Integrated Social Commerce: The Future of Ecommerce

Hey, Ezra here, behind the scenes in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, at Shopify HQ and I’ve taken you here before, right? I’ve given you a tour of the old office and the new office. But this office just opened up two new floors. There’s a 13th floor and sometimes buildings don’t have 13th floors, but Shopify does. They’re brave. So there’s a 13th floor and a 14th floor that we’ve never seen before. I hear there’s, like, tepees and weird stuff, so I’m gonna take you around on the 13th and 14th floor and show you what I didn’t show you last time because it wasn’t built. So let’s go check it out.

Here we are in the famous Shopify tepee room. Now they may sort of not understand what tepees are because tepees in general are round, but this is what they call the tepee room. Maybe there’s square tepees that I don’t know about or triangle tepees. But, you know, what’s cool about Shopify is they’ve got this focus on culture. Like, they really want it to feel good and be fun. I’m actually gonna go into one of these things and check it out. And, you know, they’re under a lot of pressure, right? Like hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on Shopify every day to process their orders. People’s businesses are like, you know, really focused and built on Shopify. So Shopify’s under all this pressure to make sure that their tool is the best out there, that it’s always up, that it works, that it processes and that’s a lot of pressure. So I think, you know, the focus on environment and culture and fun, you know, like these tepees here…I guess you could come in here and just be hanging out. Maybe you need a nap or maybe it’s so stressful. Whoa, a light turned on. You need to relax, you know? Anyways, I just love these offices and these cool, fun places to work and, you know, if you work from home or you work at an office, you know that it’s a good time to…I wonder if you can hear me through this…it’s a good time to have a place that’s comfortable and relaxed. And so this new tepee set up I think is their attempt at doing that. So I’ll take you around, show you some other places, but I might have to take a quick little nap in here first because it’s kinda cool. You know, you would think it’s claustrophobic, but actually it’s quite nice. It’s kinda like a sauna on the inside, you know, you feel sort of like you’re in a Cedar box here. They got like a little lantern, you know. You got these pillows and things. This is nice.

So I’m on this, like, golf course-looking thing, which I’ll show you from the back in a moment, but it’s really kinda cool if you ever need to maybe take a quick jog while you’re at work. It’s, like, this AstroTurf stuff. I kinda wanna slide down it. Come around, I’ll show you. I don’t think this thing is made to slide on, but it kinda feels like you should be able to. You know, one of the things that I really like about what Shopify is focusing on right now is something that I’m calling integrated social commerce, because where I see e-commerce going is an integration between the social society that we live in and purchasing. So basically, Shopify has these integrations with Facebook Messenger, with Facebook, with Instagram, with Twitter, with Pinterest, where you can literally have your Shopify store connected to one of those social platforms and you can have a whole sales cycle, from prospect to customer, happen without the customer ever leaving the social platforms. So basically they see a video about your product on Facebook. They’re like, “That looks really cool,” and then they click on it to check out the product in more detail, still on Facebook. And then they check out to buy, still on Facebook. Like, that sort of prospect to customer journey that’s integrated into a social network is the next wave of e-commerce. The technology is just kinda getting there right now and Shopify’s on the forefront of that. They’re the first people to do these integrations and that’s what I love about Shopify, out there, rubbing elbows, making things happen, doing cool integrations that have never happened before. So keep an eye out for integrated social commerce because that’s kind of the next wave of what’s coming in e-commerce and until then, I’ll be just running around on these AstroTurf things here, not really sliding, but, you know, trying.

Not bad, you know? It’s pretty good, this whole thing, this tepee. I like it. I like it a lot. I wouldn’t actually get any work done in here because I would just totally be sleeping so…cool concept though. So Ottawa’s behind me. We’re getting ready to go to a restaurant called Sidedoor, which apparently makes really nice homemade donuts and, you know, thanks for taking a look at Shopify with me. If you’re a Shopify business owner, I’ve got some really exciting stuff to announce that’ll be coming out shortly, so stay tuned to the blog. I made some good progress on a couple things that are gonna be big. They’re gonna have a huge impact on your business, so stay tuned to the Smart Marketer blog. To everyone at Shopify, thank you so much. I love being in partnership with your company and to all you subscribers and Smart Marketer viewers, thank you so much for watching. I look forward to taking you on more tours like this and I’ll see you soon.