Shopify Inc. (SHOP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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 anyone 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 right into our road maps. We looked 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 the things that we ship 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 and email, 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 sold. 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 sweep them like this. So you're not the only one, Craig?

Yes, yes. Of course, 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, try 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. And 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 we've been looking at. Can you share some of those with our audience?

Yes. I mean, whenever we talk about trends, like I'd 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, 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 #ShopifyReunite. 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, 1.5 hours, 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 jampacked. So stay till the very end, there's going to be so much exciting stuff we're going to talk about. But you don't have to worry about taking notes, because everything that we do talk about here will be posted in 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. Hey, 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 that program, eligible merchants are able to apply for Shopify right within their account. And once you're approved, you get funding in as little as a few days.

And now when we talk about this, we're actually able to fund businesses, that 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 banking account?

In just as few as a few days. And the other really -- 2 really key things is that we don't have to 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 Tobi started Snowdevil, 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 use the funding to get the 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 million to the program. And so far, we've already provided $1 billion in capital for you, our merchants.

That's incredible. So $1 billion 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 hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars?

They're as low as $200 to as high as $1 million. 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 financial 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 back 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?

Splitted for -- over months. So if you were to do $400, that would be $400 split into 4.

So -- okay. So that's amazing. So installments an 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 million users worldwide, 4x faster checkout and 2x higher conversion rate than regular checkout. So you already get to take advantage of what exists today with Shop Pay. And now with installments, it'll just be even better.

Yes. So we've 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's -- 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. So there you go Vanessa, we got capital for merchants, installments for consumers and Shop Pay for everyone.

Heavy hitter right up front. 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, then Shop Pay. I think, like, just not having to enter anything, being able to just enter in a few confirmation numbers and then, bam, all my information is there, my credit card's 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, 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 story. 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.

Hey, Vanessa. Hi, Craig. It's just 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 online, 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 the 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 we see of how retail businesses or the nontraditional 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 in 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 shops, they needed to start focusing on how to be the online store much faster, how to have more reliable and relevant products and readapting 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?

Yes. So first of all, it is a 1-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 going to 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, let's say, 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 a 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 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.

Yes, 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 on to 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 restaurant 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 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 sup 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. So it doesn't necessarily just have to be tips.

Yes. What else can they use it for? Because I know once the money comes in, like how is it -- how is it like tied to an employee? Like, how does that manage and what freedom does it give them?

Yes. 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 will 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 to -- 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 I like to recap when is all of this available? Is it all available already today?

Yes, that's right. So between gift cards, tipping and Express, you can use that all right now. 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 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 going to 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. Say, Vanessa, you're in France and you're -- 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 a 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 a localized domain. So X local Canada store, a local France store, local U.K. 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, it's 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 for 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 I 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 U.S. and I've set up my online store even though it's based out of the U.S. 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, they 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 as you said 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 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 .fr domain. 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 anyway, 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.

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. dollar. 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?

Yes. 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 products so that it's the right price based on the rate. And that works great for small to mid-sized businesses where you're seeing some international sales, but maybe not a massive influx of them. But for 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 exchange or 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.

Yes. 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, we -- 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. 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 rate 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 working on that's going to be coming up in the next 6 months?

Yes. 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 setup 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 is a lot more flexibility available on your homepage, where you can 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, on the homepage right now you can, like, drag and drop and create like totally different experiences and you can't 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?

Yes. 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 -- this new online store view, where you'll be able to click in, open up the store. What we're seeing here is the first page, it'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, whatever 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 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 one product page or I can do it in bulk, so that you can see product reviews across all of the products I have in 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 like this piece of work here, it 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. We're targeting to launch a part of these different features throughout 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?

Yes. Can you -- like, what types of customizations are you seeing 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 flow. 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 to 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 important -- very, very important. All right. Lots coming from online store. Thanks so much, Agatha.

Thanks so much, Vanessa.

Yes. So I would say not -- I think lots is probably the understatement of the year. I'm really excited about all the cool stuff that's coming there. Now we spent 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, 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% 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 off-line sales disappeared almost entirely, you said 70% drop, but then very quickly recovered online.

Exactly, they were able to adapt their business with 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, use your 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 rebuild 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 you 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, 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. Sort of adding this feature so that buyers can look at which retail locations have which inventory and what fulfillment options are available to the -- like curbside pickup or even local delivery. And we think that will help drive a lot more purchases in those local markets.

That's amazing. Okay. So now we'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, they'll drop it off at 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 & 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. Now you also mentioned the Tap & 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 Interac Debit included as well as the Tap & 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 market today.

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 off-line 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 off-line store.

Like you said, if there's one thing Shopify is not short on, it's 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. And most recently, we've worked very closely with both Facebook and Google to bring exciting new shopping experiences to Shopify 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 synchronized 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, 1 that was quite a surprise for people, which is Email. The other 1 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 Shopify Email. This is a really highly anticipated product that we were able to get into the market recently. And it's -- we've already seen over 30 million emails get sent from Shopify merchants using it.

Sorry, that number was 30 million?

30 million.

3 0, okay. Yes, keep going.

Yes. So it 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 email 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 and 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, Shopify 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 email. 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 the 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 to 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 business's conversation centralized in one spot.

Exactly. And between Shopify Ping and Shopify Email, you have that entire life cycle 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, and 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 million users and what we did...

So we got 16 million 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 1 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 of 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 customized, how it works with 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 our 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. 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 it 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. 16 million 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 am at 9 right now.

You are at 9? Wow. Okay.

I have got 9 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 shipment, 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 treasures. 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, a 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 Lynsey Thornton. Lynsey, welcome.

Hi, Vanessa. Thanks for having me.

Great to have you, Lynsey. 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 exists is actually getting your product 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 set 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 add. 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've 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 shot, 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 2 and 7 gos at actually getting their product information the way they wanted. 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 a 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 ton of staff, but the staff that they do, they're 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, 1 person was managing the images, editing, getting it up. Another 1 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 and then archives...

Yes, that's exactly right.

Yes. And then archives, you were 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 wading 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 product, that can just get out of hand really quickly. 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 upload. 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, products 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. 1.1 billion 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 work floor, 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 to decrements from your inventory". How -- 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 of helping merchants with both accuracy and efficiency. So here's what we've done. Couple of weeks ago, we released our first version of purchase orders. So that means that you can order from your suppliers 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 new report around gift card, 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.

Yes, I think purchase orders, like it's almost -- it sounds simple, but it is actually such a huge, 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 on point-of-sale? But also 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 -- I think one thing we talk a lot about inside of 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. And 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, et cetera. And that's been fantastic. The second part is sometimes the buyer still wants to return that item after the 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 send out branded buyer notifications and it's manage 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 are so interesting because it's actually -- if you've ever returned anything, which I'm sure all of us at some point have, 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, Lynsey.

Thank you. Bye.

So products, orders, inventory, customers, I think you're 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 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 mindblowing 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 to 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 6-week span. And we compared it to the previous 6 weeks and local orders were up 176%. It's mindblowing. 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 happens probably within 24 hours, right?

Totally. We've been working on 2 exciting things. You already hinted at 1 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 in the future that they can let you know as soon as they arrive outside, so they can send you a ping, ready from pickup my order, so there is minimal waiting involved. And of course, like it just helps with physical distancing and making that experience somewhat seamless.

That's amazing. Okay. So this -- 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 on 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 for maybe because they're doing a live stream, for example, what are we doing for local deliveries?

Exactly. 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 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 up 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 you want me to 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 wanted to ship to certain ZIP codes or postal codes if you are 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 in 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, leave on the doorstep or be aware of my barking dog, he's actually really friendly.

Is that for me?

Yes. Me too, though. Charlie Brown is quite loud. 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 Lynsey was just describing, you could 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 the 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?

Yes. 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 our 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, I bought some flowers that Mother's Day was recently. And I think that could have been really useful from the Shopify merchant that I bought from. So I can't wait for that to roll out for them as well. So Vanessa?

That's amazing, yes. I don't know about you ...

We are not done talking about shipping yet, are we?

No, no. I mean, like -- I mean, we're always talking about how we get packages. And 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 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, JML.

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 to get a half dozen, a couple of 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. Look, we said we'll take the label off of the early access. But 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 Lynsey 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 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. It's going to be your packing slip. We even done -- we've done some nifty things with liquid, which is our theme editing language that you built your online store with. It's the same language you used to customize your packing slips. 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, yes.

I almost forgot about talking about that. It's a good reminder. 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 of fulfillment, greater 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 Shopify 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 actually going to put a Chuck into my office and I'm going to walk you through what they look like. 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 Chuck that's really, really great. The first one, as you can see here is the main screen. So what happens is Chucks 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 Chuck and then the Chuck 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 Chuck is full, the Chuck basically zips back to the packing station. So that's where we call it collaborative because it really makes the associate's job a lot easier. Historically, they had to push big trolleys around. It was heavy. It was slow. In this way, Chucks take 50% of the walking away. And what we've seen with the deployment so far is 2 to 3x more efficient at actually picking and packing of orders. 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 Chucks 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 experts 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 honestly -- I didn't really know -- 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've 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 -- so 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 talk about investing $1 billion 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, right? We want to take care of distributing your goods. We want to help you decide how you can get your goods closer 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 Shopify 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 driers 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. We are ready.

It's been ripped off. Yes, 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 #1 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 left it maybe -- do we have time? I can talk about a couple features.

Yes, we'll take a couple of minutes. Yes, we can get...

I am not keeping track of time, but okay.

Yes. Let's do it. Let's do it. So tell us a 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 are 2 parts of performance. There's 1 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 in each continent over 80 distributors 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 it'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 reality, you don't have to care about. And there's 1 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 at 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% improvement on load times for online stores. And that's rolling out right now as I speak next. Everyone -- again, this is it 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 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 as 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 just 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 first 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 the theme. 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 obsessive as we are about making sure your online stores are fast. So this is the dashboard you're seeing is coming soon, and it can't wait to get in your hands.

Yes. Because I think -- well, 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. So over to you, Vanessa.

So thank you so much for coming in. Wow, lots of stuff.

You know what's funny? I was just thinking, we -- excuse the pun, 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 there. Thanks, Craig, and thanks, Vanessa. Hey friends, Harley here. You 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 in all of our plants, 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 and 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 it 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 2001, 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 start-up called Shopify and committed my life to helping entrepreneurs all over the world. In my first few weeks at Shopify, when we had only a couple of thousand merchants. Remember thinking 1 day, we might even help our 1 millionth merchant 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. [Presentation]

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 and 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 f***ing 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.