Shopify Enters B2B eCommerce Market to Compete with Amazon

Shopify will be focusing on business-to-business (B2B) commerce, introducing tools to compete with Amazon, a Financial Times (FT) report said Wednesday (June 22).

This comes as the company seeks to recover from a battering stock sell-off.

According to the report, Shopify entrance into B2B sales would add opportunities to its business model, with the tools meant to make it easier for wholesalers to sell in bulk and handle procurement through integrating with enterprise resource planning software.

Shopify provides software and services for independent retailers. The company has seen its shares down 75%, with more than $130 billion wiped off its market value.

The decline of Shopify has been more severe than many rivals like Amazon, with the usual suspects like inflation and supply chain uncertainty hitting hard.

Shopify has also reported a decline in overall sales growth, with total value of goods sold being down too.

According to Harley Finkelstein, president of the company, this will now be an opportunity for the company to expand its total addressable market.

The company said it didn’t want to “just go after direct-to-consumer businesses, big and small, but to now go after wholesale business, which is a huge untapped market.”

See also: Shopify-Twitter Deal Highlights Social Media’s Growing Role in Retail

Shopify announced another new development, a partnership with Twitter in which Shopify merchants will be able to display and update items on Twitter profiles.

Twitter will also now have a sales channel app for Shopify U.S. merchants, which will let merchants onboard to Twitter’s Shopping Manager and link and sync their product catalogs.

This shows how social media is now often used to let people discover what they want to buy, along with the need for companies to meet customer expectations that what they want is going to be available — addressing a big frustration for eCommerce, inventory stock-outs.