Shop Pay Goes Platform Agnostic

Since launching in 2017, Shopify’s payment feature, Shop Pay, was only accessible for eCommerce stores using the Shopify platform. As Shopify has traditionally targeted small to medium sized businesses, very few enterprise retailers were using the platform. The recent switch enables larger enterprise retailers to use Shop Pay as a stand alone component. It will be extremely interesting to see if Shopify takes other steps to try converting these enterprise retailers to move their full stack to the platform as they attempt to compete with other industry giants. For a more in depth breakdown about the efforts that went in to the decision, check out the ModernRetail article here.

iOS 17 - What Should Advertisers Do?

Similarly to the iOS 14 announcement, the advertising world was frightened after the announcement of iOS 17 (link tracking protections). However, the changes are specifically centered around email, SMS messaging, and Safari browsing. The Founder of Popsixle, Noah King, recently released an article with a deeper breakdown. Another great resource to learn more about the impact on digital marketing is the TagHero Tech RoundTable. Deep breath, advertisers!

YC S23 Batch

Converge helps eCommerce stores improve ad performance and attributions by tracking customer events such as adding items to cart and purchase orders. Competing in a market with Triple Whale, I am excited to see how the company scales.

Movley is building a quality control platform to help marketplace sellers prevent returns and customer frustration by stopping unsatisfactory products from getting shipped to customers. The team consists of former D2C founders who experienced this problem themselves.

I will include brief highlights of a few other companies in the S23 batch in upcoming editions as more companies are announced.

Keep Dreaming,

Gavin