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Intuit Inc., which markets the highly popular QuickBooks accounting product for small businesses, continues to reinforce the online version of the software with point-of-sale and e-commerce capabilities. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company on Thursday announced an integration for QuickBooks Online (QBO) with Shopify Inc., an Ottawa-based platform for e-commerce and brick-and-mortar companies.
The new integration will streamline sales-data updates and other accounting tasks for Shopify merchants. Shopify earlier this week announced a similar integration with Xero, a rival vendor of online accounting tools for small business. Shopify’s platform supports more than 150,000 merchants worldwide.
“Many of our merchants are not necessarily experts in bookkeeping,” said Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief platform officer, in a statement. “That is why this integration is so important to the success of their businesses. It’s seamless, efficient, and simple, allowing them to focus on their stores.”
At virtually the same time, Intuit announced a similar integration with Bigcommerce, a platform for more than 60,000 e-commerce merchants. Bigcommerce has U.S. offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas.
With some 700,000 users running their books on QBO, Intuit has been eager to build out the product’s cloud-based capabilities and expand its reach to merchants using e-commerce and POS tools offered by third parties.
Last fall, for example, Intuit announced an integration with Revel Systems Inc., a vendor of tablet-based POS services. At the time, Intuit told Digital Transactions News the tie-up would give QBO an entrée into small point-of-sale merchants, in contrast to the service industries where QBO has been concentrated. It would also position QBO to serve multilocation businesses and those that want to access their books from mobile devices, Intuit said.
Intuit for years has also offered its own merchant-account services as well as a mobile point-of-sale product called GoPayment, which debuted months before the launch of Square Inc. popularized the concept of accepting payments on smart phones.
With the Shopify integration, the QuickBooks Payments card-acceptance service will be available immediately. QBO will become available “within the coming months,” Intuit says. With Bigcommerce, U.S. merchants will be the first to integrate QBO, with availability in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia coming later. Bigcommerce merchants will also have access to QuickBooks Payments.
