Shopify COO on launching Shopify Balance, working with Facebook Shops

Hey Jim, thanks so much for having me on the show. It's always a great pleasure and honor to be with you.

Yeah, so if I may, before I jump into that, I just want to talk quickly about Shopify's stance on what's going on, because I think it moves us to just at least show us that. Absolutely, you know, as you know, Shopify stands for equality. Since inception, our entire core value or mission was all about leveling the playing field and allowing for fairness so that anyone can rise up and build great businesses. And we are really, as you or I'm sure, deeply saddened by some current events, and we stand with our black merchants, our black employees, and the black community worldwide. So I just wanted to mention that at the outset.

Yeah, well, look, we believe the future of commerce needs to have diverse voices, more voices, not fewer. So again, we started the business because we felt it wasn't fair. If you wanted to start a business 15 years ago online, you needed a lot of money, needed a lot of experience. And so our mission from day one has been to level that playing field, and it feels more important now than ever before to do that.

Yeah, so I mean, you're mentioning Shopify Balance, but I think just as you might for a second, what you've seen we've been working on over the last 10 years or so in particular is, after we helped small businesses and entrepreneurs figure out how to build a beautiful, scalable online store, we then said, now let's help them with physical commerce, help them sell offline as well, let's help them sell in places like Facebook and Instagram and the marketplaces. But there is this other aspect to running a business, and that's what we call merchant solutions. And so we realized that if we were to aggregate all of our stores, we would be the second largest retailer online in America, and that gives us incredible economies of scale that we can go in and negotiate on behalf of these small businesses. So we first started with Shopify Payments and made sure that people were able to accept credit cards at affordable rates in a very easy-to-use fashion. We then went to things like Capital, because we felt that frankly it was really difficult for small businesses to get capital, to get money from a bank, fulfillment and shipping. But this new thing that we're introducing is Shopify Balance. And I think you and I would agree that historically banks have really underserved and undervalued SMBs. It's the reason we started Capital. And so we're offering this new product called Shopify Balance really to give merchants access to critical money management tools, whether they need to manage their cash flow, whether they need to reconcile things like their payments and various channels, and where they can get paid and get paid to a bank account very quickly to manage day-to-day operations. But that's really our next merchant solution that we think further levels the playing field so that small businesses can compete.

It really is. So we've been working with Facebook on commerce and commerce tools since the beginning, since they started thinking about commerce. And we're really excited with Facebook Shops. Facebook Shops will allow these free tools to help merchants create a very customizable digital storefront on Facebook and of course Instagram. And it's just one more place for merchants to connect with buyers. And I think the partnership, as you mentioned, really shows that the tech industry can come together to help business at a very critical time. But that is one more place where small businesses can connect with consumers and they can make more sales. Now, again, more channels equal more sales, but it does increase the complexity, and that creates more value for Shopify, which simplifies all of that into a single centralized retail operating system.

A lot. A lot of them. I even have my cell phone number and I get daily updates. I've actually posted a few of them on social media telling me how they're not only surviving COVID and the global pandemic, but some of them are actually thriving. But you're absolutely right. We've now given more than a billion dollars worth of cash advances and loans to small businesses. And again, these are not people and not businesses that could just simply go to a bank. And so they're using it for inventory and for marketing, and they're building their business. And when COVID first hit, in that first week or two, we actually deployed an additional two hundred million dollars of cash advances and loans for these small businesses. We created gift card capabilities for merchants that didn't have more service-type businesses. We created local in-store pickup and curbside pickup. We created an email shop by email, which is free until October. And then we created a 90-day trial so that anyone who needed to pivot their business very quickly was able to do so with Shopify. And we did that within the first couple of weeks of COVID hitting. So we have felt that again, that mission of making commerce better for everyone and helping entrepreneurs feels now more important than ever before.