Checkout.com enters the Canadian ecommerce arena, rolling out direct acquiring tech and a North American leadership shakeup.
The payments giant is making a serious North American play—and Canada just became the next battleground.
Why Checkout.com is betting on Canada
Checkout.com has officially entered the Canadian payments market, launching direct acquiring services and appointing Zack Levine as Head of Revenue for North America. This move marks the next phase in a broader North American land grab following the company’s San Francisco office opening.
Levine, who joined Checkout.com in 2021 and recently led operations in Israel, will now oversee commercial strategy across North America and Israel—including sales, business development, account management, and solutions engineering. Translation: he’s in charge of bringing more enterprise merchants into the fold.
What makes Canada a strategic launchpad
- 💰 CA$52 billion market: Canada is the world’s 9th-largest ecommerce market.
- 🧾 27M+ online shoppers: That’s 11.5% of total retail.
- 🌍 Global-first behavior: 62% of Canadians shop internationally.
- 📦 Cross-border heavy: One in five digital businesses earns most of their revenue abroad.
The market is international by design, digital-native, and ripe for advanced payment infrastructure.
What Checkout.com is bringing to the table
With its direct acquiring tech, merchants in Canada get:
- Increased control over transaction data
- Improved authorization rates
- Enhanced payment performance
- One API to access cards, bank rails, wallets, PayPal, Venmo, and Pinless Debit
But the bigger sell? Checkout.com is positioning on performance. As Levine put it: “Payment performance goes beyond access; it’s acceptance rates, conversion, latency, uptime, integration depth, geographic reach, and most of all, exceptional customer support.”
And frankly, that’s what operators actually care about.
Why North America matters more than ever
In 2024, Checkout.com reported >80% YoY growth in the U.S. alone. Now it wants to repeat that playbook in Canada. According to the 2025 Digital Economy Report:
- 18% of Canadian Gen Z shop online daily
- 48% of U.S. consumers expect to increase ecommerce spending this year
Consumer behavior is tilting digital across borders. Checkout.com is chasing that demand with localized service and infrastructure that scales.
Operator POV: Cut the fluff, improve performance
This isn’t a “we’ve expanded our footprint” PR fluff piece. The real takeaway is simple:
If you’re running payments in Canada, you now have a credible alternative to Stripe, Adyen, or legacy bank processors.
Checkout.com is offering the kind of stack ecommerce operators actually want: speed, uptime, global reach, and support that answers the damn phone.
And if Levine can replicate his U.S. and Israel playbooks, Canadian enterprise merchants are about to get some overdue firepower.
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