The main event of this month was Shopify Reunite 2020. It was an online broadcast event for Shopify business owners. Let’s find out what was there.
While some businesses are cutting their jobs, like Airbnb, E-commerce is showing some growth. Shopify is not an exception as well.
Shopify Capital
This is a thing that I’ve never seen before in terms of E-commerce platforms. You can get an opportunity to get cash advances and loans for your eligible businesses. It is available for the USA and Canada Shopify merchants.
How it works. You send request and within 2-5 business days you will find out if it is possible for your business to have funding from Shopify directly. You can get from $200 to $1,000,000 USD.
Here are requirements from Shopify Capital:
- Your store is located in the United States or Canada.
- Your business has a low risk profile.
- Your store has Shopify Payments or another third-party payment provider enabled.
- Your store processes a certain amount of sales.
You can apply it here: https://www.shopify.com/capital.
Shopify Balance
This is a banking tool to centralise all merchant finances in one place. At this moment this service is available by requesting an early access here: https://www.shopify.com/balance. It will be available only for the US merchants later this year.
They offer a real Shopify Card, account with all data about finances and the list of cashback and discounts.
Delivery methods updates
Shopify added 2 new delivery types for supporting businesses during this outbreak.
Now we have Curbside pickup and Local delivery options to use.
With Curbside pickup you can offer delivery from your warehouse spots.
Local delivery is a more massive tool. It is a fusion of Shopify Local Delivery app, Shopify store locations and in the future you will be able to use them within a Shopify Fulfillment Network.
The Shopify Fulfillment Network is getting few major upgrades too. We’re building a network of warehouses to give every business on Shopify affordable access to a two-day shipping.
What can it give the merchants in particular?
It looks like it will evolve in the separate Shopify based delivery network within the USA. At this moment it is available to businesses that ship between 10 and 10,000 orders a day to the United States.
If we will look more in details, we will find that Shopify has huge plans for this Shopify Fulfillment Network. Do you remember that in the end of 2019 Shopify buys warehouse automation tech developer 6 River Systems for $450 million? Well, now they’ve announced Chuck, robot who will hang out in warehouses, like robots in Amazon.
It looks like Shopify can evolve in such a huge giant as Amazon.
New Express Shopify theme
It is a brand new free Shopify built theme for restaurants and other food and beverage businesses. It is a one page online store, and it looks simple, bold, unusual, fresh. But it can be used only by small local businesses, which are the new target audience for Shopify, as it seems through this year.
Localisation for stores
This is awesome. Finally, we will have a proper country based store versions with language, currency that we need to show. They say that it will be available later this year.
With that thing we can get rid of terrible Langify/Weglot hacks with sub-domains and currencies that are being converted via third party apps.
