Executive Briefing
Shopify’s actually-clever consumer rewards program
Also: Chipotle is playing offense again.
By Dan Frommer on Saturday, February 18, 2023 at 8:00 am
One of the low-key best pieces of software created over the past decade is Shop Pay, the super-fast checkout service from Shopify, the e-commerce hosting platform. With just a couple of clicks, it makes checking out feel more like a fun little dance than a forced exchange.
This is extra smart because a fast, frictionless checkout experience is great for everyone involved: The consumer, whose time is respected; the merchant, which has a better chance of completing the sale before you change your mind; and Shopify, which can then collect a higher fee as both the payment processor and as the e-commerce platform provider (and build an ever-growing set of logged-in shoppers, now “well over 100 million,” with stored payment information and a consolidated flow of user data).
Consumers used Shop Pay to spend $11 billion during the holiday fourth quarter, Shopify said this past week during its Q4 earnings call. That’s about one third of the $34 billion worth of payments that Shopify processed during the quarter, and almost 20% of the $61 billion total spent at Shopify stores during the quarter. Pretty good.
It’s also, as I’ve written previously, allowed Shopify to do something few enterprise software providers are able to do: Start to build a beloved little consumer brand around Shop Pay and its growing collection of Shop-branded services.
Its latest is a sort-of rewards and loyalty program called Shop Cash, which started rolling out over the past several months for some people in the US.
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