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Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

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Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#31

Post by mikeryan »

scabbycakes wrote: post #19

As someone who worked developing Shopify apps (NOT a Shopifyt employee to be clear), I can attest to the incredibly high percentage of shops that evaporate from the platform on a nonstop basis. Something like 80% of the people that would install our apps in their shops would be gone or in limbo after a couple months. (Not an app uninstall, their shops actually no longer existed.) The charts we see from Shopify like t…

This seems like a "feature"? Not to discount the churn numbers - but being able to quickly and at low cost set up a high quality commerce site where folks don't have to be heavily invested seems like they're providing the service as intended.

I enjoy the Shopify experience from the Vendors that use it and do stick around.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#32

Post by dre54673 »

hrshtr wrote: post #26
kaiby wrote: post #7

This interview with Shopify's CEO about how the company grew / his mindset was interesting [1]. He said a lot of things that sounds similar to the author’s quotes in the article. [1] https://fs.blog/tobi-lutke/

+1 to the podcast. He seems to be a calm guy and it is good to hear about his thought process and the vision he has. Interestingly he loved playing video games and he owes playing video game to help him in critical thinking.

> he owes playing video game to help him in critical thinking.

I often hear people attribute part of their success to things they already did, and I think it's usually just a combination of survivorship bias and other similar effects. I've heard people say similar things of nearly every substance or activity: "I am successful and doing X is part of the reason" where X can be anything from illegal substances to something mundane like coffee. Usually when X is something one likes, one tends to find it interesting.

This has been on my mind after recently debating with friends whether some substances like weed or shrooms should be legal and them basically saying they shouldn't because they know people who have taken them and turned their lives for the worse. Then I brought up how you can say similar things about video games (which IMO they are addicted to) and they quickly said it's different and you need to perform some impossibly complex studies to determine anything.

This is likely part of the reason echo chambers form everywhere. If ideas confirm our own beliefs, we hold them to much lower standards than when they don't.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#33

Post by askafriend »

DavidAdams wrote: post #9

I know that a lot of activity on Shopify is from ambitious but deluded people setting up dropshipping businesses. Shopify is just selling picks and shovels to a lot of prospectors in a particularly unfruitful gold rush. I'm wondering whether they'll see a contraction as the enthusiasm wears off.

Tesla sells every car they make through their website powered by Shopify. It's not just small boutique stores using Shopify.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#34

Post by scabbycakes »

mikeryan wrote: post #31
scabbycakes wrote: post #19

As someone who worked developing Shopify apps (NOT a Shopifyt employee to be clear), I can attest to the incredibly high percentage of shops that evaporate from the platform on a nonstop basis. Something like 80% of the people that would install our apps in their shops would be gone or in limbo after a couple months. (Not an app uninstall, their shops actually no longer existed.) The charts we see from Shopify like t…

This seems like a "feature"? Not to discount the churn numbers - but being able to quickly and at low cost set up a high quality commerce site where folks don't have to be heavily invested seems like they're providing the service as intended. I enjoy the Shopify experience from the Vendors that use it and do stick around.

I suppose as a user you could definitely look at it that way.

As an investor I'd be worried about losing their churned-out merchants to other platforms like Etsy and Woocommerce and Weebly and about ten other platforms hacking away at their knees. To be fair to Shopify though, I think they know they've already lost the battle for the little merchants and have fixated on other things.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#35

Post by thrownaway954 »

sova wrote: post #28

Shopify is so expensive and for a small-time shop hosting and paying the shop fee eat up your first 2-10 sales easily, where is the free platform that only charges per sale?

Wordpress + WooCommerce

You can say all you want about bad the platform is, but the fact of the matter is that you can setup and start selling on a proven platform for almost nothing.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#36

Post by nspady »

sova wrote: post #28

Shopify is so expensive and for a small-time shop hosting and paying the shop fee eat up your first 2-10 sales easily, where is the free platform that only charges per sale?

Square's online store is probably the best for being able to sell without paying a platform fee for most features. But it is much less feature rich than Shopify.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#39

Post by bonestamp2 »

scabbycakes wrote: post #19

As someone who worked developing Shopify apps (NOT a Shopifyt employee to be clear), I can attest to the incredibly high percentage of shops that evaporate from the platform on a nonstop basis. Something like 80% of the people that would install our apps in their shops would be gone or in limbo after a couple months. (Not an app uninstall, their shops actually no longer existed.) The charts we see from Shopify like t…

> I'm not convinced they're factoring in churn.

I guess it depends on why you're interested in the user number to begin with. I mean, from an investor standpoint, their profits keep growing so I'm not as interested in the exact number of merchants actually using the platform (assuming it's still a reasonably high/diverse number).

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#40

Post by itsyogesh »

sova wrote: post #28

Shopify is so expensive and for a small-time shop hosting and paying the shop fee eat up your first 2-10 sales easily, where is the free platform that only charges per sale?

Take a look at Reaction Commerce[0]. They are pitching themselves as an open-source Shopify competitor which you can host on your servers.

[0]https://www.reactioncommerce.com/

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