Or they can use Shopify and get all of those, and manage their inventory, and pricing, and shipping rules, etc all from one place and pay Shopify a few hundred dollars a year, when they would have paid thousands in software annually to replicate the same anyways.
Yeah, I can totally see why they would go the non Shopify route.
The idea behind it is "headless commerce" -- a shop owner can operate single backend while diversifying the front-end channels from which customers are able to transact (marketplace, webshop, third-party, mobile app). It's a value-add service that all ecommerce sites will eventually move toward to retain customers.
With higher transaction volumes, provided customer data is collected and passed through, the shopkeeper can now access analytics for multi-channel targeting, marketing etc. Shopify can then sell all kinds of value-added services based on this data.
Now that the longs had their say, here is the short side.
Shopify has an API. Someone wrote a plugin to allow a shop keeper to publish inventory into the Walmart API. When sellers sell on Walmart's platform, Shopify sees zero transactional revenue.
That's the actual technical story.
The linked "article" which actually included a quote from the COO includes a page of bullet points about how Shopify is really knocking it out of the park. Including the "Facebook deal".
Actually the Facebook deal is FB pulling the cart & payments features into their FB & Instagram apps. So, effectively killing Shopify web store use. Apparently FB is doing something special for Shopify so that Shopify can charge 2% on top of FB's 5% fee. But sellers can also just make their shops directly on FB and skip the 2% Shopify surcharge.
I would have expected fellow programmers to understand a bit of math & show some constraint with bubble valuation stocks!