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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

#51

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.

Your point is accurate, but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops. Their biggest investments are for their subscribers that ACTUALLY sell stuff. Dropship-dreamers are super scared of actually subscribing but they are the vocal majority because of guru's and such. Its all about growing GMV / PLUS / CAPITAL / FULFILLMENT and those are all hitting +50% YOY

> but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops.

This makes no sense. Why would any company that starts making serious money continue to give SquareSpace money for a template. There's nothing you can do in SquareSpace that you can't do better in a custom app running on one of the many free software CMS's out there. I don't get this.

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

#52
post #12
post #4

Bigger than eBay by market cap, but much smaller by revenue.

Shopify grew revenue by 50% in Q2, eBay by 2%.

Yeah. 50% of a small number vs 2% of a much MUCH bigger number. It's a classic mistake that the statically-blind make.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm assuming The shops are startups that failed after s while. They are enabling them to be started quickly.

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

#56
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third-party sellers at Amazon don't have robots, and I suppose they fulfill a considerable amount of the volume.

Sure they do, Amazon fulfillment is a giant business. https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.h...

Well most of the time when I order something from a third-party vendor, it doesn't come in an Amazon box, so I suppose it is handled by the vendor, not Amazon.

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

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with revenue vs profit?

I'm asking if buying something on eBay technically means paying eBay (revenue) that they then pay out to the seller in a way that it wouldn't with Shopify's Stripe integration. OP didn't say anything about profit.

eBay's marketplace (eBay.com) revenue should be the amount that's their listing fees and percentage of the final price that they take. The amount that the sold goods are worth should be the gross merchandise volume. See https://investors.ebayinc.com/fast-facts/default.aspx for their current numbers. Looking at their fees: https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/sell... , it seems to be 10% to 12% for common things. For the recent quarter, their GMV is $21.5B and revenue is $2.2 billion so that seems about right (this is minus StubHub and only their primary marketplace).

Shopify's revenue from https://investors.shopify.com/financial-reports/default.aspx is $362 million and their GMV is $13.8 billion. Looking at their fees at https://www.shopify.com/pricing , they charge between 2% to 3%. This seems to be about right.

This is a superficial look but, I think to your original question, the revenue should be comparable.

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

#60
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/

From their docs “Reaction is built with JavaScript (ES6), Meteor, Node.js and works nicely with Docker.”

Is Meteor still being actively developed?

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