Leap operates a retail platform which requires the close integration of our strategies, operations, and technology with our partner brands. Shopify is a convenient common platform for us and many of our current and potential partners, so we use it to gather data and understand more about your business in a fast and convenient way.

We operate a Shopify app, Leap Retail, that we use as a data syncing app in your store. This app connects your store to our platform and allows us access to data based on the scopes you review and approve during installation.

If your brand runs on Shopify, we'll ask you to begin by connecting your store to our platform from the Leap web app. When you click to connect your Shopify, you'll be taken to a page in Shopify where you'll have a chance to review the types of data we need to access and approve this access within Shopify.

Once this is done, our app will be installed in your store, and your store will be connected to our platform in a "read only" state, where we can read data but not write data to your store.

By connecting your Shopify account here, we will ingest commercial data up to five years in the past to better understand your business and its dynamics.

We use this data to analyze your sales, seasonality, product mix, top geographies, and other facts about your business to determine whether your business seems ready for retail, which Leap retail solutions might work for your business, and to make geographic recommendations.

Once you connect your Shopify store to Leap and approve our access in Shopify, we immediately begin receiving data. The time required to receive data and make recommendations varies, but depends primarily on your sales velocity and number of products -- in short, the amount of data we have to load as fast as we can from Shopify. This is, however, typically finished within a day or two.

Your Leap contact will then be in touch to share insights and make recommendations.

If you choose to join the Leap platform, we'll begin working to fully integrate your Shopify store.

By fully integrating, we can enable valuable omnichannel and omnimerchant flows such as live order and inventory syncs and automatic syndication of your product catalog and discounts to your Powered by Leap stores. These are meant to improve your visibility into store operations and enable customer experiences like placing shipping orders, enabling online returns of purchases from Powered by Leap stores, and support for many loyalty rewards or affiliate marketing programs.

Fully integrating requires you upgrade our access to be able to read and write to your Shopify store, as we need to write data to your store to sync things like orders and inventory levels from our store. This upgrade can be done from your home page in the Leap web app, where once again, you'll be redirected to Shopify to review and approve the additional permissions we're requesting.

Not all brands run on Shopify and you may still be a great fit for Leap's platform. To get started, we'll work with your team to request commercial data securely through another means.

For operating stores, we have a variety of integration patterns we can follow to various levels of integration. Our Integration and Platform Operations teams would be glad to discuss these options at any time during your relationship with us.