Welcome to The Yellow Summarin - collecting the most interesting ideas, topics, and tweets from the past week at the intersection of tech, media, and commerce.
In today's edition (22.1.22):
The leader in independent e-commerce keeps on leading
The tweets show us hyperactivity in the NFT space thanks to the major social platforms announcing web3 integrations
Read and listen :
Facilitator of Dreams
By Marin Gerov, 22.1.22
Shopify is in the business of facilitating dreams. In particular, the dreams of entrepreneurs who believe that they have imagined solutions to problems people didn’t know they had. All you have to do is imagine a product and Shopify can make it happen for you. That, of course, is an exaggeration - you still need to learn to market, tell a story and sell, but when it comes to access, sourcing, logistics, payments, and distribution, the platform offers it all.
Side note: I’d hate it for this piece to sound like a Shopify advertisement, but it is hard to ignore talking in such terms when the Ottawa-based company keeps on innovating and delivering tools and services for the small-scale entrepreneur to turn their vision into reality.
The leader in independent retail announced two very important developments this week. First, the company, partnering with Stripe - another behemoth that is the dominant player in the payments industry, unveiled a banking service for merchants. This is a huge deal! Speaking from experience, opening up a bank account for your early stage business is often a painful, slow and costly process. While there have been innovations from services such as Wise and bunq that reduce the friction when getting your financial infrastructure in order, the fact that you need to rely on different vendors for your company’s banking adds a lot of complexity to the equation, especially when it comes to administration. Thanks to the new banking service that Shopify and Stripe will introduce on the platform this all goes away - merchants can get access to everything they need for their banking needs from one place without the worry of high fees, compliance and availability issues.
Second, Shopify is going to make it easy for retailers to expand to the Chinese market while also opening up access to a vast amount of suppliers in the country, thanks to a partnership with JD.com. The partnership will facilitate access for Shopify merchants to China’s growing market for imported goods by decreasing the times when listing on the JD platform (which could take up to a year). Furthermore, tools and services for cross-border sellers such as automatic translations, price conversion and logistics network will be provided. In return, Chinese sellers and suppliers willing to invest in brand building and product design will get access to Shopify’s tools and the ability to sell on the Western market. Potentially, this solution will be more attractive for serious players than listing on Amazon where the ability to tell a brand story is very limited and you are at the mercy of Amazon’s rules.
Shopify and China’s JD.com team up to capture cross-border sellers (TechCrunch)
In an age when the creator economy is picking up steam by the day and more and more people are turning to entrepreneurship as a means for earning a living, reducing the barriers to entry when setting up a retail operation will significantly increase the chance of success for micro and small scale ventures. This new entrepreneurial class is constantly coming up with new business models, whether that is subscriptions, selling merch, buy now pay later schemes, or even launching NFTs, to facilitate their dreams. What the past months have shown us is that Shopify is committed to address those needs and models and capitalize on an exciting opportunity.
Tweets
That’s all for this week. Have a great week(end)!
Marin