Shopify launches Shop, a free app and shopping assistant to help people shop local

Shopify is a Canadian multinational e-commerce platform best known for powering over 1 million businesses in 175 countries. Today, the company launched Shop, a free app for iOS and Android devices that you can use to make your online shopping experience better. The new Shop app helps people find and shop from local businesses.

Since Amazon has captured the online e-commerce market, Shopify is aiming to venture into local business market by making it easier for local businesses to connect with nearby customers. The new app, which can be downloaded from App Store and Google Play, offers a range of features including: delivery tracking, shop profile, Shop Pay, and carbon offsets.  Shop app als combines the features of Shop Pay, which provides one-click checkout, and Arrive, which enables online order tracking. Shopify said over $8 billion in sales have been processed using Shop Pay. Arrive is used by 16 million shoppers.

“We are setting out to reimagine the online shopping experience for customers — to provide them greater convenience, transparency, and personalization. As a result of social distancing and stay-at-home measures, customers have become more reliant on online ordering than ever before as it becomes more challenging to stay connected to the brands they love,” Shopify said in a statement.

Designed to bridge the gaps in online shopping, Shop offers users the ability to easily discover local businesses, receive relevant product recommendations from their favorite brands, check out effortlessly, and track all of their online orders. We’ve brought together our expertise in commerce and proven features from Shop Pay, a one-click accelerated checkout, and Arrive, an app to track online orders, to make purchasing and order tracking frictionless for shoppers. To date, Shop Pay has processed over $8 billion in sales, while Arrive has been used by 16 million shoppers to track their e-commerce orders.

In a world of increasing physical separation, we want to help businesses deepen their connection with their customers and, over time, understand what they want to continue to build trust and loyalty.

“Shopify has focused the last decade on solving complex problems for entrepreneurs by making commerce seamless and accessible,” said Carl Rivera, General Manager of Shop. “Now, we want to do the same for customers. We set out to solve the common pain points in the customer’s shopping journey today, while developing specific features, like local business discovery, that will be relevant today and in the future.”

Shopify currently powers the e-commerce sites of some of the most prominent direct-to-consumer startups, such as Allbirds, Brooklinen, Kylie, Outdoor Voices, and Rothy’s, along with legacy companies, like Budweiser and LeSportsac.

Shopify was founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake after attempting to open Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment. Dissatisfied with the existing e-commerce products on the market, Lütke, a computer programmer by trade, instead built his own. In 2018 alone, Shopify sold more than $41.1 billion  worth of merchandise on its platform.