Apple is turning to one of Canada’s best-known tech companies, Shopify, to extend Apple Pay to online small and medium businesses.
Ottawa-based Shopify said in a blog post the deal will mean Apple Pay will be among the checkout options for its base of merchants sometime this fall.
“Right now, shoppers can use Apple Pay to buy from retail stores and in some apps, but when they shop on mobile websites they’re still left typing their payment details on a tiny, virtual keyboard,” the post said. “As mobile traffic to online stores continues to skyrocket, and as people continue to warm up to the idea of shopping anywhere, we’ll need to find ways to make the checkout experience amazing. Apple Pay is designed to do that.”
In an on-camera interview with Marketing at the recent CMDC conference in Toronto, Shopify’s director of business development, Brennan Loh, made similar comments about the complexity in ecommerce today that puts its partnership with Apple in context:
The deal with Apple comes not long after the first-year anniversary of Shopify’s IPO. Earlier this month, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke won the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s 2016 Entrepreneur Of The Year Award.
