Shopify aims to mitigate crisis for merchants

OTTAWA — Shopify is reaching out to entrepreneurs facing uncertainty with a spate of new business tools. The e-retail firm, which recently outstripped the Royal Bank of Canada as the most valuable publicly traded Canadian company, is rolling out tipping and “buy now, pay later” among other options for its merchants. The new features are a combination of brand-new tools which were already in development but accelerated when the outbreak hit, according to Chief Product Officer Craig Miller. “Some of the things we were anticipating as being important over the next coming years became super important basically overnight,” he told The Canadian Press, “so we’ve been trying to equip our merchants as much as possible to deal with this kind of situation.” Other new features include the ability to set delivery zones and minimum order prices.