Shopify builds new merchant tools for navigating tariff uncertainty
Executives addressed tariffs directly during the company's first-quarter earnings call Thursday, saying that it had launched a series of new solutions for calculating and collecting duties.
"We've shipped a lot, and we focused on areas that we can have a more immediate impact: cross-border trade, making it easier to buy local, duties calculations, and shipping," President Harley Finkelstein said during the call.
That includes a website it launched this week that provides AI-driven guidance on US tariff rates based on a product's description and its country of origin. The website cautions users to take it as guidance and to double-check rates with customs officials.
In February, Shopify made its duties-collection tool, previously exclusive to users of Advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus, available to all merchants.
Merchants using the tool can display and collect duties at the time of checkout. It also lowered the transaction fee for that tool to 0.5%, down from 0.85% for Shopify Payments users and 1.5% for merchants using other payment providers. Finkelstein said the number of merchants using the duties-collection tool doubled between January and the end of March.
Shopify also added a filter in the Shop app that allows shoppers to view products made in a particular country and to buy locally.
On the shipping front, it launched the ability for merchants to purchase prepaid shipping labels and send products to customers using delivery duty-paid shipping, which essentially means that merchants assume the costs of tariffs and taxes for customers.
It also started working with more third-party logistics providers on the Shopify Fulfillment Network app and added features to its managed markets product, which, through a partnership, allows merchants to designate Global-e as the merchant of record rather than the seller itself.
"Our obsession with unlocking every opportunity and filling every important gap in the system, to give our merchants the best chance of success, is one of our superpowers," Finkelstein said.
"We rolled out the Shop app filter in less than a week, and the duties calculation at checkout update over a weekend. Literally, the weekend after the tariff changes were announced, the team got to work, and by Sunday evening, we were testing it for production," he added.
Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said that cross-border commerce accounted for 15% of the company's gross merchandise volume in the quarter, similar to previous quarters. About half of that cross-border commerce involved trade into or out of the US.
He added that only about 1% of Shopify's overall GMV was for items from China that would qualify for the de minimis exemption.
"The recent expiration of the de minimis exemption for goods from China is not expected to have a meaningful impact on Shopify in the near term," he said. "That said, this expired less than a week ago, and we will continue to monitor its impact on our business."
Shopify reported 27% revenue growth and 23% GMV growth for the quarter.
"As the platform that powers global commerce, we're of course monitoring for potential slowdowns, but our data through April shows little evidence of that," Finkelstein said.
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