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Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

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Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#51

Post by sieabahlpark »

palebluedot wrote: post #45
jonknee wrote: post #28

Note that they are not the second biggest shopping site by any reasonable metric (sales, visitors, unique shoppers, orders, SKUs, really anything). This article is using market cap: > The company has quickly become the most popular online shopping destination, second only to Amazon, thanks to an astronomical increase of its shares in the past year. So far this year, stock has soared 160% with revenue coming in at $36…

No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.

But that defeats the purpose of reading an article and pick and choose what you want to talk about.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#52

Post by wil421 »

gkoberger wrote: post #19
alphadog wrote: post #11

Shopify isn't a homogeneous marketplace that is comparable to Amazon.com. It's a SaaS ecommerce platform. I've seen these comparisons made lately and I don't understand it. What am I missing?

Well, Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/Etsy all are platforms that let other people sell things. I get your point (and might even agree with you), however if you look at it from the perspective of "I want to sell something... where do I go?", they're competition. They do discovery, checkout, inventory, fulfillment, etc. It just happens to have a slightly different approach than the others.

One of those is not like the others. I just went to Shopify.com and I can’t find anything for sale. Shopify is a SaaS platform not a marketplace.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#53

Post by Guvante »

palebluedot wrote: post #45
jonknee wrote: post #28

Note that they are not the second biggest shopping site by any reasonable metric (sales, visitors, unique shoppers, orders, SKUs, really anything). This article is using market cap: > The company has quickly become the most popular online shopping destination, second only to Amazon, thanks to an astronomical increase of its shares in the past year. So far this year, stock has soared 160% with revenue coming in at $36…

No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.

The given link is hard pay walled and I don't see any more explanation of the number. Did they actually have more sales of consumer goods to consumers than eBay or are they saying the company which is on paper a competitor to eBay had more sales total which isn't the same thing.

If you want to compare Amazon vs eBay as a platform you wouldn't look at AWS to give an example of what I am talking about.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#54

Post by iask »

Shopify is not enterprise ready. It’s designed for smaller self-managed stores. We recently looked into the platform to run a few large E-commerce stores. Two of the biggest issues are:

1. Payment processing. You’re forced to use their Shopify Payments. There’s no flexibility for managing that via API. Once something goes in there it’s stuck. Our particular requirement entails tokenized card info. And we needed to access the tokenized card for recurring orders. Shopify told us that was impossible. And want us to use one of the handful subscriptions app, which btw, also have no flexibility. We then hired a 3rd party to see if they can extend the cart...nada. So, if you already have an internal recurring/subscription system - trust me, Shopify will not work for your e-commerce platform. Dont waste your time.

2. Most of the apps are shady. We spoke with two regarding upsells and cross-sells, they couldn’t give us a clear answer if our customer data they collect will never be shared or sold.

The platform is for small self managed stores.

It definitely has an A+ front end, but the backend needs to be more flexibility for the enterprise.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#55

Post by jonknee »

palebluedot wrote: post #45
jonknee wrote: post #28

Note that they are not the second biggest shopping site by any reasonable metric (sales, visitors, unique shoppers, orders, SKUs, really anything). This article is using market cap: > The company has quickly become the most popular online shopping destination, second only to Amazon, thanks to an astronomical increase of its shares in the past year. So far this year, stock has soared 160% with revenue coming in at $36…

No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.

But the link doesn't actually say that. It is also talking about market cap. From the Financial Times article:

> The stock has climbed more than 150 per cent since the beginning of 2019, making Shopify more valuable than well-known internet companies including Twitter, Square and Spotify. Its market capitalisation — now more than $40bn — surpassed that of ecommerce pioneer eBay earlier this year.

It's all rather silly, it's sort of like saying Square is the second largest seller of coffee because a lot of coffee shops transact with it. AWS also hosts a ton of other eCommerce infrastructure, we have to include all sales made using AWS if you want this sort of comparison. It's a bunch of nonsense.

tl;dr If you sell shovels you can't claim you're one of the world's biggest miners.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#56

Post by manigandham »

palebluedot wrote: post #45
jonknee wrote: post #28

Note that they are not the second biggest shopping site by any reasonable metric (sales, visitors, unique shoppers, orders, SKUs, really anything). This article is using market cap: > The company has quickly become the most popular online shopping destination, second only to Amazon, thanks to an astronomical increase of its shares in the past year. So far this year, stock has soared 160% with revenue coming in at $36…

No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.

Limited share of the FT article it's linking to: https://on.ft.com/3098o7k

> "Its market capitalisation — now more than $40bn — surpassed that of ecommerce pioneer eBay earlier this year."

> "Most of the shoppers who spent more than $40bn across 800,000 Shopify merchants last year would have had no idea they were transacting with the Canadian company."

$40 billion is mentioned in two different contexts.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#57

Post by jonknee »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #51
palebluedot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.

But that defeats the purpose of reading an article and pick and choose what you want to talk about.

I read the article and the FT article, it's all about market cap. But since Shopify isn't actually a shopping site this is all a moot point.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#58

Post by xal »

dragonsh wrote: post #46

An article put forward by marketing. Not sure why many HNr's like this kind of article. By no stretch Shopify is bigger than eBay, market cap is a game played by investors and this kind of article are used to boost it. If someone is holding Shopify stocks it will be the best time to sale. Funny enough by this ridiculous metrics SAP's commerce cloud and Adobe's Magento will become the largest shopping site miles and m…

We really don't think these are good articles to be written about Shopify.

Shopify is a company that got big by totally being in the background and making other brands look good instead of itself. I fear what happened in the last little while is that we became too big to be ignored and the Shopify vs Amazon vs Ebay angle seems to be the most accessible angle for writing. It seems to be working though, for whatever reason this made it on Hacker news even though in the same week as this article was written we also bought a robotics company for $450m to automated warehouses and announced a $5m carbon sequestration fund which should really be appreciated on hacker news. Alas we talk about GMV number comparisons.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#59

Post by xal »

jonknee wrote: post #30
mtw wrote: post #12

Does it really mean that Shopify is selling more than eBay? There are lots of indie entrepreneurs who open a site with shopify and pay for the Shopify subscription only to discover that they don't have nowhere near the the number of sales or even visitors they hoped.

No, this just means that Shopify has a high stock market valuation. This isn't looking at sales figures at all. And since they just rent software to people who sell things I'm not sure it makes sense to compare them to more traditional eCommerce plays (if you started selling homes through Shopify somehow it would hugely increase "sold goods", but not in a way that impacts anything).

This article isn't clear about it but yes - its about the amount people sell on both platforms, not stock price.

Now, is that a useful basis of comparison? It's fun fact but not much more given the difference of the platforms.

Re: Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

#60

Post by jonknee »

manigandham wrote: post #56
palebluedot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.

Limited share of the FT article it's linking to: https://on.ft.com/3098o7k > "Its market capitalisation — now more than $40bn — surpassed that of ecommerce pioneer eBay earlier this year." > "Most of the shoppers who spent more than $40bn across 800,000 Shopify merchants last year would have had no idea they were transacting with the Canadian company." $40 billion is mentioned in two different contexts.

OK, but that's less than half of eBay. This is just a non-serious puff piece and I have no idea why it's being voted up on HN.

https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ebay-q4-2018-results/

> In 2018, eBay enabled $95 billion of gross merchandise volume

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