Shopify Inc. plans to spend $1 billion to set up a network of fulfillment centers in the U.S. to help merchants using its e-commerce platform deliver products more quickly and cheaply, much the way Amazon.com Inc. does.
“A large number of orders are lost in the final stages due to complex shipping costs,” Craig Miller, Shopify’s chief product officer, said at the company’s annual developer conference in Toronto. The service will use machine learning to predict demand and suggest closest fulfillment centers to merchants.