In early March Shopify announced a series of changes to its partnership program and API access that had implications for its partners and merchants.
At that time it was also announced that Mailchimp is leaving Shopify’s marketplace.
MailChimp said it asked Shopify to remove its MailChimp for Shopify integration from the e-commerce platform’s app store over concerns that Shopify’s updated partner terms of service “jeopardize our users’ privacy and require us to hand over customer data acquired outside of Shopify.”
The Shopify and Mailchimp data spat was front and centre on tech news sites for weeks but did you know there is a Vancouver connection to the break-up story.
It turns out that before Mailchimp parted ways with Shopify they quietly made an acquisition of Vancouver’s LemonStand, one of the dominant e-commerce platform’s much, much smaller competitors.
Not surprisingly, Mailchimp denies that the events are linked and that they acqui-hired the team behind LemonStand at the end of February to bring more integrated e-commerce features into its platform. Subsequently LemonStand announced on March 5th that it was shutting down the service on June 5th.
“Our decision to discontinue our partnership with Shopify last week is unrelated to LemonStand. Shopify knew we were working on e-commerce features long before we hired the LemonStand team. In fact, we launched Shoppable Landing Pages last fall in partnership with Square, and Shopify chose not to partner with us on the launch.”
Photo illustration: Amber McAden
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