Shopify and the Power of Platforms • Hacker News Board

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#31

Post by sgerenser » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:05 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…

I already had a $5 DigitalOcean droplet running for experimentation and stuff but really wasn't doing much with. When my wife wanted a e-commerce store for her craft/jewelry business, I figured why pay $20+ per month for Shopify or Weebly when I can just install WordPress and WooCommerce and be good to go. So I spent an hour or two getting it set up and had the basics going.

But she hated the web-based admin interface and it was way too cumbersome to get anything customized, products added, etc. In the end it just wasn't worth it and she's now on Weebly. Shopify and Weebly have their own faults and can definitely be a pain if you want to do anything off the beaten path, but for the non-technical user who just wants to sell things I see the value over a self-hosted Wordpress install.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#32

Post by j4_hnews » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #10

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…

You can buy bed bug supplies on Amazon. Yet, https://www.domyown.com/ probably does $10m-$50m/yr revenue.

Right, but that site is not using Shopify (which was my point). To differentiate and get a competitive advantage - build a better bed bug website, better than the thousands probably already on Shopify, you may need to leave Shopify.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#33

Post by username444 » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:10 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'm not a huge fan of Shopify. Their default setup and theme requirements are abysmal.

But it's light-years ahead of WordPress+Woocom.

Neither of these are well set to run a proper ecommerce without heavy customizations though.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#34

Post by asdfokd8 » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

j4_hnews wrote: post #28

asdfokd8 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some products will always remain predominantly in the category of a commodity. And probably all products will have a commodity category. But I think overall the trend is toward beloved brands for more and more things which were once commodities, like mattresses or reading glasses. And when Brands are sought, retailers/aggregators are just more expensive middlemen.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#35

Post by omouse » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #22

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?

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

some open source people

Hey now, stop with the name-calling :P I work on and use proprietary end to end solutions for ecommerce (but not Shopify).

Woocommerce wins for me because it lowers development costs and costs are lower overall. My perspective is definitely someone who has developed ecommerce sites, not solely as a non-technical user, and for me it's very advantageous to lower costs by using and modifying GPL'd plugins and themes.

I guess Shopify has 4000 employees and enough cash and enough direction to come out of box with a good UX and good defaults and that's good enough for nontechnical users.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#36

Post by _the_inflator » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #22

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?

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

What a gem, thx.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#37

Post by j4_hnews » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

bastawhiz wrote: post #24

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 produ…

I've been using Amazon more and more, due to bad experiences using smaller sites (not sure how secure they are, my cc got swiped on one of them). And shipping with Amazon is much faster.

But there's definitely some gems out there!

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#38

Post by omouse » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

sgerenser wrote: post #31

_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…

I already had a $5 DigitalOcean droplet running for experimentation and stuff but really wasn't doing much with. When my wife wanted a e-commerce store for her craft/jewelry business, I figured why pay $20+ per month for Shopify or Weebly when I can just install WordPress and WooCommerce and be good to go. So I spent an hour or two getting it set up and had the basics going. But she hated the web-based admin interfac…

That's fair, the UX for Woocommerce does need a bit of technical hand-holding. Could be improved on, though it seems like the pressure from Shopify will force some improvement on that front.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#39

Post by AznHisoka » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:17 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…

"when the Shopify platform makes the same set of selling advantages available to everyone?"

Shopify doesn't make advantages like branding, brand awareness, marketing, market research, etc available. It simply makes setting up an online store more convenient for people do. Convenience != competitive advantage. You can extend this argument to cloud platforms. AWS, and Azure make setting up and scaling a SaaS easier, but it doesn't give you any secret sauce that you need to succeed, like the ability to know what your customer want.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#40

Post by baybal2 » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

On my first job ever, when I was an exchange student in Singapore in between 2007-2009, I did API integration for a trade company with Alibaba's APIs or whatever you can call them back then.

You was making a CVS file with product description, putting it on a web server, and directed Alibaba's product feed downloader on it.

Alibaba also had "hosted frontpage" back then. The same thing you get now with a store in *.alibaba.com subdomain. It was actually much more feature rich back then. They were allowing upload of more or less fully featured HTML pages, but around 2010 they discontinued both.

If Alibaba guys ever knew what a gold mine they were sitting on all that time...