Shopify introduces Venmo as checkout payment option

Dive Brief:

Shopify is adding PayPal-owned mobile social payments platform Venmo as a checkout option for its merchant clients, according a Shopify statement e-mailed to Retail Dive.
For U.S.-based Shopify merchants who already support PayPal Checkout, Venmo will automatically appear as a payment option for shoppers, though in the merchant's orders report, purchases made through Venmo will show up as PayPal Payments, Shopify stated.
The e-commerce platform company said that 67% of purchases made on Shopify's stores today are happening via mobile, and that Venmo's own strong mobile adoption and growing user base make it a good match for Shopify clients.

Dive Insight:

As purchases via mobile account for an increasingly large percentage of all online sales, it makes sense for Shopify to make this move. It may have even made sense at this time last year, when there were already more than 15 million Venmo users, according to eMarketer, and at least 2 million merchants already accepting Venmo through PayPal.

However, Shopify likely needed to make sure Venmo would be a good fit for the majority of its 600,000 merchant clients. The capability to purchase items with Venmo has been available for a while, with retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch adding it as a payment option within their app. That retailer's core audience notably aligns with the younger demographics of Venmo's core user base.

There also has been some competitive shakeout happening with peer-to-peer money services in recent months, with Zelle surging in adoption and expected to overtake Venmo in total numbers of users in the coming months. Also, giants like Amazon and Apple are looming as competitive threats.

While there could be some concern about how Venmo's popularity could be affected by these threats, recent financial results from PayPal suggest Venmo is still growing at a healthy clip. PayPal's third quarter earnings report showed that Venmo's transaction volume increased 78% to about $17 billion, making it a pretty safe bet for Shopify merchants.