Shopify Gives Devs More Creative Freedom

Shopify’s Unite 2021 conference was held on June 29, 2021, and the e-commerce platform had some big, developer-centric news to share. Alan Shimel spoke with Shopify’s Glen Coates about the developer-first business model that is giving developers the most opportunity to build their businesses with a new 0% revenue share model, and how developers can leverage as much creative freedom as they want, from low-code capabilities in Online Store 2.0 to “max-code” custom storefronts. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation.

Alan Shimel: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another TechStrong TV segment. My guest this segment is Glen Coates. Glen is with Shopify. Glen, welcome to TechStrong TV.

Glen Coates: Thanks, Alan. It’s great to be here, man.

Shimel: It’s great to have you on. Glen, no pressure, but I think you’re the first person from Shopify who has been on TechStrong TV.

Coates: There you go. _____ [inaudible due to audio distortion] it’s going to be all up from here, like you’re starting at the right place.

Shimel: We’re starting at a low bar.

[Crosstalk]

‒ it only gets better. We’ll see. Anyway, Glen, I think our audience doesn’t need an introduction to Shopify. We’ve all bought things online through Shopify storefronts and so forth, but why don’t we talk a little bit about you, your background, your position with Shopify?

Coates: Right. I’ve been at Shopify a couple of years now. Before Shopify, I founded a startup called Handshake, and Handshake was a wholesale-focused e-commerce platform, so very much like Shopify but not focused on direct-to-consumer selling, just on wholesale. Handshake was acquired by Shopify about two years ago, so I’ve been at Shopify since the acquisition. In my time in the last couple of years at Shopify, I initially started out focused on wholesale, obviously, given my background. I spent most of last year focused on Shopify’s checkout, which is, obviously, a pretty important part of Shopify, and then about six months ago, _____ _____ product for what is called Shopify Core.

If you’re a merchant, Shopify Core is like what’s in the box when you buy Shopify. It’s the online store, it’s the checkout, and it’s the back office admin that lets you set up and run your business. If you’re a developer, Shopify Core is the core developer platform, so the APIs, the dev tools, the docs, all the things that let you build apps and themes and work on the Shopify platform. Yeah, and, obviously, it’s a big responsibility and a really exciting role to be able to help the world of entrepreneurs start and try their business ideas.

Shimel: Absolutely. Glen, just to give a little color, how many different Shopify merchant stores are there, whether it’s sheer number, percentage of commerce, or what have you?

Coates: Yeah. Today, Shopify powers almost two million merchants. I mean, obviously, the last year has been kind of an accelerant to businesses going online, and that’s both been new businesses, people trying businesses for the first time, and it has also been traditional businesses going digital more quickly than they might have otherwise. But yeah, today, Shopify powers almost two million merchants worldwide, and it wasn’t that long ago that that was only a million. Even at massive scale, even being the world’s largest commerce platform in terms of number of merchants, it’s still growing very quickly, which I think just goes to the pace at which the world of business is going online, and how many people want some help with that.

Shimel: Got it. Excellent. Thanks for all that info. If you don’t mind, let’s turn to the topic of today’s conversation, and I’m going to let you explain it, if it’s okay.

Coates: Sure. Next week, it is Shopify Unite, which is our annual conference. Over the years, Shopify Unite has been focused on a combination of merchant and developer topics, but this year we’re really doubling down on developers, and really making it a developer-centric conference. The reason for that is sort of going back to the question you asked me a second ago, is Shopify was founded in Canada, and, if you go back five, six, seven years, Shopify’s mission has always been to make commerce better for everyone. But, if you go back half a decade, it was mainly North American merchants mainly selling apparel, mainly direct-to-consumer, which that’s a big market but it’s not the world of commerce.

Over the last few years, Shopify has expanded considerably into new industries, new countries, new ways of welling, so wholesale as well as retail, and so we’re now in a much more diverse world of commerce, different businesses doing different things. As we sort of march down the road and try to fulfill that mission of making commerce better for everyone, that everyone is becoming a lot more diverse as we expand. Shopify can’t build all the solutions for everyone, all those different niches. While we have a great core product that includes many of the out-of-the-box things that people need to start and run a digital business, it’s not everything. We need the help of the world of developers to help build those solutions for the markets for the spaces that they are experts in to complement what is in Shopify Core, and really deliver everything that merchants need to successfully start, run, and scale a business.

This year, we’re really focused on developers and helping them get onboard with our platform. There are really three main legs to that, I would say. The first one is mainly technical. I think for your audience, some of those details are important, like Shopify really is expanding to be PlanetScale commerce infrastructure, really becoming the power lines, the plumbing, the electricity grid that runs the world of commerce. So, we’ve done some things to really scale up our infrastructure that if you’re a developer building on Shopify, you can be confident your stuff is going to run at global scale without you really having to do anything. Our checkout can handle seven times the load that it could before. We’re now at greater than 30,000 checkouts per minute on a single shop.

It’s interesting what’s happening to the world of commerce, like the world of social selling has made, and the way algorithms reinforce themselves in terms of distribution to drive traffic towards things that are trending. It’s become more important than ever that a merchant who blows up, whether it’s because of them being re-shared by an influencer or whatever it is, that they can capture that demand in the moment. Traffic is basically getting more spiky on the Internet. When things trend, they trend fast, and so Shopify already was the highest throughput checkout on the Internet but it’s now 7x higher, so merchants should never worry about not being able to make the most of those moments when they’re trending becoming more and more important.

Shimel: It’s hyperscale, is what it is, Glen. We’re seeing it not only in merchants and commerce, but across everything. The Internet is big business, it is worldwide business, and especially with COVID, right? If you haven’t built your infrastructure to hyperscale, you’ve got trouble.

Coates: Right.

Shimel: That’s what digital transformation is about. That’s what the world is demanding right now, hyperscale.

Coates: I imagine the readers, viewers of your site are not strangers to the world of what it takes to scale websites, and I think a lot of what Shopify tries to do is say, “Well, listen. We’ve figured that out for you. You’re a merchant with an idea. You’re going to come up with a new shoe or a new candle,” or whatever it is. Entrepreneurship is a risky endeavor, not everyone succeeds, but, when you succeed, like we really want you to be able to just capture the whole thing. The checkout works at one checkout a minute when you’re just starting out, and then, on your biggest days, it goes to 30,000 and you just don’t have to do anything. It just works, which is great. Kind of piece number one of Unite this year is Shopify really is PlanetScale infrastructure for commerce, and we already were the leaders and we’ve kind of gone up another multiple from there. Point two is really like, “As a developer, what things can I build on your platform? What are the opportunities for me to innovate, like where can I do that, and why is that exciting?”

We’ve made some major updates to our online store, to our themes platform, which is obviously every merchant basically runs an online store with a theme on it. There is a new themes platform that allows developers to properly separate basically data and presentation into different layers in a way that makes themes more modular and extensible and kind of upgradable in the future. We have this powerful new data infrastructure that allows merchants and developers to essentially build custom data models inside a shop, and not just be confined to the out-of-the-box data model that ships with Shopify. There is now a much more powerful customization framework for both theme developers and app developers to integrate custom content into themes without having to hack the theme by hand and try to take it off the upgrade path, which is really great for merchants. We have also recognized that the Shopify online store is based on a web templating language called Liquid, which is similar to the templating languages that all developers are basically familiar with.

We are also announcing, if you want to, you choose your own stack. If you want to build your website using React or something else that’s not our out-of-the-box stack, we’re also making available a new platform codenamed Hydrogen that will allow developers to basically choose their own stack, build online stores using whatever technologies they want, but ‒ and this is the crucial part ‒ still leverage a global infrastructure and hosting in scale and, “I don’t have to think about it. It’s just going to work,” on the Shopify platform, which is really great and really unique. Last but not least, I mentioned earlier that I spent last year on checkout. We are opening up for the first time the ability for developers to build checkout apps. Checkout is the piece of Shopify that it really matters. It’s where the money changes hands. It has to scale, it has to be super reliable ‒

Shimel: Super secure.

Coates: Super secure, super trusted, right, and trusted not just in the technical security sense of the word, but even just in the emotional sense of the word, like when I’m a buyer and I’m buying from an online store, when I see this checkout, does it feel familiar? Does it feel like something I can rely on? Am I comfortable handing over my money? Checkout is really where, in the _____ journey, the emotions shift from at the top of the funnel it’s kind of, “Okay, your brand, it’s really different. It’s exciting. I want to see differentiation. I want to be challenged and see new things.” But, when you’re handing over your money, the emotional tone is different, right? You’re not looking for excitement, you’re looking for predictability, right?

Shimel: Yeah.

Coates: Historically, Shopify’s checkout has been less customizable than the actual storefront pages higher in the funnel, and so now we’re opening up a new extensions framework for checkout that allows developers to build in apps that securely extend the function of Shopify’s checkout without compromising on the trust, the scalability, the speed, and all those kind of baseline, crucial things.

Shimel: Very cool.

Coates: That’s really cool. The last thing I’ll mention is we’ve talked about, “Okay, as a developer, if I build on your platform, is it just going to scale to the world?” The answer is yes. “Okay, so then what am I going to build?” Okay, so there are a bunch of new programming surface areas that we’re opening up for people to build apps and themes into, and then the last piece is, “What’s in it for me? Where are the dollars? If I start building your platform, am I actually going to make any money as a developer?” One of the things we’ve announced is _____ economic opportunities for developers. One is we’re cutting the rev share on apps in the Shopify app store to zero for the first million dollars in revenue per year, and, after the first million dollars, we’ve actually cut our rev share from 20 percent, which was already one of the lower rev shares in the industry, down to 15 percent. We’re really trying to help developers who have an idea for an app or an idea for a theme get that off the ground, no rev share on that first million bucks, and we really just want to help developer entrepreneurs get going as easy as we try to help merchant entrepreneurs get going ‒

[Crosstalk]

Then, the second one is that the Shopify theme store has historically not been open for submissions from any developer who wants to build a theme. There has been a sort of a curated set of themes there until now, but we’re actually opening up the theme store, so developers who want to build a theme and sell it to merchants will now have that opportunity that they didn’t before, which is also a huge market that is new.

Shimel: Look, I think emphasizing the developer and the developer interaction in Shopify is huge. Glen, this is all great. I didn’t want to stop you when you were talking, but of course we’ve pre-recorded this show and it’s now playing after Unite has already taken place, I believe, on the 29th.

Coates: Right.

Shimel: But, for people who maybe want to see a replay of it or maybe get the highlights, is there a place we could send them to check it out?

Coates: Yeah, if they just go unite.shopify.com, they’ll be able to watch the keynote and then dive into the other sessions that were part of the event and dig into whatever they would like.

Shimel: Fantastic. Glen, thanks for a great recap on what happened at Unite and what’s going on at Shopify. Please come back on and keep us posted. You were wrong. You set a high bar. It’s going to be tough for people to beat, so come in and please keep us up to date on what’s going on at Shopify, especially with this renewed focus on developers and development options on the platform.

Coates: I appreciate your time, man. Thanks for having me.

Shimel: All right. Glen Coates on Shopify, about Unite, the Shopify conference here on TechStrong TV. We’re going to take a break and we’ll be right back with another guest.