Shopify Sees Buy Buttons As The Future

Shopify is pressing hard on buy buttons.

Re/code reports that the eCommerce platform is increasing the number of online sales channels on which its merchant customers — primarily small businesses — can sell their products. It’s a move particularly motivated by the rising popularity of shopping on mobile devices, notes the outlet, which also shares that among Shopify’s new channels currently are the product discovery app Wanelo, the home design site Houzz and the coupon app Ebates — with more to come, according to the company.

“This is a continued bet on distributed commerce,” Satish Kanwar, Shopify’s director of product, remarked to Re/code.

The outlet notes that the expansion comes on the heels of Shopify’s integration with social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest — while pointing out that it is too early to tell how successful eCommerce on Twitter and Facebook will be in the long term, with Pinterest’s efforts in that regard having not exactly set the world on fire thus far.

Nonetheless, Kanwar told Re/code that a quarter of Shopify’s merchant customers (about 60,000 retailers) are already selling their product on at least one of the aforementioned social platforms, a fact he attributes to the rise in mobile device-based shopping.

“A lot of this is hedging on what mobile commerce will look like at scale in the future,” he stated to the outlet. “The strategy here is really enablement.”

In his comments to Re/code, Kanwar further explained that Shopify merchants will be able to manage their product offerings on Wanelo, Houzz and Ebates using the same software dashboard with which Shopify had previously outfitted them.