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Shopify and the Power of Platforms

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Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#71

Post by thegagne »

ysavir wrote: post #20
_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. So all the average person needs to set up shop is design skills, software engineering skills, understanding of server…

And manage patches, worry about security, PCI compliance, data loss, etc.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#72

Post by leviathant »

jonny_eh wrote: post #66
_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"…

How many plugins does a site need?

It depends on the complexity of your business, although every Shopify site is going to need a handful of plugins to do the basics. Things like the email signup modal aren't base features, but require a plugin.

If you've got even a moderately complex business, plugins add up pretty quickly, and each Shopify app you add to your site slows down your pageload. When Shopify pitches you, they show you some really great looking sites, but after you've bought in, you find out that they're not only operating with 35 apps (at an additional cost of thousands a month), that some of them are hacky custom workarounds, and even though status.shopify.com is all green lights, the servers these third party apps are running on aren't on the same infrastructure, and you're dealing with dozens of points of failure on black Friday...

But thousands of shops are on the Shopify platform, and the "Just Grow Bro" Sales Lead told me they do B2B and international, so how bad could it be?

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#73

Post by [deleted] »

_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…

[deleted]

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#74

Post by hw »

_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"…

The WordPress plugin ecosystem is so fragmented, and most of the 54,000+ plugins are really low quality and good luck getting support for them when something breaks.

Magento/Magento2 is dying, if not dead. I work in the e-commerce space and have seen more businesses move off Magento into Shopify, or BigCommerce.

Shopify's app store has only ~3000 apps for a reason - Most of the functionality of a core shopping / merchant experience is already built into Shopify so you don't need to go through 50,000 apps to do what you need to do to sell. The apps on the Shopify app store also go through a review process that ensures the quality of the apps.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#75

Post by MuffinFlavored »

j4_hnews wrote: post #32
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm... what shopping cart does DoMyOwn use? The point I was trying to make is: you can bring in $10m/yr revenue with any shopping cart software. It just depends on marketing/SEO/traffic/conversion...

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#76

Post by MuffinFlavored »

sushilewis wrote: post #67
pxue wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my hot take (with 2 years of running a #1 trending shopify app + multiple attempt in starting a store) Shopify DOES NOT help you sell. Period. Amazon will win in the long run because at the end of the day it's all about if the "platform" can move merchandize or not. Amazon captures top of the funnel all the way down to personalized targeting. Shopify will never do that. they are just the tool to help you figur…

That's a great take that others miss. Marketing is 100X harder than setting up a platform.

Devil's advocate: go make a listing on Amazon for a product that already has other competitors selling. How are you going to "market" yours to the top?

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#77

Post by rafaelm »

_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"…

To add to this, Shopify is the equivalent of Medium for blogging vs WordPress.

Sure, it's easy to get started, but once you're locked into their platform and you need a more custom solution, it's going to be hard to move out of it.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#78

Post by sarora27 »

_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…

former Magento employee here...what you're describing is a TON of upfront technical investment for an e-commerce merchant who is just getting started. The platforms you've mentioned are ideal for merchants who are starting to hit $5M to $10M in annual revenue and need to innovate on their storefronts in order to continue achieving growth.

For someone at the beginning of their ecommerce journey, Shopify is the BEST way to start making money almost immediately.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#79

Post by projectramo »

_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…

And who needs Shopify fulfillment?

Just set up 10-20 warehouses, hire a few hundred workers, train them, get an HR rep, IT, finance, and support, and you're off to the races!

Kids are so lazy these days, with their long hair and their rock'n'roll music.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#80

Post by paultannenbaum »

sushilewis wrote: post #69
hackermailman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopify reported 50% yearly revenue growth which helped the stock price, and gov of Canada/provinces used shopify exclusively for their online marijuana ordering starting last year too. That said their lack of net income is a problem https://www.fool.ca/2019/05/07/where-will-shopify-tsxshop-st... and their hiring process is ridiculous even by modern meme hiring standards meaning it's going to get harder to hire peopl…

On the How I Built This podcast, they mentioned AllBirds uses Shopify as their platform. I just checked their site, and it looks like it's still the case.

They do, but I think they are considering moving off of Shopify. The reality is that shopify has a ridiculous amount of down time, and any high traffic store will actually be losing real revenue as a result. Just scroll their status page, they consistently have several outages a month.

https://status.shopify.com/

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