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Very thoughtful analysis! (Stripe engineer working on Relay here)

Getting retailers on-board is definitely core to the success of Relay. As announced today Saks and the SAP Hybris platform are live on Relay and we're working with numerous other retailers as we speak.

For apps, getting retailers to sell on their platform is a huge pain (custom integration to their APIs and payment systems) convincing them to do so. For retailers as well it's a pain. They have to create technical integrations with as many channel out there. That's why we think Relay make sense. We help both side of the equation.

Also, the relationship between a retailer and a channel app in Relay is opt-in today. This is literally a Stripe Connect (think OAuth) connection. But once a channel is onboard, it's nothing more than clicking a button for a Relay retailer to start selling there.

Also I wouldn't say they are losing control on the full shopping experience, they're merely enabling a better one on mobile. When you think of the shopping experience, a lot happen after the purchase (support, shipping, loyalty) as well and I think there are new experiences to create there, especially once the customer receive the receipt from the retailer.

Can I request a Shopify platform integration? My company (www.dodocase.com) would love to sell our products in mobile apps. Feel free to reach out to me at patrick at dodocase dot com.

Hey Patrick. We've just finished building a Shopify to Stripe integrator - it's in beta, but we're happy with how it's performing. Check it out: https://www.shoptorelay.com

Hey.. Does Stripe not offer a direct way to integrate with Relay for Shopify shops? Is there a page that describes this process?

Thanks.

Founder of Two Tap here. It takes an average of three minutes to send the order to the retailer via our platform. On the frontend we use a similar model to Amazon where tell the shopper we're confirming her purchase and handle the process in the background. It's working great for Amazon, and it works great for us for a thousand merchants.

Retailers are incredibly happy by the fact that they don't have to do a complicated integration where they have to maintain a new piece of infrastructure for potentially getting less than 1% of their orders.

That being said, we're huge fans of Stripe. Always have been. John Collison was our mentor during YC. We're looking forward to seeing how they handle the challenges in the space.

Is that a conflict of interest having your mentor launch a direct competitor to your company?

No hard feelings here. We mean it when we say we're big fans of Patrick, John, Stripe. It's unfortunate that we have to compete, we would have loved to work with them.

Our approach is completely different than theirs: light integrations vs deep integrations. We believe their approach will do more harm than good for the industry causing retailers/platforms to invest millions of dollars in building infrastructure that's not going to be ROI positive. Retailers will end up paying to build/maintain that infrastructure part, they will pay the merchant fees, and they will have to pay Twitter/any partner promoting them.

That's good. Market will decide!

  "We mean it when we say we're big fans of Patrick, John, Stripe."

  "We believe their approach will do more harm than good for the industry"

I can see what you're saying, but this was not as well worded as it could have been.

You're right. Can't edit it anymore. Would have deleted the second paragraph.

Also founder of Two Tap here. Just to clarify on the above:

1. Pricing and inventory are realtime with Two Tap -- taken live from the merchant site when a shopping session is started. If only a size S is available on the merchant site then that's what we make available for shoppers in our carts. Merchants don't have to do any integration or manage this process.

2. Reliability has been a non problem for a while, we have a guarantee that we don't lose orders. And the process to confirm orders is async like Amazon -- step 1: we've received your order; step 2: your order is confirmed.

3. Two Tap supports over 1000 retailer integrations.

Thanks for looking into the space!

Agree that the challenge is in obtaining partnerships, but not every retailer needs full control of the shopping experience, especially on mobile. And that's the win - alleviating the need for every retailer to solve the same technical problem.

The challenge for the developer is twofold; 1) Understanding the real time availability of the inventory at the retail partner and 2) Supporting the payment provider of the retailer. In the desktop world this was solved by a straight up affiliate redirect. You arrived at the retailer page and saw your product in a shopping cart or close to it. Of course if inventory was poorly synced you occasionally got an error. This is still pretty common with things like airline metasearch services where the cheap ticket can be gone. Either way inventory was managed. Then you entered your payment method on the retailer site and it was processed by their backend processor.

In the mobile world with mobile optimized apps those redirects don't work. So app developers want to make the payment experience feel like it's happening "within the app" Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and others all then had to solve for the inventory + payments challenge. Defaulting to Stripe can be problematic if the retailer already has a different payment processor relationship in place. By solving for the inventory piece I suspect Stripe is hoping to help drive momentum around overcoming the processor objections.

Full disclosure I work at Spreedly where we help solve for the payment dilemma (not inventory) by allowing developers to work with a wide range of payment processors and/or affiliate API's.

re Inventory: we want to provide live product availability information to the developer through our API. We encourage app developers to GET latest product info from our API before even rendering a potential Buy Now button. To make that possible we keep product information extra-fresh from big retailers, and even update it on the fly when we see orders failing because the product is out of stock.

re Payments/Processor: So that's where it gets interesting. We have constructed for Pinterest a full payment distribution infrastructure to send payment information securely to large retailers or their processors. This infrastructure will also be used by Relay. Doing so, we believe we bring a ton of value to the ecosystem. But I'm sure you agree with that given your focus!

Congrats on the big day btw!

In other words, since the app system doesn't have links like browsers, a whole new system is needed to emulate them.

Well they could push out and invoke a browser session which is how it was done initially and is still sometimes done. But yes conversion is poor.