San Francisco-based Affirm has elected to continue its exclusive partnership with Canadian e-commerce giant, Shopify.
Shopify and the American buy now, pay later (BNPL) tech company first opened access to Shop Pay Installments for eligible Shopify merchants in the United States in 2021.
Shop Pay Installments, which is powered by Affirm’s BNPL technology, avoids sending buyers to another website to complete their purchase, which Affirm claims makes it unique among BNPL solutions.
The multi-year extension of the agreement cements Affirm as the exclusive pay-over-time provider for Shop Pay Installments in the United States, according to Affirm.
In connection with the extended agreement, all eligible US merchants offering Shop Pay Installments will have access to Affirm’s Adaptive Checkout, something the company claims is a first-of-its-kind product in the states, and which dynamically offers biweekly and monthly payment options side-by-side in a single integrated checkout.
Affirm claims that since its launch in June 2021, Shop Pay Installments has enabled more than 100,000 Shopify merchants to offer millions of consumers the ability to split purchases up to $3,000 into four interest-free biweekly payments with no fees.
In its third-quarter results for fiscal 2022, Affirm noted that active merchants increased from 12,000 to 207,000. Affirm attributed the increase largely to merchants adopting and using Shop Pay on Shopify’s platform.
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In recent weeks, Shopify’s stock has been pummeled on the market as its earnings reports showed the company’s growth was slowing, as well as a broader tech stock sell-off that has also hurt other publicly-traded Canadian tech companies.
It’s also a given that Shopify has taken a bath from the plunge of Affirm’s stock; the Canadian unicorn was granted warrants to buy up to 20.3 million shares in Affirm, and, according to CNBC, making its Affirm stock worth some $2 billion USD ($2.5 billion CAD) when Affirm went public on the Nasdaq in 2021.
But since then Affirm’s stock fell from a 52-week high of $176.5 USD to a low of $13.64. At press time it was sitting around $21.58.
For its part, Shopify also rolled out what it called its not-so-best-kept secret: Shopify Audiences.
The new audience-building tool integrates with a variety of social media platforms and, after merchants select the product they want to boost, uses machine learning to tailor audiences to the merchant.