Shopify and the Power of Platforms • Hacker News Board

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#21

Post by omouse » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #15

_csoo wrote: post #11

"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies. WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. And it…

"Just combine these 6 things and it's just as easy as a single tool that does it all for you." Is this satire?

I've set up ecommerce sites quite a few times and it was honestly 1 to 2 days of "work", install + configure and then the rest was customization which clients pay for and are patient for. We were ready to sell product within a day basically and then iterate from there based on client needs.

I guess I wasn't clear enough in making my point: Wordpress + Woocommerce can be setup very quickly and with minimal fuss and they can be as heavily customized as you want and rival whatever plugin-heavy Shopify sites are out there.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#22

Post by simonh » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #15

_csoo wrote: post #11

"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies. WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. And it…

"Just combine these 6 things and it's just as easy as a single tool that does it all for you." Is this satire?

No, it's the standard response from some open source people for any proprietary end-to-end solution. The most famous example was this response to the launch of Dropbox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#23

Post by delecti » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

omouse wrote: post #21

delecti wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just combine these 6 things and it's just as easy as a single tool that does it all for you." Is this satire?

I've set up ecommerce sites quite a few times and it was honestly 1 to 2 days of "work", install + configure and then the rest was customization which clients pay for and are patient for. We were ready to sell product within a day basically and then iterate from there based on client needs. I guess I wasn't clear enough in making my point: Wordpress + Woocommerce can be setup very quickly and with minimal fuss and th…

Someone who knows how to do all of those things, already knows that they know how to do all of those things. Nobody who uses a one-stop-shop like Shopify is duped into thinking it's something revolutionary. Either it's not something they know how to do on their own, not something they think is worth the trouble to do on their own, or not something they could afford to pay someone like you to do.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#24

Post by bastawhiz » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

j4_hnews wrote: post #3

As Amazon gobbles up more product categories, there may be less viable categories that potential e-commerce startups might venture into on their own. This could mean over time, more Shopify merchants would be selling overlapping product categories (the ones Amazon has not yet gobbled up yet). Which would mean that as a Shopify merchant, you would competing with other Shopify merchants (not Amazon). How do you differe…

Just a personal anecdote: I've been using Amazon less and less. Most of the goods I buy from them are things that I would otherwise get from a supermarket. Bulk goods mostly, and almost entirely things I'd otherwise get at my local supermarket or Walgreens.

My other purchases are from shopify sites. I trust that what I'm buying is what is advertised far more than I do with Amazon. The influx of crummy knock-off products, poorly made junk, and a lack of quality around product listings on Amazon has completely driven me away from them for things like clothing, shoes, fitness products (equipment, supplements), and anything else that I wouldn't see myself purchasing regularly or that I require a high standard of quality for.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#25

Post by bhouston » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

I predict that Shopify will eventually create an Amazon-like system where products from its merchants can be listed in a unified e-commerce frontend site all together.

Not sure if I will be correct about this but I might as well try for a third correct prediction about Shopify:

* Fulfilled by Shopify (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524131)

* Shopify POS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6289827).

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#26

Post by omouse » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

_csoo wrote: post #11

"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies. WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. And it…

> WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. My wife is starting a fashion business. This is a hill too high to climb for a non-technical user. She was up and run…

I don't know, these options look just as much as "swipe credit card, get started" as Shopify's options: https://www.siteground.com/woocommerce-hosting.htm?afcode=d5...

* Until then, Shopify earns their keep (and margin)*

That's fair. For business stuff I've swiped the credit card and paid for support as well. If the Shopify experience is easier than WooCommerce, etc. then I get it.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#27

Post by inapis » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

_csoo wrote: post #11

"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies. WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. And it…

Maybe if you have a dev at hand who’s willing to help. You really can't expect a non technical user to follow all of that. Shopify really simplifies all of that into an hour and a credit card. Without Shopify you'll be saving at best 10-15$ per month which is not worth it when you take into account maintenance, basic security, programmers charges etc. Not to mention if something borks you'll have to wait for your developer to have time to tend to it.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#28

Post by j4_hnews » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

asdfokd8 wrote: post #9

j4_hnews wrote: post #3

As Amazon gobbles up more product categories, there may be less viable categories that potential e-commerce startups might venture into on their own. This could mean over time, more Shopify merchants would be selling overlapping product categories (the ones Amazon has not yet gobbled up yet). Which would mean that as a Shopify merchant, you would competing with other Shopify merchants (not Amazon). How do you differe…

This assumes a trend toward product commoditization. However, I believe the opposite trend is actually taking place: toward product brands. https://medium.com/@thecraigmartin/the-greatest-threat-to-re...

Amazon Basics?

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#29

Post by nickjj » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

_csoo wrote: post #4

Shopify is just the next closed-source iteration of WordPress and Magento. WordPress has one of the largest platforms and they've taken over (and open-sourced) blogging, content management, learning management systems, and ecommerce. They and Magento are better examples of a platform than Shopify. In the long-term, "platforms" like Shopify lose because they don't have nearly enough developers. They have ~3000 "apps"…

I think a big difference is Shopify's core product has a bunch of really useful things to help sell things. You don't need plugins or third party apps written by other developers to get a superb selling experience (note: I don't work at Shopify but I used the platform a few years ago and even wrote some custom apps / templates for it).

The benefit is the core product is insanely battle hardened and you can depend on it having a high degree of reliability (both from an up-time and code quality level).

Where as with WP, are you really going to cobble together a bunch of plugins written by anyone and then hope everything works? Maybe, but you'll also have to host it yourself too and now suddenly you're on the hook for site reliability -- unless you use a closed source WP hosting platform and now you're in the same boat as Shopify except it's worse because you have no idea what you're getting when it comes to reliability.

I think Shopify is a good example of how a niched down product can be successful. If you want to sell things, you want a platform designed to sell things. Not a generic CMS where you need to assemble a custom solution. This is especially true if you're not technical.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#30

Post by jasonlotito » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

_csoo wrote: post #4

Shopify is just the next closed-source iteration of WordPress and Magento. WordPress has one of the largest platforms and they've taken over (and open-sourced) blogging, content management, learning management systems, and ecommerce. They and Magento are better examples of a platform than Shopify. In the long-term, "platforms" like Shopify lose because they don't have nearly enough developers. They have ~3000 "apps"…

My wife had an Etsy store before moving to Shopify. I'm a developer, and we still moved to Shopify. We went with Shopify because out of the box, it had everything you needed, even things you don't think you need. ecommerce is more than just accepting payments and a shopping cart. Shopify is, in effect, a curated experience. Other options required a lot of effort to setup to run at least as easily as Shopify was out of the box.

And here is the thing you forget: no one with a store is interested in dealing with setting up and managing a web store. They are busy with their business. The web store is the side effect of that. SEO, taxes, shipping management, etc? All that needs to come out of the box, or a no brainer.

54,000 plugins doesn't help with that. With Shopify, we only installed a few, and they did exactly what we wanted them to.

So, if you are going to compare open-source options with Shopify, you need to actually compare it with a turn-key solution.

i.e. Where do I create a woocommerce store that is setup correctly from the beginning, which includes updates, SEO, shipping, taxes, payouts, billing, and everything else Shopify provides out the gate.

Because I'm busy running a business, and that business isn't running a web site.