Pay. And I just like it bears repeating. This is something that our merchants can enable. And it both makes a better consumer experience.
So when I go and I shop, it makes it so much easier. I don't have to fill up pages and pages of checkout. And on the consumer side, it's better. And then on the merchant side, the merchants actually it improves their conversion rate. So they actually end up seeing more sales as well.
That's correct. It makes things seamless and a lot easier for their buyer, thus increasing the conversion rate for them.
That's amazing. So Shop Pay is available right now. All of our merchants can go turn that on. And later in the year, we're bringing installments to Shop Pay as well. That's amazing.
Okay. Thanks so much, Michelle. Great features coming out of the payments team. I think we'll hear about one other thing a little bit later. But for now, we'll say goodbye.
Thank you.
So there you go, Vanessa. We've got capital for merchants, installments for consumers and Shop Pay for everyone.
Heavy hitter right upfront. Yes, like I don't think there's a feature that I love more like as a person who buys a lot online, my husband will attest, we have a lot of packages coming regularly, than Shop Pay. I think like just not having to enter anything, being able to enter in a few confirmation numbers and then bam, all my information is there, my credit card is there and it's like, oh, super smooth checkout. So I'm not surprised to hear those numbers.
Yes. And I think the idea of bringing installments to Shop Pay is also just incredible because installments have been something that so many of the people on the live stream have been asking for a long time, because it really does help improve conversion. And it does so in a way that's actually not detrimental to the consumer experience, which is what I just absolutely love.
Yes, yes, especially that 0% interest that's just breaking it up into 4 simple payments for that example. Okay. Well, we're talking about stores and conversion rates, but let's talk about the original store.
The online store. Okay. I think I know who you're bringing on.
Yes. I'd love to bring in Agatha to talk a little bit about what we're building to make your online store presence just shine. Hey, welcome, Agatha.
Vanessa. Hi, Craig. It's awesome to be here to talk about the online store.
Okay. So I mean, I talked a little bit about some of the trends, but I really want to kind of go back into what we're seeing at Shopify. A lot of people are now coming to Shopify to get online who are from sectors that we normally probably wouldn't think to be line, a lot of restaurants, a lot of food and bev. I know like we all know somebody in that industry that's probably been affected by this. And they're having to go online in ways that they probably haven't like how does a restaurant go online?
What does that look like? They're probably having to reimagine their business. So can you tell us a little bit about what we're doing for those people who have never been online before, especially because their business probably isn't just traditional selling products?
Yes, absolutely. And when you're talking about some of the trends and moves, you see, how retail businesses or the non traditional e commerce type businesses are having to open up e commerce shops. That gave a big impact on what we're prioritizing across the entire online store. We really wanted to pivot to help those businesses build up and get to market quickly. So say you're a restaurant, maybe you're focused on the fine dining experience.
The last few months have completely flipped everything upside down in terms of your business model. These stores have needed to like these restaurants, these different types of service they needed to start focusing on how to be the online store much faster, how to have more reliable and relevant products and really adapting to this new market environment. So what have we done there, right? We've launched as of this last week, it's super exciting actually. We made this new theme called Express available to all merchants.
And this Express theme, the name is actually pretty fitting. It's intended for businesses like restaurants, like coffee shops or even service shops that are used to having in person experiences, but needed to react quickly and get their shops up and running as fast as possible.
Yes. So I mean, we have lots of themes on the theme store today. I mean, like themes, especially for people viewing online today is not going to be anything. But what makes Express so different and makes it so easy for these folks to use?
Yeah. So first of all, it is a one page online store. So it's really quick to set up and it provides all the most important relevant information right there as soon as you go on to the online store. It's also centered around a mobile experience. So it's really easy for any of your mobile buyers or users to go in and pick a couple of products and make purchases.
But you know what, instead of talking about it, why don't we actually take a look at what it looks like? Because it's always so much easier to see it when you see it in action. So I'm gonna just pop that open right here on the screen in front of you. This is the experience of the online store. If you're a buyer and you're going on to us for the first time, you're going to see a quick preview of that store at the very top, the name, a little bit about the brand.
And as you scroll down, you see the different products that this particular store, in this case, our restaurant has available. There's a few different tabs, so you can choose which products you want, what quantities, and then kick off the checkout flow. We call it a 1 page experience, but of course, you're going to have that cart and that checkout experience that would be expected as well.
Wow. Okay. So it's a lot easier to get online, less to configure, but it's also as a as someone viewing the website, also just really easy to navigate without having to build like a ton of pages and worry about a ton of like design content. I saw gift cards in there. We I mean, gift cards isn't new, but I know we have news about it.
Yeah. Exactly. You called it out. And so you're right. Gift cards is not a new feature, but what is new is that anyone who's on a Shopify plan today can have access to the gift card.
So before, we only had it available for a couple of our plans. Now anyone who is a Shopify merchant can take advantage. And we definitely recommend that you do because that's a quick cash flow that can get onto your online store right now.
Yes. I know for us, we've actually bought quite a lot of gift cards. And I've seen a lot of stores around Toronto actually using gift cards as a way to like, hey, when we get back up and running, get this gift card, it's going to be a 20% discount off of a dinner, which is a really great way to like still support them, but then they don't have to worry about getting everything online right away. It's still at least one thing that they can get online right off the bat. Okay.
So we're talking about restaurants and services, but obviously everybody when they think about those businesses, they think about tipping because it's such an important way that you get money into the hands of your employees. What are we doing around supporting that?
So first off, tipping is available today for anyone who wants to use it. We've just launched it over the last few days or weeks. So definitely check it out. The way it looks, we'll pop in a demo here so you can take a look as I'm describing it. But throughout your checkout flow, you can enable it.
And at that point, the buyer, when they're on the payment method step, will see the option to add in a tip. We call it tipping, but
you can actually do a couple of
different configurations with it behind the scenes. It doesn't necessarily just have to be tipped.
Yeah. What else can they use it for? Because I know once the money comes in, like, how is it like tied to an employee? Like how does that manage and what freedom does it give them?
Yeah, sure. So first of all, when you're collecting money in this new area around tipping, we calculated it separately. So you'll be able to go in and look around at how much has been donated or given into that particular space. So it'll be isolated out from just different additional line items inside of your order. But the way you can customize it, right, we provide some default text there that says tipping with a description.
But you can go ahead into those files and change that text to whatever it is that you want. So you could potentially so that you want if you're asking people to donate to a local charity or if you want to just generally ask for a little bit more support towards your business, you can make those tweaks. And then because you're able to see how much has been donated in that particular space, decide how to use that income that makes more sense for your business.
Yes, I love that. I've seen a lot of folks use like, hey, this is going straight to our employees or like, hey, we're going to donate X percent to Feeding Kids. So that's awesome. So when just to recap, like I know you kind of mentioned it throughout, but like to recap, when is all of this available? Is it all available already today?
Yeah. That's right. So between gift cards, tipping and express, you can use that all right now. Right. And by the way, just a call out on all of these features, especially that express theme, it's not just for those new businesses that need to move into the e commerce space to react.
If you're thinking about self setting up an online store, if you're one of those people who are just trying to learn more about Shopify, take a look at this theme. It's gonna help you get your shop up and running quickly, and you'll really be able to understand how the entire Shopify platform works.
Awesome. Okay. So new folks coming online. Check it out. There's a lot that you can learn.
There's a lot of easy tools we're building to kind of get you online fast. But let's kind of switch gears and talk about people who are already online, people who are probably most of the viewers online today have stores that are actively having orders, doing shipments. But I know, me and you were chatting before this and I know that actually for that segment, we are seeing a lot more cross border or international sales, basically like people consumers buying from stores that are not in their country. So what are we building for folks that are experiencing that, that have already been on Shopify for a little while?
Yes. So cross border sales is really top of mind. So just to reiterate what that cross border really means. Let's say, Vanessa, you're in France and you're like, let's say you live there and you're shopping around and you want to make a purchase, but the stores from which you're purchasing are in the U. S, that's considered cross border, right?
The buyer is in a different country than the merchant who runs their business. So what are we doing there? We're actually starting to roll out the concept of country specific stores. Now don't get scared here. This doesn't mean you have to manage a whole bunch of different stores all in parallel.
You still have this one main store that you're managing for all of your products, your inventory, your configurations. But then you can configure localized domains. So a local Canada store, a local France store, a local UK store and personalize it with things like the appropriate languages for that store and the currency that those buyers will want to be shopping in.
So it's essentially like you don't need to duplicate all that work of creating multiple stores. You can just use the store that you have, the products that you have, all that investment that you probably put in setting up that store. And now you can actually just it feels like multiple stores that are localized for you based on where you are. It's the right domain, the right currency and it's the right language.
That's exactly it. It's kind of best case scenario for your buyer as well as the merchant. But you know what, it's always a little bit hard to understand how all of this comes together. So why don't we just go through an example and I'll pull up the demo and kind of go through this kind of simulation here. So let's say I'm a merchant that sells handbags and I'm located in the US, and I've set up my online store, even though it's based out of the US, to to also be configured for Canada, maybe France and the U.
K. Let's actually drill into France for a moment here. And in France, I want to enable the French language as well as English. And I'll set up the currency to be euros, local for euro. That's basically all you need to do from the merchant store setup.
Now let's use that example again, Vanessa, that you're living in France and you're really excited to buy a new handbag. So you go on to Google and you start to do a search for finding an awesome cool bag or a awesome new handbag. And the first thing that comes up potentially is going to be my merchant store advertising handbags to you, Or maybe it just comes up as a regular search result. So you click on that and now you're going on to my merchant store. But you're not seeing the U.
S. Version of it. You're going to see that store show up in the local dotfrdomain. You're going to see it potentially in French or English depending on the preferences that you have. But all the prices that you're going to see there, they're going to be in euros, not in U.
S. Dollars.
I was going to say, I kind of wish I was in France trying to buy a handbag, but anyways, let's keep going. So if you're buying this handbag, what and I'm getting charged, one of the things that we hate a lot, I think when we're buying online, all of us know this, what am I getting charged in that scenario where I am in France buying a handbag?
Yes. I mean, isn't it super frustrating when you're buying something and you think you're paying in a currency and then you see the exchange rate on your credit card charge?
Yes.
But the whole point behind what we're building here is that that's not going to happen. So when you make that purchase in your local euro currency for this really awesome handbag that I'm selling, you're going to get charged in euros. But I, on the other hand, as the merchant, I'm still going to see all those sales in my local U. S. Dollars.
So I don't need to deal with worrying about all the different currencies my buyers are buying products with. I just get to deal with the primary currency that I run my business in.
That's amazing. Because right now, I think one of the things we all hate is seeing fees and seeing credit card charges that we don't doesn't attribute to the amount that we think we paid for. So that's a huge step forward. Okay. But we also know I mean, like we're talking about adjusting prices and FX and all of that, like people spend a lot of time worrying about their pricing structure and being pretty meticulous about it.
So how do they manage that? Like FX prices change all the time. Do they have to manage it by themselves?
Yeah. So you can have 2 options with that. You can either go with the automatic FX exchange rate, which means that depending on the current exchange rate, we're going to change the price of your product so that it's the right price based on the rate. And that works great for small to midsize businesses where you're seeing some international sales, but maybe not a massive influx of them. Before our bigger merchants or those that have a really high amount of products being sold internationally, we're also going to be launching later this year the ability to run a custom FX exchanger, FX conversions.
So that basically means that you can define the conversion rates for your products and then adjust them as is. That's going to help you stabilize your product prices so that when people come to your store, they see that same fixed price within the different currencies.
Because I know one thing that we talk about a lot and I know that we account for it in the automatic pricing, but buyers in certain countries, maybe in North America, we're used to seeing something priced as $3.99 but that's not the case everywhere in the world. And so this way, it gives them a bit more control over what it's going to actually look like because that actually means conversions. That actually means what a buyer what a consumer will see.
Okay.
Okay. So we've talked a lot about kind of like stuff that's available now. All this international stuff, which parts are available now? Sorry, I kind of missed that.
Yes. So we're we currently have some automatic currency work that's happening, but all of the FX exchange rate and domains work is coming soon.
Okay, great. But let's kind of move ahead to the future. I know one of the things that people ask us a lot is what's coming new up next for the online store. Obviously, it's something that everyone kind of cares about as they're going online. Can you share tidbits on kind of what you guys are on that's going to be coming up in the next 6 months?
Yeah. So we have been really focused on bringing a lot more flexibility, customization, personalization when it comes to building up your online store. We're basically calling this the new editor, the new online store editor experience.
The new editor experience. Sounds like that sounds a little bit cryptic. Can you break it down a little bit for us? Yes, sure.
So most of you here listening in are merchants who have an online store set up already. So you've gone through the experience or one of the people in your business has gone through the experience of setting up that store. But when you set up the store, there was a lot more flexibility available on your homepage where you could create custom sections or content, images and text. So think of that same experience, but actually a whole lot better, like a version 2.0 of that experience available to every page on your website. A bunch more flexibility across the online store.
Yes. Sorry. I know on the Home Big right now, you can like drag and drop and create like totally different experiences than you anywhere else. So what you're saying is now that's going to be available on product pages, collection like every page on the online store?
Yeah. Well, actually, let's just take a look so I can show you what this actually looks like. So I'll go into the new experience, this new online store view where you'll be able to click in, open up the store. What we're seeing here is the 1st page, that's your home page. It looks a little bit similar behind the scenes.
There's actually a lot of rework that we've done, but let's pop into a product page. So as we're looking through this product page and look at these headphones, we can add in a couple of new sections. So maybe we'll add in an image with a description of some of the additional information about the headphones we're trying to sell. We can also add in a video. So within a given product page or a collection or blog or article, wherever it is that you want to add in that additional content, you'll be able to kind of create these net new sections, not just the defaults that we have available.
But it's also not just about creating your own content. What you see here on this part of the demo is the fact that I installed a product reviews app from our our app marketplace earlier on in the day, And now I'm adding in the ability to add product reviews onto a particular product page. Now I can do this individually on 1 product page or I can do it in bulk so that you can see product reviews across all of the products I have on my online store.
That's amazing because I know that people want, for example, for a particular collection to have maybe a video introduction, but not in one another collection. So we're kind of breaking apart that template idea and now saying like everything is customizable on your online store. But then also if you want it to be a template, that's still an option, right?
Yes, that's exactly it.
Yes. And I'm being a bit coy because it kind of sounds like sometimes I'm not I'm asking you a question, but actually we've been working on this together. I know our teams have been working together on this for quite a long time. I know it like this piece of work here was not simple to build and took a lot of technical infrastructure work. So when will this actually be available?
Yes, tell me about it. It's been a big team working for a long time to get this over. So they're all really excited about us finally being able to talk to publicly about the features that we're building. And we're targeting to launch a part of these different features the course of this year. So definitely stay tuned for that.
But as we're talking about customizability and personalization, we're also doing a lot of other things that are related to it. And so we talked about how you can personalize your store, but we've also been looking at how have you actually been personalizing your store? What kind of apps have you been installing? And where can we work together with our app marketplace to make those experiences more seamless and integrated?
Yeah. Can you like what what types of customizations are you seeing that that we would focus on?
Yes. So one of the things we're actively working on is around subscriptions. Now when I say subscriptions, I'm talking about the ability to sell your products through subscription based models. So then buyers can have recurring purchases of those particular products. That's an area we're working actively on right now.
So that's one. Another place that we're investing in is around upsells or cross sells throughout your checkout flows. So as you're selling a particular product in checkout, there's an additional step where you can try to do an upsell of another product that might be related to the one that they're currently purchasing.
Yes, that's amazing because I think it sounds like not only are we helping you to have your brand show really, really authentically and in the way that you want through the online store with all the work that's coming up with the new design experience or new editor, but we're also helping you sell more, which I think is now more than ever more very, very important. All right. Lots coming from online stores. Thanks so much, Agatha.
Thanks so much, Vanessa.
Yes. So I would say not I think lots is probably the understatement of the year. Really excited about all the cool stuff that's coming there. Now we spend a bunch of time talking about online store because that's where most of our merchants get most of their sales. And it's probably what Shopify is best known for.
But there's another store. I think it's time we start talking about the retail store. And for that, I want to bring in my old friend Satish. Satish, are you on the line?
Hey, Craig. Thanks for having me.
Hey, Satish. So a few weeks ago, you shared with me a pretty mind blowing story about some of the data we've been seeing around how resilient retailers are. Can you share that with some of our viewers?
I mean, I don't think any of us could have imagined a short while ago that half of retail stores would have to close down in late April. But that's exactly what's happened with retail merchants on Shopify as well. What I'm most excited about is that the story doesn't stop there. I'm so proud of how these merchants have reacted and adapted their business in that short time. So what happened is that 71 percent of sales coming through Shopify point of sale in those 6 weeks from March 13 compared to the 6 weeks before went away.
But those retailers replaced 94% of those sales through their online stores in that time. And that's really the power of multichannel Shopify.
So in other words, those offline sales disappeared almost entirely. You said 70% drop, but then very quickly recovered online.
Exactly. They were able to adapt their business for the way that consumers are adapting their purchasing behavior, and they could do that all instantly from within Shopify.
That's amazing. Now you already mentioned Shopify point of sale, but just a couple of weeks ago, we launched probably the biggest update, upgrade, new version, rewrite user word. We launched the all new Shopify point of sale. Can you tell me about what led to the creation? And what are the new things that merchants might want to look at it for that it now supports?
That's right. We've completely redesigned and rebuilt Shopify POS to make it extensible for that future of retail today. And we've heard from a lot of retailers that this has become a very good time for them to upgrade the technology in their store and retrain the staff that they have while business is a bit slower in those physical spaces. So I want to show you here a demo of the all new POS. And you can see it's very different from the old POS, dark mode and a lot more.
We've added this new smart grid feature that lets you customize and organize your POS to work the way you need for your business. And you can even embed apps into it so that you can customize things like loyalty programs for your staff members to work with right from that smart grid. And then there's so much more and access to the rest of Shopify right from inside this tool.
Now you also mentioned staff. Now I know one of the top requested features for Shopify POS was better staff control and fine grained permissions. Were we able to solve that feature at this time?
Exactly. We've tried to make it a lot stronger and more flexible for you to control which staff members are able to do what inside of your store and inside of your locations. And those staff members can see that from inside of POS and you can manage it right back from Shopify.
That's amazing. Now retail is very different these days. It's a lot about contactless. It's a lot about buy online, pickup in store or curbside, I think, is the term a lot of people are using. How does the all new Shopify point of sale?
Let's start with curbside pickup. How does it support curbside pickup?
Yes. We're trying to do a few new things to make it a lot easier for you to adjust as you reopen these retail stores inside your communities. And the first thing is by bringing information and insight about what's happening in these retail locations into your online store. So adding this feature so that buyers can look at which retail locations have which inventory and what fulfillment options are available to them, like curbside pickup or even local delivery. And we think that'll help drive a lot more purchases in those local markets.
That's amazing. Okay. So now I'll be able to find when I go to an online store, I can find which of the stores that they have nearby actually have the items in stock. I can buy them online, go pick them up in store and we'll do the curbside pickup to drop it off of my trunk and it's entirely contactless.
Exactly. And we want to make sure that if you do happen to go to those physical spaces before buying that the contactless checkout itself can also be uniformly available across Shopify.
Tell me more.
Yes. So we've had tap or contactless payments for quite some time, but it requires the Shopify tap and chip reader to happen, whether it's with a physical credit card or something like Apple Pay or Google Pay. But what we're doing now is we're using the power of Shopify's online checkout to bring that to all buyers and all merchants in any situation. So a buyer will be able to scan a QR code from Shopify POS and that will bring up Shopify's online checkout for them where they can complete the checkout or use any online wallet like Shop Pay itself to finish that in person transaction. And we think that will help cover everyone in any situation to have a more safe and trusted transaction if they do happen to do that in person.
So in other words, I could actually buy something using Shopify from my car and just scan the QR code. I don't have to have the window down. I can just scan the QR code, pay with my phone right there and there's no physical touching of devices, don't have to worry about germs or anything like that?
Exactly. We don't want to make it just fast and easy to buy from Shopify in any way, but we want to make sure it's safe and flexible for you too. And so this is one of the ways that we can assure that everyone has an opportunity to do
that. Cool. And you also mentioned the tap and chip reader. Now up until now, that's only been available in the United States. What are the plans for releasing that internationally?
Our team has been working really hard to bring these integrated payments and devices to more markets. And just last week, we brought it to Canada with Interact debit included as well as the tap and chip reader. So later this year, we're going to bring that to the U. K. As well and we're going to keep going to make sure that we can expand Shopify POS globally.
That's amazing. So again, I just really want to encourage all of our viewers that have looked at Shopify point of sale in the past and maybe thought that it was missing one feature or the other to really take this moment to reevaluate it and see if it now has the right tools and features for your business because we really believe it's one of the best point of sale systems on the market, if not the best point of sale system on the And to
help you do that, we've actually made Shopify POS Pro
completely free until October of this year, so that you can easily try it out,
test it in your business, or start that migration process while your store is still closed. And we hope that will help you get started with us.
Love it, love it, love it. Okay. So now we've talked about the online store, the retail store. Now the challenge often for both online and offline is actually driving traffic to those stores. In the past couple of days, we've been announcing some of our partnerships that we've been working with the likes of Facebook and Google.
Can you give can you elaborate a little bit more? Can you give us a few more details on what we've been working with those partners on because they're really experts at driving consumer demand and traffic to both your online and your offline store.
Like you said, if there's one thing Shopify is not short on its channels and partners like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, eBay and many others are integrated right from inside of Shopify so that you can expand the ways that you do business. Now most recently, we've worked very closely with both Facebook and Google to bring exciting new shopping experiences to shop by merchants everywhere. In the case of Google, merchants can now actually list their products on the shopping tab of Google search for no cost. And that's available in the U. S.
Now and rolling out globally by the end of the year. So you can really improve the way that your products show up in Google search results. Whereas on Facebook, earlier this week, we announced a brand new shops feature, which lets you put a small version of your online store right inside of Instagram and more, but synchronize exactly with your Shopify store. And both of these become essential ways for you to help find and drive new traffic and new customers to your business.
Okay. So driving new traffic and new customers to your business is essential. But then what happens when they come to your site? How do you how can we help them communicate with those customers? We have 2 products, one that was quite a surprise for people, which is e mail.
The other one is Ping, which lets them chat. Can you tell us more about how we're thinking about our merchants should be communicating with their customers and how these new technologies and tools that we built can enable that.
We all know that there's nothing more important than that repeat customer and that lifetime relationship. And both of those products were built exactly for improving this and extending that lifetime value. So shop by email, this is a really highly anticipated product that we were able to get into the market recently. And we've already seen over 30,000,000 emails get sent from Shopify merchants using it.
Sorry, that number was 30,000,000? 30,000,000. 30, okay, yes, keep going.
Yes. So it's just become such an essential marketing tool available right from the heart of Shopify that's already driving so much value for all of you. And it's performing better in the market against industry standards because it's been optimized for e commerce.
Yes, that's one of the things I love most about Shopify email because as someone who's done e mail marketing in the past, normally it takes days and days to actually set it up. You've got to go set up DNS records, you've got to go import customer list, you've got to do you got to match your themes and templates in some other system with your online store. None of that happens with Shopify Email, right?
None of it. I want to show you here exactly what it looks like. Shopify email is a part of Shopify that you know and love and it automatically pulls content and design templates from the rest of your online store to make it easy for you to send a new email. And this is a new local fulfillment email that we're showing here that you can send out to a segment in a few clicks. And we're going to keep adding to these capabilities with new customizations, new templates and even more automation features later.
Okay. So in other words, coming soon to shop by email is automation, the ability for merchants to actually schedule things to happen automatically.
Exactly. And much like we did with POS Pro, we're making email completely free until October of this year and we'll continue to have a free plan afterwards, so everyone can get started with email.
That's amazing. And again, I would encourage our merchants to go and try this out as it is an entirely free product right now and see if it works for your business. And if it doesn't, let us know. And if it does, send us your feedback as well. So okay, that's e mail.
What about something a little bit more real time? Let's talk about chat.
Yes, you brought up Shopify Ping, which is our free messaging product for merchants that lets you talk to your customers in real time pre or post purchase. And we know that it's more important than ever right now to have that personal connection and bridge that experience with your customers. So Ping has been available on iPhone and iPad before and we're now going to bring it to Android and later this year we plan to bring it to the web too, so that your whole team across all these platforms can be using chat to talk to your customers.
That's amazing. I mean, I have to admit, probably on a daily basis, when I go to an online store, my first question is, are they still open for business? Are they still shipping? And one of first things I do is actually try and chat with them or send them an email just to confirm that. And so I think chat
will really help that. And we're also even starting to see a lot of our retail stores that we talked about earlier use their staff to talk to online customers as well in between individuals coming into the store themselves. And that's why we're going to add staff access into Shopify Ping. And so now you can log into Shopify Ping and see which conversations you as an individual staff member are having or have been assigned to. And while we're at it, we're going to let those staff members talk to each other too, so that you can direct message other team members inside of that Shopify store and ask them about their morning or talk about a customer.
That's amazing. So in other words, you can have the entire businesses' conversation centralized in one spot.
Exactly. And between Shopify Ping and Shopify Email, you have that entire lifecycle of communication that you need with your customers, whether it's real time or later to update them on what's happening with your business.
Okay. So Shopify Ping is available right now on iOS, and it's coming later this year for Android and web. Exactly. Okay, amazing. Now I have to admit, we've gone pretty far into this live stream.
I think we're well over 40 minutes, we haven't talked about one of our most surprising launches this year. So I think it's time for us to talk about SHOP.
Awesome. Super exciting topic to get into. And I couldn't be more pleased that we have SHOP in the market for everyone. So if you haven't heard, shop is our brand new personal shopping assistant and it's already being used by over 16,000,000 users. And we'll be
So 16,000,000 consumers out there already using this app. So what does the app do?
So what we've done is bring together the seamless tracking experience that we previously had in an app called Arrive and that speed of Shop Pay that you heard about earlier into one app that makes it easier for you as a business owner to reach the customers that you already have and continue to extend the relationship and communication that you have with them. So here you can see the shop app itself where shoppers can look at all the stores that they buy from and individually see the recent information and personalized recommendations from those stores. And then they can go and track all of the orders that they're getting. So they know when that doorbell rings exactly what package is outside.
Yes, I've got to admit during this live stream, it's actually vibrated twice for me both times Shopify merchants. So I absolutely love the app. So again, it lets consumers track their packages as well as reengage with some of the existing brands they bought from in the past. So let's talk about Shopify merchants though. What's the reaction been amongst Shopify merchants?
Our real goal here is to bring merchants closer to their own customers. And that's what's so different between SHOP and any traditional marketplace or advertising platform. We know that buyers want to be in touch with the brands that they love and support the brands in their community. And we'll never compete with our merchants the way some others do. We want to put their brands first and make them more successful.
So we're going to start to invest in ways that let our merchants customize the way shop works for them.
That's amazing. Okay. So when we talk about Customize, how it works for them, what are we talking about?
So I'm really excited today to announce that we plan to release a new shop channel. And as you know, with channels, the shop channel is going to let you as a merchant control exactly how your brand shows up on shop and the ways that you want to be involved. So here you can see that you'll be able to customize your shop profile to better tell your story and customize where and how you show up in the shop app itself. And we're going to keep adding more analytics and more marketing features into this channel for you.
That's amazing. So you can imagine long term, shop will really be a great way for our merchants to actually reengage with our customers time and time again.
Yes. And so inside of Shopify, whether it's the online store, point of sale or shop, you'll have these essential places for you to start and grow your brand online, in person and now on mobile. And that's what the combination of these products makes us so powerful for merchants everywhere.
That's amazing. And again, I love that tracking feature and I just love how there's more and more being added to it every day. Well, thanks so much, Satish. We've gone over a lot of great stuff and we'll talk to you soon.
Thanks for having me. Bye, everyone.
Yes. Dollars 16,000,000 sounds like a lot, but if you've ever used, I think, Shop Pay before this and then now Shop, like it's actually pretty self explanatory why it's so successful. It is just so, so easy to use, especially now. But I know in the app, you can actually see trees you've saved from buying things, which is great. And I think like there's a little competition around how big everyone's forest can be inside of Shopify.
I think, Craig, you're like at 6 last time I checked or something?
No, no, no. I'm at 9 right now. I've got
1 in the trees
that I have helped protect as I've been using again, I do a lot of shopping online and I use SHOP for a lot of it. So again, just to clarify, if you use SHOP Pay and you place an order using Shop Pay, your the shipment is carbon neutral. And so we actually work with a partner to go out and protect trees to reduce the carbon impact otherwise from that shipping, which is a great feature that we have and it's definitely not very well advertised, but it's one of my favorite little things that we added to shop as well.
Yes. It's one of those special little touches. Okay. Well, we've talked a lot about kind of like the front of store. We talked about the financing, online store, point of sale, bunch of channels.
But I know for those of you who are watching right now, a lot of you folks spend most of your time actually in what we call the back office here at Shopify, which is essentially where you manage your products, where you manage your orders. So to talk about how we're actually going to make that better, I'd love to bring in Lindsay Thornton. Lindsay, welcome. Hi, Vanessa. Thanks for having me.
Great to have you, Lindsay. How are you doing?
Yes, pretty good. Pretty good.
Amazing. Okay. So, I just kind of explained a little bit about what we mean by when we say back office here at Shopify, but I know kind of like the trend about what we try and do with that area time and time again every year over year is how can we make it more efficient for you to manage your business in those activities? So can you share kind of like what we're doing this year to make sure everybody is as efficient and productive as they could be?
Yes, absolutely. There's so much that we're working on at the moment. So let's start with 3 big pieces that do make up the chunk of where merchants spend the majority of their time in Shopify: products, inventory and orders. So if we start with products, that is where merchants tell us they spend most of their time. One of the most time consuming tasks that exist is actually getting your products into Shopify and managing them.
So there's a couple of things that we're focused on here. Back towards the start of the pandemic, I was spending some time talking to merchants, not in their physical spaces, but digitally, about how they were thinking about getting their stores online. And for many of them, we've touched on this a little bit, it's not that it never occurred to them. It just felt like more work than the value that was going to be created for them. And part of that was the apprehension about the time it was going to take to get all of their huge product sets online.
So that's a problem that we took really seriously. And we've gone back and we've completely revisited how we want to upload products into Shopify and we've created a fast ad. So what that looks like let's pull this up. So what that looks like is, particularly on mobile, leaning on the camera to actually make the fast add a lot quicker than it is at the moment. We stripped down to some really basic fields, just the most essential ones.
And we're using the natural advantage of the camera for things like creating square product shots, something that's really important in a lot of Shopify themes to save you doing a bunch of re edits after the fact. You'll be able to upload products in bulk and manage them. And then excitingly, you will also in the future be able to work on them in different states. So instead of just publishing them straight off the bat, which we know a lot of merchants don't really want to do, we see merchants spend anywhere between 27 goes at actually getting their product information the way they want it because we all know a really great product page is the difference often between making a sale and not. We're going to try to make that a lot easier to actually manage those different states along the way.
And so that means creating draft state and in the future also creating an archived state, so that you will be able to manage your business a lot more succinctly, be able to hand those products off to other team members to help them fill in the gaps. And then when you're done with those products, to be able to actually file them away in a way that allows you to manage your products in a much more organized way. And this will be a godsend, particularly for people who run very large product sets, where the product pages can just become totally overwhelming.
Yes, because I know one thing, I've met a merchant recently and they're a small merchant. They don't have a of staff, but the staff that they do, do, they already even in this small, I think they had a team of 10, 3 of them were all doing product uploading activities, whether it's, hey, one person was managing the images, editing, getting it up, another one was really optimizing the description and someone else was managing the keywords and SEO. So like States really allows them to work on something in draft together and then publish it when it's ready, when everybody has put their touch on it. So that's I can see how that's super impactful. Yeah,
you're exactly right.
Yes. And then archives, you're the one actually who told me that people have to keep around tons of products even if they've been delisted from their online store just to make sure that the data isn't lost. So that must mean tons and tons of time just waiting through products that are actually no longer on their online store actively?
Yes, exactly. And particularly if you're the type of merchant who cycles through a lot of products, that can just get out of hand really quickly. Yes. And so we think there's better things that you could spend your time doing. And so that's like thematically, you're going to see this across everything else we talk about today as well.
Particularly for back office, the theme really is personalization and flexibility. So allowing you to work with the type of products that you want to apply. Like in the future, we even hope to have things like templates where you can set the basics for the type of product so that you can add them really fast in the future. Also looking at important things like price by measure, trying to work out what would that mean to businesses now that we're starting to see more businesses like groceries and people who sell items by weight, for example, come on to Shopify using nonstandard quantities. So what will that look like?
All of these things, the team is exploring at the moment. But you will see very quickly some of those fast adds come to market. We're hoping June, July, we'll get some of those out. Product states will come afterwards. And soon after that you'll start to see some of those other explorations.
But rest assured, we are doing all we can at the moment to focus on making product addition and management extremely fast and efficient.
Yes. But I know like product is one area people spend a ton of time on because it's a craft putting together a really good product page. But of course, once you get those orders, I think you told me the most viewed page in Shopify is the orders details page.
Yes, that's right. Yes. 1,100,000,000 views in the last year and that's great. I mean, that means orders are coming in. However, that's actually not where we want you to be spending the bulk of your time.
So let's take a quick look at this. Here is the what we call the order index page. It's the overview of all of your orders. And up until a couple of weeks ago, the information that was there was pretty much just enough to give you a jumping off point to help you identify what order to actually dig into and then you would go in there and do your work. We think there's a better way and we've completely redesigned the index and we've started to release this a couple of weeks ago and we're making changes on almost a weekly basis now to make this better.
But the vision for this is that we actually want you to be able to work from the order index, not only use it as an identification point. And so if we look at this now, you can see that you can actually identify information about the customer, a couple of pieces of information about the order, so that you don't have to always go into the order details page to get that crucial piece that you want. Now in the future, we'll also have more ways to customize this for your exact workflow depending on who you are in the business and the type of job that you do. So you'll be able to group orders by things like local delivery or delivery method and much more to come on that in the future as well.
Amazing. So there's kind of orders, but I know orders affects inventory and inventory is a journey we've been on at Shopify for quite a while to make sure, hey, your inventory is accurate in Shopify. It affects what shows up in your online store when you fulfill an order, it's important it decrements from your inventory. What are we doing around inventory to make sure that that stays as accurate as possible?
Yes, that's a great question. Yes, inventory is another one of our obsessions where we know we could do a better job at helping merchants with both accuracy and efficiency.
So here's what we've done.
A couple of weeks ago, we inventory. Track and then you can use your mobile phone to actually receive that inventory. That's all live today. We've also released a new set of inventory reports that include cost, so that you can understand the amount of inventory you have or the cost rather, the value of the inventory that you have on hand. Often that can be a business' largest active liability.
So it's really important that you know and understand what's selling, what you need more of and the total value of the money that you have invested in that inventory to date. We've also included some a new report around gift cards so that you can also see the value of those products that you have coming in that you've sold to. So those are some of the updates on inventory. There'll be lots more to come here, but rest assured that we're doing all that we can
to improve the entire
life cycle of inventory management across Shopify.
Huge influx on like the growth of Shopify's system, like what you can store in Shopify now, not just, hey, what's going to be on my online store, what's going to be available in point of sale, but also active or active records of where are my where is my inventory even if they're not on my online store yet, what's coming in? Also like what is caused? I think one thing we talk a lot about inside Shopify is how we represent so much more than just your online presence or whatever channel you're selling through. We're actually the heart of your business. We actually have so much information around how your business is operating, which we work really hard to make sure that, that stays accurate and that, that stays, as efficient to manage as possible.
Yes, totally. I mean, we really want to model the realities of running a business today. And one other small piece that we have there that's pretty important is after you get that order and you get that fulfilled and it's sent out, a couple of things might occur. You might get a change to that order. The buyer may change their mind.
Earlier last year and earlier this year, we've been constantly releasing additions to order editing, which makes it possible for you to go back after the fact and alter that order, sometimes add more items in, alter various aspects, etcetera. And that's been fantastic. The second part is sometimes the buyer still wants to return that item fact and we're releasing a new workflow in Shopify later this year, which will allow you to do that end to end all in Shopify. So that's process the actual return label, that's send out branded buyer notifications and it's managed the receiving of that inventory and the retracking of that in your stock and your inventory as it comes back in.
Yes. So tied to inventory, but actually returns is so interesting because it's actually if you've ever returned anything, which I'm sure all of us
at the company, yes,
Returned a lot of things. But returns is actually such a it's not just, oh, something went wrong. It's actually such a great moment for you to provide a really good customer experience so that that customer continues to come back over and over again.
Exactly. I think what we see again and again with the type of businesses that run their stores on Shopify is that they really do care about customer experience. And I've had some already fantastic returns processes with Shopify merchants that have made me a customer for life. And we want to make it possible for every merchant to offer that type of great experience to their customers. That's just key for us.
So the more we can help merchants do that, the better.
And already by default in Shopify without you having to do anything, which is
awesome. Exactly.
Okay, great. So that's a lot coming from back office in the next 6 months. Thanks so much, Lindsay. Thank you. Bye.
So products, orders, inventory, customers, I think you were starting to see that Shopify really aspires to be the heart of our business of our merchants business. And again, I think that's something that we understand that requires a lot of trust. And I hope that we have earned your trust by building these types of features. And these are the things that we are looking at when you think about Shopify because we are really the first thing that you'll log into in the morning and the last thing you'll log out of at the end of the year at the end of your day. 100%.
So Vanessa, think back about the first thing you ever bought online. Can you remember what it was?
Pretty sure it was like a book for class or something.
Okay. Yes, for university. Now I remember the thing about buying online. The thing that I remember was just the infinite selection because suddenly you can buy from anywhere in the world, right? I think that was the thing that was just so mind blowing to me.
It was just there was everything out there. But as I think about my most recent purchases, increasingly, they're actually a lot more local. Sure, I can buy from far away, but the idea of actually purchasing online from someone that I could actually probably drive to is just becoming more and more common. And so for our next guest, we're going to bring on Thea, who actually is thinking and working about our local delivery and local fulfillment options. Hey, Thea.
Hey, thanks for having me. I love any opportunity to talk about shipping.
Yes. So first, maybe let's talk about curbside pickup because it's been mentioned a few times today. And we've been working on this especially more recently because we've been seeing some interesting data, right, that's showing more and more merchants are actually opting into this and then more and more consumers are opting into this as well, right?
You bet. You bet. So looking at the data, we are looking at mid March to end of April. So that's 6 week span and we compared it to the previous 6 weeks and local orders were up 176%. It's mind blowing.
It's awesome to see that local support. It's also a testament to say, it's a quick and sure way to actually get your order in a timely fashion as there have been delays recently in the past.
Yes, I mean, absolutely. I know when I'm buying online, oftentimes I'm wondering how long will it actually take, whereas from my local merchants, I kind of feel that there's a very good chance that it happens probably within 24 hours, right?
Totally. So we've been working on 2 exciting things. You already hinted at one of them. So curbside pickup. Curbside pickup is part of it is already live.
So right now in your shipping settings for any store owner globally that has less than 20 locations, you can already enable local pickup. So you can add your own instructions. But what's awesome and coming over the next few weeks is more functionality. So like the ability to for the consumer to tell you when they want like to schedule their pickup. There's also coming the feature that they can let you know as soon as they've arrived outside, so they can send you a ping ready from pick on my order.
So there's minimal waiting involved. And of course,
you said it's already available right now. It's under shipping settings and you can configure it for different stores or different locations. How does that
work? Exactly. So the local pickup setting is live, but all the extra bells and whistles like the scheduling, it's coming soon. So keep an eye out LP in the next few weeks.
Okay. So that's amazing for those consumers that are looking to go actually to the store and pick up the items from there. But what about those of us that are a little bit lazy that like getting their items dropped off at their door, maybe because they're doing a live stream, for example? What are we doing for local deliveries?
Okay. So local delivery, I'm so jazzed to tell you about it. We're in the middle of rolling it out to all shops global, global feature. And so what this means is, you know, store owners like yourself or perhaps you want to task this to your staff, you can actually go and deliver orders within a vicinity that you would like to do. So this way you can take it into your own hands.
I was speaking with a florist the other day and she was so excited about this coming out because flowers are super fragile. You don't want to maybe hand it off to another courier. You want to take care of it yourself. So as this is coming out and it will also be in your shipping settings. Do we tell you all about how to set it up?
Absolutely. Show me more.
Okay. All right. Here we go. So, once you're in your shipping settings, you can decide if you want to decide to ship to certain zip codes or postal codes, if you canadian. Or if you don't want to be that detailed, you can just set a radius.
So say, I'm going to deliver to 10 miles or 10 kilometers, you can choose that. And then that way the buyers that are eligible at checkout, they'll see that option. But anyone who's not eligible won't see it. And what's also really cool is that as a buyer, you can leave notes. So for the delivery driver, like you ring the doorbell, leaving the doorstep or beware of my barking dog, he's actually really friendly.
Is that for me?
Yeah. Me too though. Charlie Brown is quite loud. So, but the other thing that's really cool. So that's the shipping settings part.
There's also an app. It's called the local delivery app. And what this does, it allows you to from the order index page that Lindsay was just describing, you can pull all of your local orders. You can then decide the route that you're going to take. So, it'll optimize your route within the city.
And then you can also let your customers know when you're on the way. So delivery is on the way or delivery was successful. And all of this is going to be handled in the app and it's totally free.
That is amazing. So these are all coming up within the coming months?
Yeah. So just to recap, local pickup available now. The bells and whistles for curbside pickup coming really soon. And then third, local delivery, it's in the middle of rolling out. So you should see it on your store if you don't already.
Amazing. Well, thanks so much, Thea. This is going to be great, especially for certain categories, like you said, like a florist. I have to admit, bought some flowers at Mother's Day was recently. And I think that could have been really useful for the Shopify merchant that I bought from.
So I can't wait for that to roll out for them as well.
Thank you.
So Vanessa That's amazing.
Yes. Hey.
We're not talking about shipping
yet, are we?
No. No. I mean, like, I mean, we're always talking about how we get packages. And, you know, it's great that we're doing all this stuff for local delivery. I know for me, I saw a store owner that I like know for years and have bought from for years actually take it into his own hands and do some of those deliveries with his staff in the last week.
So it's great that we're doing that. But not everyone is just buying local. There are a lot of cases where we're also having to buy from stores that are not down the street. And those packages have to get shipped. And so for those, let's I would love to bring on our Chief Technology Officer, Jean Michel, to talk about what we've been doing with Shopify Fulfillment Network.
Welcome, J. Mel.
Hey, Vanessa. How are you doing?
I'm doing okay. How are you?
I was thinking about all of you talking about all the packages that show up at your door. And I was like, I don't know if this is taboo or not, but I actually don't shop that often. But when I do, those few packages that show up, I want them to show up fast. So maybe that's a good segue into kind of what I wanted to talk about now, which is it's our 1 year almost 1 year anniversary of talking about the Shopify fulfillment network that we announced last June. So it's only been 11 months and we've been really busy.
So when we announced it, it was about an early access program in June. We wanted get a half dozen, couple dozen merchants out of the platform to test onboarding and also to get ready for the busy season and make sure that we can scale and have a really good shopping experience during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holidays. So the good news is we've got a bunch of merchants on. We had a great holiday season and the team has been really busy making sure that there's new features added and enhancements. And we also spun up 5 new warehouses as part of that as well.
So I think we've in 11 months, we went from announcements to actually having live packages and to actually taking off the label of early access and it's we're kind of open for business now.
Yes. Hold on. We said we'll take the label off of the early access, but like let's describe the thing we just took the label off of. So for those who don't know, what is Shopify fulfillment network? Why should they care?
Why should they be excited?
So our vision around this is we want to take the complexity out of fulfillments for all of our merchants and we want to make sure everyone has the availability to have 2 day shipping anywhere on the planet, right? So even for people like me who don't shop a lot, when you do, speed kind of matters. And also, we realize that for merchants, as Lindsay was talking about, inventory is a big deal. And it's also a big deal trying to worry about storing it, trying to figure out how do I get my inventory close to the buyers, where are my buyers, Like all the logistical challenges. So I think with SFN is like how do we simplify it all, make onboarding great and then make sure every merchant can have fast shipping across the planet.
So that's kind of in a nutshell what our vision was. Like everything you've heard today, like our whole mission is to be behind you and supporting your brand. So when packages show up to the door, it's going to be your logo on it, going to be your packing slip. We've done some nifty things with Liquid, which is our theme editing language that you build your online store with. It's the same language you use to customize your packing slip.
So I think that's been a big philosophy around how we built out the Shopify fulfillment network is it's your packages are going to show
up. Yes. And you pair that with the 2 day shipping, you get like a really, really great customer experience that you're able to just offer with Shopify Fulfillment Network. So I mean, it's been 11 months, but I know behind the scenes we've been really, really busy. Last year, a lot of people probably heard we acquired a company called 6 River Systems.
Can you go into it a bit? I mean, it's robots,
you know?
I almost forgot about talking about that. It's a good reminder. In the last 11 months, a lot of it went really quickly and the last 8 weeks maybe have slowed down to a crawl, but a lot's happened. So one of the things we were trying to get done is we believe like technology is going to play a huge factor in us providing a really reliable fulfillment network. So we've been looking at who else has had that passion and that mission with us.
And we found a great company in Boston called 6 River Systems. And they are experts at fulfillment, great at technology, have a lot of expertise in this. So we acquired them last October. And one of the cool things that I think we brought into the Shop and Fulfillment Network family is collaborative robotics, which works within warehouses that really helps make warehouses a lot more advanced. So anyway, really excited.
Now we call these robots Chuck after the Boston or the Charles River in Boston as well. So yes, we're really excited about these collaborative robots.
What do you mean by collaborative robots? Can you break that down a bit?
Okay. Well, maybe like why don't I just show you while I talk through it. So I'm just going to grab my phone and we have a little model here. So I'm going to I'm actually going to put a check into my office and I'm going to walk you through what they look like and what they do and what problems they're solving. So okay, let me just move to that.
Okay. So we've got Chuck. Here you can see what this robot looks like. And the whole idea about collaborative is these are self driving autonomous robots that zip around within warehouses. And their jobs are to make it easier for associates to pick things and not have to walk the whole length of the actual warehouse.
So there's 3 parts of the truck that's really, really great. The first one as you can see here is the main screen. So what happens is, trucks go to an index spot in the warehouse where they basically get their work and their work is done by us having a lot of analytics and a mapping of the warehouse and we kind of know what orders are coming in, so we can batch them. And then we basically give the work to the truck and then the truck goes off, zips off to its zone and it finds some associates and the screen basically says, hey, welcome associate, like follow me, right? Follow the leader, follows through the warehouse.
And when the truck is full, the truck basically zips back to the packing station. So that's where we call it collaborative because it really makes the associates' job a lot easier. Historically, they had to push big trolleys around. It was heavy. It was slow.
In this way, trucks take 50% of the walking away. And what we've seen with the deployment so far is 2 to 3 times more efficient at actually picking and packing the mortars. So that's really great. You can also see in the picture here, Chuck is pretty versatile, because we're picking different kinds of things in the warehouse. And a lot of times, we can bring some of this automation to existing warehouses without having to kind of revamp them completely, because as you can see these trucks are pretty mobile.
They can spin. There's 2 wheels underneath it. They can spin really quickly. And I don't know about you, Vanessa, but I'm not a robotics expert until the last 9 months. But what you're seeing right now with Chuck is also a robot that just recently won 2 design awards.
So the Red Dot Award, which is a very prestigious award, was awarded. And I think they won 2, 1 for functionality and 1 for flexibility. So brains and looks of this Chuck apparently are pretty nice. So anyway, we're really excited about Chuck. The team at 6 Rivers, I think, is bringing a lot of expertise to us as well.
And just the model that I was just showing, we'll make it available so you can all put Chuck in your living room and have a closer look as well.
So cool, so cool. Yes, I didn't really know that. Funny enough, I actually did my undergraduate in robotics, so it's funny that you say that. But I actually didn't even know that there was a design award for robotics. So that's really cool.
Okay. So we talked a lot about efficiency. I think that's kind of like something that we're going to have to see in warehouses, not only just the distribution of more warehouse locations everywhere, but also like within each warehouse, it has to be really efficient and work really well with the associates that work inside those locations. Amazing.
Exactly. Yes. And I think like some maybe I'll just wrap up the shipping part here. Obviously, it's pretty serious that we're investing in this. I think the last 11 months we've shown that.
We talked about investing $1,000,000,000 over 5 years. We're a year into that investment now. And hopefully, what I'm walking you through right now is just proof that we're taking this really seriously. We're really excited about the technology, but also the user experience. Like we call it a Shopify fulfillment network because we wanted to make it easy for you to onboard.
We want to take care of distributing your goods. We want to help you decide how you can get your goods close to the buyers, so you don't have to worry about that. It's going to be a multiyear journey. There's some things we do really well with the software fulfillment network today. And there's obviously some things we have to we're going to have to improve with.
So our sweet spot might not be fridges and dryers right now. And that's kind of okay. But I think if you're doing 10 or more orders a day, if you've got 2,000 SKUs or less, I think we're definitely open for business and would love to onboard as many of you who are listening who have a pain in fulfillment, we're open and really ready for this.
Yes. Easy, the early access label is off. It is fully open.
It's off. We are ready.
It's thrown away.
I'm actually surprised you haven't talked about one topic that you're pretty known for talking about especially on Twitter. We haven't talked about performance at all.
We haven't. Well, I guess we talked about robots performance, but not Shopify's performance, which there's a lot to talk about today. But one of my jobs at Shopify obviously is to be a megaphone for making sure that people realize that speed is Shopify's number one feature in a lot of ways. People are impatient, whether it be speed on POS, clicking buttons and probably most notably the speed of the online store itself. So I'd like to maybe do we have time?
I can talk about it.
Yes. We'll take a couple of minutes.
We can't
get We can't
keep track of
time, but okay.
Yes. Let's do it. Let's do it. So tell us a little bit about performance. I know you talk a lot about that inside Shopify and outside Shopify.
Like what are some of the biggest things that you're excited about that we're doing there?
So I think maybe the simplest way for all the viewers is there's 2 parts of performance. There's one part that you just get for free for being on Shopify and that's something we just invest in every year. We've been expanding our infrastructure from our networking infrastructure. We've got points of presence on each continent over 80 distributed around the world, which means that your traffic when you're on Shopify to the online store is going to be optimized. We take care of your images.
You might not know, but when you upload an image to your shop, we make sure that's optimized. So it's as fast as possible depending if it's being viewed on a mobile, on your desktop. That's something you don't have to care about. Like we don't ask you, hey, tell me what optimal image size. We do all that for free.
And we've been spending a lot of time like making sure that's actually rally you don't have to care about. And there's one final piece here that we've been investing in for the last almost 2 years now, which is we're rebuilding our online store engine. The engine that takes all of your themes and then spits out the actual online store, that piece has been rebuilt from scratch and it's being deployed right now to merchants. We have several plus merchants on our new online store engine. And they're seeing between 50% to 100 percent improvement on load times for online stores.
And that's rolling out right now in the peak. Everyone again, this is just turn on by default. You don't have to say anything. It's just you're just all going to get this.
And for those who maybe don't know what points of presence is, like it's really just means like we have servers everywhere around the world now. So it's really close similar to actually SFN, what you just said, it's really close to where your people are viewing it. And so it's really fast. Love drawing those connections. And so you also mentioned like, hey, you get some stuff for free.
What's the stuff you maybe don't get for free?
Yes. So maybe on the theme side, right, there's a lot of configuration in your shop, deciding what themes you have, what apps you have, you have people who go in and you've hired developers that go in and actually make changes to your theme, like all that has an impact obviously on how fast your theme is going to be. So what we're doing as well is we're launching in a couple of months, a performance dashboard that's going to show up into Shopify. And what that's going to let you as a shop owner see is how is your shop doing over time. And that's one of the big advantages we have at Shopify is there's a lot of web performance tools out there.
You can go and see how fast your web store is, but there's no one who's saying how it's doing over time. Is there anything you've done to your shop that might have had an actual significant impact to your performance? So I think that's launching pretty soon. And maybe I can just give you a quick demo of it right now. So let me bring it up here.
So you can see at the top, one of the important things, you can actually see the distinction. On the left is all the stuff you get for free from Shopify, that's time to 1st bite. That's all the networking stuff you just get. And that shows you kind of how good Shopify is doing it at serving all of your data across the world. And the other side is how does your online store perform once it's all loaded into the browser.
And what's really cool here is we scroll down a bit, you can actually see the history of this over time and you can see whenever you've changed themes, you can see when you installed apps, you can see when someone logged in and updated a theme. And And this is going to help you get really good visibility to kind of be as obsessive compulsive performance as I am. And we're trying to put that in as many of your hands as possible, so you can kind of make a really good decision for, again, staying fast. Because we know, I mean, this is not just a geeky fun thing, but speed affects SEO. SEO impacts people landing on your site.
People on your site are happier when things are fast. It impacts conversion. So I think we all have to kind of be as obsessed as we are about making sure your online stores are fast. So this is the dashboard you're seeing is coming soon and I can't wait to get in your hands.
Yes, because I think it's one thing to give you guys the numbers, but it's another to actually showcase like what has happened that has impacted that so you can actually go and do something about it. So really, really cool stuff. Okay. All right. We got the performance in JML.
Thanks. I'm done with I'm out of here. All right.
Thank you so much for coming in. Thanks. Wow, lots of stuff.
You know it's funny. I was just thinking we sped through a lot of things today. And yet, here we are way over time. But we're not done, are we?
No. Nice scoop, Craig. Like last year, we kind of have this tradition now at Shopify whenever we do these types of events, we save something really juicy for the end. And of course, this being probably one of the biggest events we've ever held virtually, but to be honest, still very much so a very, very significant event. Of course, we had to come back with something as well.
I mean, last year, you launched Shopify Fulfillment Network. What are we going to do this year? And to kind of announce it, we'd love to welcome our Chief Operating Officer, Harley. Hey, Harley.
Hey there. Thanks Craig and thanks Vanessa. Hey friends, Harley here. You've probably heard a lot about our mission that we're trying to make commerce better for everyone. And a large part of commerce is banking and financial services.
I think we can all agree that there is so much room for improvement there. We think we can do better. Most of today's banking products are built from a traditional bank's point of view. The products are designed for large established businesses and they do not move as fast as our merchants do. They're not flexible and they need to be.
They aren't designed around the needs of independent businesses and entrepreneurs. And we want to change that. We're going to give all eligible merchants and all of our plans the financial products they need to start, run and grow their business. We want to build the best business account designed specifically for independent businesses and entrepreneurs and we're calling it Shopify Balance. Shopify Balance will give independent businesses the tools that are typically reserved for only the largest businesses in the world.
But right from the Shopify admin, you'll be able to pay your bills, track your expenses and make smart decisions about the future of your business. And if you need more funding, you can get that right there without any delay. Your money from your sales will land right into your balance much faster than it would with any legacy bank. And you will not have to pay any minimum fees or any or maintain any type of minimum balance. You will also get the Shopify card.
So you can make payments in person and online even take out funds from an ATM. And you can have a virtual one or a physical one with your business name right on it.
All right, Harley. Stop teasing us. Let's see the card.
It's right here.
Incredible.
This card will not just have your name and logo on it. It will also be designed specifically to reward Shopify merchants. We're building the best rewards program ever for independent business and entrepreneurs, things that you all value like cash back and partner discounts on important things like shipping and marketing. We want to make the Shopify card better than any bank card you've ever had and we're in a rush to get it into your hands. Our plan is to launch Balance for early access later this year to U.
S. Merchants on Shopify Payments and then we'll expand to other countries. Boom! Is that my mic drop moment, I guess? Are we done here?
100%. That is a very, very mic drop moment. Thanks so much, Harley. It's a really big product we're launching Shopify Balance. It's super magical.
Craig, I don't think there's anything else for us. I think it's maybe time that me and you sign off.
That's right. Thanks so much.
Actually, I have something important that I thought I would share. So no more announcements, no more launches. Just something to close out the time we spent together today. And it may sound a little strange, a little cheesy, but I wrote a letter to all of you watching, to all the entrepreneurs here today. And here goes.
I've spent my life admiring entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs who have built massive companies and also entrepreneurs who have built small businesses with a lot of meaning. My grandfather became an entrepreneur in the 50s as new immigrant to Canada. His reason was survival. When my grandmother turned 60, she became an entrepreneur for self reliance.
And my moment, that came in 2,001, when I started supporting myself as a student. My reason for becoming an entrepreneur was equal parts passion and necessity. And I've always felt that entrepreneurship is this profound way to build something of value. And when things are rough like they are right now, maybe even a way to survive and thrive. Some have accused me of being entrepreneur obsessed and maybe that's true.
It's been about a decade since I joined this scrappy little startup called Shopify and committed my life to helping entrepreneurs all over the world. In my 1st few weeks at Shopify, when we had only a couple 1,000 merchants, I remember thinking, one day we might even help our 1,000,000 merchants. And a few months ago, that actually happened. Our entire company exists for one reason, to make commerce better for everyone. And the way we do that is supporting entrepreneurs in everything that we do.
I want to play you something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It's a call to our support line from a merchant. The merchants of Pharma in the U. S. Hit really hard by the pandemic.
Hi. Thank you for calling Shopify's retail support.
I have a Shopify account I've been working on to launch an online store for selling local vegetables and flowers. We're just barely able to do this in the midst of trying to grow all this stuff. However, there is interest now of coming to pick up the vegetables on the farm, of which we hope to do presales online.
Yes, absolutely.
I can cry right now because it's
a work for Shopify. I don't think we have a farm. So
I don't think we sell anything. I almost didn't set it up because building a website is so hard and Shopify beta
is so easy. They should know they're really helping people. It's really important. That
speaks to me on a yes.
For me, this is an emotional reminder of how Shopify can bridge the gap between a family business that fails and one that survives. This is why we're here. This is why all of us are here. And that farmer, she's going to keep feeding her family and her community because we were here. She's going to do great and the world looks a hell of a lot better with businesses like hers thriving.
There are so many wonderful things about starting a business and being an entrepreneur. But there is one major downside. It can be lonely. It can be isolating. And it's not always clear who to turn to for help or advice.
Enter all of you, all of us. We are each on our own journeys in our own corners of the world right now, seeking our own versions of success and our own versions of independence. Right now, we may be physically distant, but we are not alone. Together, we are the strongest collective entrepreneurs on the planet, community over everything. Many of you have heard me say, we want to arm the rebels.
We want to make sure that entrepreneurs have everything they need to succeed. That was our objective from the start and it feels like that is more important now than ever before. We've been thrown in to an unprecedented challenge, but we've shown we will not let it break us. We are not fragile. We are resilient and it's time for us to step up, to reach out, to build, to work and to push.
This is our moment right now, right fucking now. So to our merchants, to our partners and to anyone who's ever bought anything from a Shopify store, we say thank you. The future of commerce is here and we are that future together. Thank you all for joining us for Shopify Reunite.