Amazon rival Shopify, which hosts online stores, announced it would no longer take a cut of the first $1 million that a developer makes on its app store. This follows similar moves by Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft that reduce app store fees for some developers, as the Big Tech companies are scrutinized by regulators and lawmakers over potential anticompetitive behavior. From August 1, developers on Shopify will keep 100 percent of their revenue from their first $1 million; the company said the benchmark will “reset” each year.

CNBC reports that, “Shopify made the announcement during its annual conference for developers, Shopify Unite.” Shopify president Harley Finkelstein also stated that the company is “cutting its commission rates for developers who make more than $1 million annually to 15 percent from 20 percent.”

Finkelstein noted that this is “half of what other popular app stores cost.” “We are making it easier for you to change the direction of the future of commerce and make a living doing it,” he said. This new revenue share model will also apply to Shopify’s Theme Store, “an online platform for custom website designs [that] is separate from Shopify’s app store.”

ZDNet reports that Shopify also announced updates and new features, including “the launch of Shopify Online Store 2.0, improvements to Shopify’s headless commerce APIs, and new functionality for Shopify Checkout.” Online Store 2.0 is the company’s “most significant rebuild of its Liquid template language since its inception” and is aimed to “make it easier for developers to build customized features for merchant storefronts.”

Netflix, which had early access to Online Store 2.0, used it to create Netflix.shop, its first e-commerce store. Online Store 2.0 features include “a new editor experience that aims to make it more efficient for merchants to build their storefronts, and theme app extensions that aim to make it easier to extend and manage apps within themes.”

Also new is Dawn, Shopify’s “new standard for storefront theme development that the company said is 35 percent faster than its current default theme.” Its new Theme Store will be open for developer submissions on July 15. Spotify also introduced “significant infrastructure investments in its APIs and developer tooling that the company said are meant to ensure that a merchant never has to replatform to build headless, or customized, storefronts.”

Shopify also previewed Hydrogen, “a framework for building customized storefronts, and Oxygen, a way to host Hydrogen storefronts directly on Shopify” and stated that Shopify Checkout is now “twice as fast and capable of handling seven times the volume compared to the previous version.” New Checkout Extensions will “let developers build apps into Shopify Checkout.”

The company said that, in 2020, 450 million people checked out on Spotify, which processed “nearly $120 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV).”

Related:
Shopify Expands Ecommerce Hosting Across the Globe, TechRadar, 7/6/21