Shopify's legal troubles

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• Shopify’s legal troubles

• Shop Pay goes Enterprise

• Merchant update roundup

Shopify’s legal troubles

Shopify battles patent trolls

Shopify is taking legal action against patent trolls, known for exploiting patents to sue businesses.

Shopify is seeking transparency in patent litigation to identify the identities of funding groups behind patent trolls who work from the shadows. To that end, Shopify has filed a motion in US District Court in Western Texas for third-party interest disclosure i.e, to find out who stands to gain from these frivolous lawsuits.

And there’s already a small win reported this week with at least one lawsuit being dismissed voluntarily.

Shopify clashes with Canadian Tax Agency

Tobi, Shopify’s CEO, has promised to fight a move that he calls an overreach by the Canadian Revenue Agency's (CRA).

CRA has asked Shopify to hand over the tax records for over 121,000 Canadian stores from the last 6 years.

There are no details yet about why the CRA is asking for such records but it does have a history of going after big companies in the past like PayPal and eBay.

Shop Pay goes Enterprise

Shopify has expanded the availability of Shop Pay to enterprise retailers not on Shopify through its Commerce Components product.

As of now, this will be available to enterprises based in US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. But there’s no word on when this will be available in other geographies.

Kaz Netajian (Shopify COO & VP of Product) notes that large merchants previously didn’t use Shop Pay since they did not want to move their entire e-commerce stack to Shopify.

But as part of the Commerce Components unveiled earlier this year, this extension now allows large B2B merchants to integrate Shop Pay as a standalone component, offering access to over 100 million shoppers.

Merchant update roundup

There have been a whole host of updates for merchants in the past week. Here’s the rapid-fire version in 30 seconds:

1. 7 new granular staff permissions for Draft orders to replace the single one that gave access to everything in Draft orders.

2. Better volume pricing with Shopify Email as you send more than 300k emails/month

3. Markets Pro to show a banner to display payout failures, along with new Markets Pro transaction filters with payment providers.

4. A niche update for changing merchant of record for Shopify Markets Pro orders to accommodate specific B2B scenarios

5. Shop Pay checkout will now reflect changes made to the wording via the theme content editor.

Pulse Check ⚡️

1. Shopify App Store introduces a new ranking system for app reviews, prioritizing recent reviews from long-term users with valuable and helpful content.

2. Harley says developer community flourishes as Shopify app store reports +36% YoY payout growth.

That's a wrap for this week! Join us over on Twitter to chat about all things e-commerce. It's like attending the coolest virtual shopping party – no long lines, pushy salespeople, or shopping cart collisions in sight (@theshoppulse)