Two Years in, Shop Is Having Its Best Season Yet!

A couple of years ago, Shopify rebranded its package tracking app Arrive into a hub for shopping that brought Shopify's payment system into millions of devices and also gave local businesses using Shopify visibility.

Back in 2020, I thought this was one of the most clever moves in the shopping industry.

Shop has grown its downloads every holiday season since launch, but 2022 is going to be the biggest of all.

Shop's best season is the holiday season when everyone is buying something online. Shop's shopping features are still not that mainstream, nor is its payment system, but with every holiday season, those features make their way into millions of pockets.

To see how Shop's growing, and estimate what the holiday season will look like, we can compare the downloads from past Novembers with the one that just ended.

• 2020 - 2.6M downloads
• 2021 - 2.6M downloads
• 2022 - 3.4M downloads

If you're looking at the chart, I highlighted those so you don't look at December by accident. I did that because November of 2022 was bigger than December, Shop's best month of the year, for both previous years.

If downloads continue following the same pattern, I expect Shop to make its way into 4.2M new iOS and Android devices.

That's big for Shop but also for the payments industry. Why? Because every download of Shop means another user can now pay with Shop Pay, a service that competes with Apple Pay and other payment services.

It's a clever step in Shopify's aggressive strategy to take over the marker. I call it aggressive, and if you've used Shop Pay you know this already because Shop Pay doesn't wait for you to activate it but rather automatically springs into action whenever possible, attempting to streamline the payment in supporting sites/apps before you even ask.

The first time it did that to me I was pretty confused and had no idea what it even was, but... the convenience eventually won me over. I imagine that's a part of the strategy.