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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

#91
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So that means Shopify grew by 500M and EBay grew by 200M. Is that right?

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

#92
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.

I would say not. You have hosting and you have to deal with maintenance, security and backups. Your Shopify fees cover that and the payment processing fees are comparable.

Unless there is some feature that WooCommerce can throw in for free that would require paying a Shopify developer an ongoing fee (wishlist functionality is probably one) your monthly fees are going to be similar.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a non-Shopify online store and maybe like 80% of my competitors are running a Shopify-powered drop-shipping operation. There's always new ones of these Shopify stores popping and and disappearing every few months.

I place 50 virtual chips on your shop going out of business in the next 2 years.

You must be fun at parties.

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

#95
post #56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More than half of the items bought on Amazon and from a 3rd party seller but fulfilled by amazon. It arrives in an Amazon box in 2 days and most people don't realize it was from a 3rd party seller.

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

#96
post #4

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

More importantly. eBay is profitable. Shopify is not. I have no idea why people overindex on revenue instead of profit - especially for public companies.

because they're investing profit back into the business to grow it - which is what you want them to do

when they run out of places to efficiently deploy capital then they become a standard tech bluechip

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

#97
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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 someth…

Yup. Everything is ex-post-facto rationalization chock full of survivorship bias with no way for you to accurately calibrate for the difference in personal and temporal circumstances and accurately map what outcome you would have if you do X.

It's not worth listening to anyone's advice. Only experiment with your own life and find what works for you or die trying.

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

#98

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…

A big factor in their churn rate is the fact that a significant chunk of their growth has come from make money online gurus. Search YouTube for “Shopify dropshipping” or similar and you’ll see what I mean. It became viral among the scam artists, who all came up with different systems to sell, with one thing in common among them: Step 1 is to go open a Shopify account. When the systems that most of these gurus sell fa…

Nothing you say is backed by data. Their revenue keeps growing with Shopify payments (they take a share of every transaction), which is an entirely different metric than the number of stores. If those were all empty store with no sales that would show. But that’s not the case. Also huge growth with their enterprise solutions shopify plus. Read their financials, it’s all there and easy to understand.

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

#99
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?

Will your business be viable if you can't even afford Shopify?

Have you heard of economies of scale?

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

#100
post #57

Why is all the money at sellers like Amazon, and not where the real work is, i.e. shipping?

Value is captured at the point of sale for everything, not just ecommerce. Also, there’s a number of successful publicly traded logistics companies in the $20b to $70b range.
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