Shopify introduced Shopify Finance, a unified home for all of its financial solutions built straight into the Shopify admin. Now merchants can access the following tools and services in one place:
- Shopify Balance – a free business account that allows merchants to receive funds from orders on the next business day. The account comes with a 3.39% APY on balance (4.43% APY and higher ACH limits for Shopify Plus).
- Shopify Credit – a pay-in-full Visa business card that gives merchants up to 3% cashback on eligible marketing, wholesale, and fulfillment purchases. Merchants can now get up to 10 months to pay over time from a percentage of daily sales.
- Shopify Capital – a revenue-based financing program for Shopify merchants to borrow working capital up to $2M, with no credit checks or impact on personal credit score and repayments automatically deducted as a percentage of daily sales. Now Shopify is rolling out monthly-cost loan structures in early access, which offers lower overall costs the faster merchants repay.
- Shopify Bill Pay – a business payments solution that allows merchants to schedule, pay, and manage their business bills directly from their Shopify admin by credit card, debit card, bank transfer, or Shopify Balance, whether or not a vendor accepts that form of payment. Now merchants can make batch and recurring payments, as well as combine payments to save on transaction fees.
- Shopify Tax – a built-in tool that automates sales tax calculations, collection, and reporting, while enabling merchants to automatically set aside sales tax into their Balance accounts.
Shopify wrote in its announcement:
“Shopify Finance is our latest move in making merchants’ lives easier and removing barriers to entrepreneurship. Now, business finances can be more streamlined, less daunting, and more aligned with the way entrepreneurs need to operate. Shopify Finance was built not just to meet the needs our merchants have today, but to help them scale for years to come.”
Honestly, I love all these financial moves by Shopify. Their tools are convenient for merchants and beneficial to Shopify's bottom line — a win-win. Shopify earns revenue by moving money, and it makes sense for the company to do so in additional ways that benefit businesses outside of payment processing (their bread and butter). The more money that flows through Shopify's payment rails, the better for the company.
Here's my biggest concern though — reporting.
If I had a dollar for every time I've heard a story from a merchant about how terrible Shopify's reporting system is…
In fact, just a few days ago a reader wrote me a detailed account of a discrepancy with Shopify's reporting of subscription sales. The issue she's run into is that Shopify doesn't include the first subscription sale as a “subscription sale” in their reports, and only counts subsequent sales as coming through the subscription app. This can obviously create a lot of issues when it comes to tracking new subscriptions. She also brought to light several other reporting issues related to subscriptions, which Shopify has now been made aware of.
Another example… a client I work with hired a merchandising expert as a part time consultant. This guy works with major enterprise fashion brands (think Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch level) — but has never worked on a Shopify store before. He's working with this particular brand because he's a customer himself and personally passionate about their mission. He wrote to me last week and asked if there was something he was doing wrong with Shopify reporting, and explained the issues he was running into. Basically he asked, “Is it really this bad?” The best answer I could really give him was — “You're not imagining things” — and I offered to install whatever tools or 3rd party analytics platforms he needed to get the job done.
Honestly, I could share countless stories about Shopify Reports falling short of merchant expectations. It seems that reporting has never been a strong point for the company. And that's extra concerning if they're now going to play the role of your bank.
Reporting discrepancies are notoriously difficult to discover unless you cross-reference reports from various apps and analytics tools — which most small merchants don't do because they look to Shopify Reports as their single source of truth.
I applaud Shopify for all of its recent financial moves, but I humbly ask that the company make reporting a priority. Shopify did report in September and in their most recent Shopify Editions that they rebuilt their analytics tech stack to make it “faster, more flexible, and more intuitive” and will offer merchants the ability to layer on combinations of metrics or dimensions and build exploration reports from scratch (which sounds a little GA4-esque).
So it sounds like they've listened to merchant feedback and are trying to improve their internal reporting system. Hopefully the updates, which we should begin to see in the coming months, will solve many of the documented reporting errors.