Shopify invests in wholesale marketplace Faire

Shopify invested in wholesale platform Faire, strengthening a partnership that would see Shopify's merchants connect to a large B2B marketplace.

Why it matters: Wholesale is a lever both retailers and brands are pulling to grow their business, and the integration of the two makes buying and selling on the channel much simpler.

What's happening: Shopify will become a shareholder in the company, though the companies declined to disclose how big the stake was or the size of the investment.

How it (will) work: Faire will become Shopify's recommended wholesale platform.

• Faire will enable Shopify merchants to reorder bestselling items through a fully integrated Faire buyer app, and easily connect on its platform, allowing them to source and secure inventory from over 100,000 brands on Faire.
• Meanwhile, Shopify gives Faire a dedicated seller channel, and Shopify brands can add Faire features to their own e-commerce websites.

What they're saying: "If we can just make those two platforms talk better together, your life is just so much easier as a small business," Ami Vora, Faire's chief product officer says.

• "It just comes back to like really leveling the playing field for small local independent customers who might not have access to all the data and all the tools that the big guys do," she adds.
• "Shopify becoming a shareholder in Faire and really aligning their incentives with ours, we view it as an endorsement of us as really the leader in the wholesale space," Faire CEO Max Rhodes tells Axios.

The big picture: Shopify maintains that its overarching goal is to make it easier for its retailers and brands to do business.

• "Shopify continues to double down on our B2B offerings by building sophisticated B2B features into the core of Shopify, and by providing new solutions to help merchants connect to buy and sell wholesale," Shopify director of product Aneeqa Khan says in an emailed statement.