Shopify Rises on New Amazon Collaboration

Additionally, Shopify will providing these merchants with tools and services to help grow their online businesses. Shopify will also integrate Amazon offerings such as Login and Pay with Amazon, Fulfilment by Amazon and Selling on Amazon.

The tools and services offered to merchants via Shopify can be described as:

• Amazon Webstore sellers can now seamlessly migrate their businesses to a Shopify account, with no interruption to their online businesses. Webstore sellers can select any Shopify plan, starting at $29 per month. Shopify will also provide support to assist in the store migrations.
• Shopify merchants can enable Amazon’s payment gateway in the United States. This gives consumers the ability to login and pay using their Amazon credentials. As a consumer’s shipping and payment information is stored with Amazon, they can quickly and securely checkout on desktop or mobile.
• Shopify merchants can ship products sold on their websites using inventory stored in Amazon’s fulfilment centers.

Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief platform officer, commented on the collaboration:

Both Amazon and Shopify are leaders in ecommerce so it’s a natural fit that we would enable our retailers to seamlessly run their businesses across either platform. Many of Shopify’s existing 175,000+ merchants already use Amazon as a sales channel, and this will bridge the gap between our two companies, with just a few simple steps.

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For some background: Shopify is a leading cloud-based, multichannel commerce platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Merchants can use the software to design, set up and manage their stores across multiple sales channels, including Web, mobile, social media such as Pinterest and Facebook, brick-and-mortar locations and pop-up shops.

Shares of Shopify were up about 21% to $34.93 Thursday afternoon. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $37.75 and a post-IPO trading range of $17 to $42.13.

Amazon shares were up 1.5%, at $535.51 in its 52-week range of $284.00 to $580.57. The consensus price target is $648.92.