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Shopify and the Power of Platforms

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Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#81

Post by paultannenbaum »

paultannenbaum wrote: post #80
sushilewis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Sorry was typing on my phone and didn't clarify. I have a friend who works at Allbirds and told me they are strongly looking at migrating because of the down time issues.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#82

Post by greymalik »

rluhar wrote: post #63
Townley wrote: post #2

> Shopify is giving merchants an opportunity to differentiate themselves while bearing no risk if they fail. In addition to this being a great position for Shopify, this is an amazing thing for merchants compared to Amazon's offering; it's the critical difference between "We'll sell your stuff" and "We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies. Semi-re…

The Knowledge Project podcast is awesome. Here are some snippets that I found very useful. On starting his company in a secondary market: I do think that there is an almost complete difference between how you build a company in a primary talent market and sort of secondary talent markets. For instance, one of the biggest differences in secondary places is, if I hired someone, the chance that we are going to still wor…

> we have a hiring process that really, really finds people of high future potential

Did he elaborate on the details of this process?

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#83

Post by moate »

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.

Exactly why having a simple to set up platform is valuable. It allows you to focus on the things that create the product or visibility of the product.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#84

Post by lprubin »

jasonsync wrote: post #50
AznHisoka wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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, bu…

Isn't the point of the article that the Shopify Fulfillment Network will be available to all merchants (that pay for it)? Most of the Shopify plugins exist to give a store owner an advantage in sales, conversion or marketing. Sure execution counts, external branding counts, but Shopify is a closed platform. You use their plugins and approved apps. And most store owners rely on these plugins to some degree, to help th…

I’d just like to point out that Shopify isn’t a closed platform. Shopify has the concept of a private app that is not in the app store and not approved by Shopify. So a store can either build/hire an agency to build their own unapproved app using a wide variety and growing set of shopify apis. I’ve made a lot of money doing exactly that.

There also are a number of apps who choose not to be in the app store and not give up 20% of their revenue and instead market on their own.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#85

Post by hammock »

pxue wrote: post #53
_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"…

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…

So it's the difference between setting up a store (Shopify) and selling to a store (Amazon)

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#86

Post by cleong »

_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"…

It's funny as a previous dev that worked with Magento, they said that Shopify did not pose any threat to their business. But I think it's getting clear now that Magneto/Adobe's positioning in the market (enterprise/large-ish medium businesses) is still a good niche but seems like their losing a lot of the SMB customers that made the Magento community what it was.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#87

Post by hombre_fatal »

valueprop wrote: post #48

Hi, Considering about working on an open source with turnkey SaaS hosting modern alternative. Drawback: MVP is quite big. Would you see such a need, or is everyone happy with Shopify? Some questions, if you can spare a few minutes: What are top 3-5 issues with the platform that you're currently using? What do you like most about the current platform? What would be the must-haves of another store platform in order for…

I don't really understand who an "open source turnkey ecommerce solution" serves.

The last thing you need when trying to sell product is to now deal with running software and a server. Kinda reminds me of when I thought I could build a webshop for my father with Rails and Stripe. Thank god I realized sooner than later that there's basically zero upside to running this software and I switched my father to Shopify where he's happily been since.

I think this kind of solution only seems good to HN nerds who don't realize what Shopify brings to the table, or that technology is somehow the hardest part of running a webshop. It seems naive.

Since you're asking these questions, it sounds like you don't have much domain experience. I encourage you to create a simple Shopify shop and try selling something, if only to see what it gives you out of the box that your turnkey solution can't. That would be essential experience to have before you even make your initial commit.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#88

Post by thatoneguy »

greymalik wrote: post #82
rluhar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Knowledge Project podcast is awesome. Here are some snippets that I found very useful. On starting his company in a secondary market: I do think that there is an almost complete difference between how you build a company in a primary talent market and sort of secondary talent markets. For instance, one of the biggest differences in secondary places is, if I hired someone, the chance that we are going to still wor…

> we have a hiring process that really, really finds people of high future potential Did he elaborate on the details of this process?

I know it definitely sounds ageist. Is a 45 year old fresh-out-of-university-to-start-new-CS-career going to be considered and hired by Shopify on a regular basis (i.e. not just hiring one and being like "see, we're not ageist")?

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#89

Post by JacobDotVI »

joking wrote: post #51
RickS wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am plenty technical to do this and it still sucks. We moved to shopify from a plumbed-together solution like that and it's a world of difference. First, shopify is like $30 for a month. I'm $30 for a few minutes. The cost savings are laughably huge. And shopify's better anyway! Their plugin ecosystem is great, the admin tools are built specifically for merchant admin types (as opposed to boil-the-ocean blog admin U…

you seem to forget about the credit card rates, which are the 2.9% of your sales. I don't know in other countries, but where I live you can get the same conditions than for a physical pos terminal from a bank with around 1% rate. a 2% of your sales can easily grow to something that you can optimize.

This isn't necessarily a fair comparison - card not present transactions have always had a much higher rate than point of sale transactions due to the increased risk of fraud. There's an open-ended question of if new entrants like Apple Pay can bring down those card not present fees thanks to their integration into your apple id, but tbd.

Re: Shopify and the Power of Platforms

#90

Post by jasonv »

_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'm sure if you surveyed Shopify customers, many of them couldn't handle any of that, nor could they afford to pay for bespoke services to handle that.

And there may be a split between the most successful and least successful customers of Shopify, but Shopify gets to make money off both.

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