Quickbooks Integration with Amazon Seller Central Deepens Existing Partnership

Late last week, Intuit and Amazon made an announcement that they would integrate Quickbooks with Seller Central.

On both sides:

* Intuit gets distribution in Seller Central to millions of Amazon sellers.

* Amazon sellers get better financial visibility, as well as access to Quickbooks Capital directly from Seller Central.

This follows a decision earlier this year for Amazon to stop underwriting loans to sellers. For Amazon, it was likely a subscale business, and it allows them to continue offering a service and likely get paid by Intuit a healthy commission on referred business.

For Amazon and Intuit, this is a continuation of a partnership that began in 2020, when Intuit Quickbooks integrated with Amazon Business for purchases.

But why now? The simple explanation is probably the correct one.

Amazon truly believes its sellers need financial tools, and Amazon views this as a market that is not important enough for them to tackle.

Of the two parties, it seems to me that Intuit needed this deal more than Amazon. There are so many large ecosystems out there. Intuit partnered with Etsy in 2016. With eBay in 2022. Now with Amazon in 2024.

Seems like a smart strategy to me for Intuit.

Could this be related to Shopify at all?

Personally, I think not.

It might be tempting to try and draw any parallels to Shopify in this case (we've seen increasing focus by the company on Shopify Balance, Credit, Capital, Tax, etc... all things offered by Intuit also), it does seem like this is not directly related to any moves there. Still, you might say Shopify Finance is a nice little side quest... err... hustle for Shopify at the moment.

Kidding aside, Shopify seems to view its financial tools as part of its main quest because every seller needs to have bookkeeping. However, every seller must also have logistics too, and we see how that turned out. Still, financial tools have the upside of a low capital expenditure profile, even if the margins are not incredibly high. The continued focus by Shopify on financial tools does put them on a collision course with both Paypal and Intuit in the long-term.

Do I expect Shopify to build its own accounting suite?

I do not. Even Microsoft couldn't deliver a relevant competitor to Intuit after many years and I would not expect Shopify to attempt this.