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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

#71
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really the same thing though, Amazon/eBay/Etsy you can browse multiple "stores". Shopify is just a platform so it really isn't that fair. It'd be like including every single Magento powered site to say Magento is the X largest platform.

You can look at it as a "decentralized platform".

Adding search across stores = centralized.

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

#73
post #55

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 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 sill…

Amazon and eBay are also selling shovels.

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

#74

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?

For everyone that's trying to compare Shopify to marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, you really can't. They are apples to oranges. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that gives you your own website where you’re required to do your own marketing, SEO, and develop your own customer base. Selling on eBay and Amazon on the other hand gives you the advantage of putting your products in front of millions of customers who are actively window shopping. The former gives you ownership of the customer while the latter doesn’t.

Both types of sales channels have their own value props and are complimentary to each other. Furthermore, even each marketplace attracts their own customer archetypes so they can also be complimentary to each other. This isn’t a binary strategy where you choose to sell on one or the other!

I’m the founder of Trunk[1] which helps online e-commerce stores sync their inventory in real-time across their sales channels. Most of my customers on average sell on least 3 places (e.g. Shopify, eBay, and Amazon).

Congrats to Tobias and his team. He’s come a long way from being a Rails core team member back in the day!

1. https://trunkinventory.com

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

#75

Shopify seems like something that should have been done 15 years ago. It is just a website that allows anyone to set up a digital storefront for a monthly fee. The fee part is the most lucrative. Most people set up the store and sell little or nothing and forget to cancel , so Shopify keeps printing $ from the recurring subs, much like AOL does.

They also power a large number of real businesses too.

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

#76
post #74

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?

For everyone that's trying to compare Shopify to marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, you really can't. They are apples to oranges. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that gives you your own website where you’re required to do your own marketing, SEO, and develop your own customer base. Selling on eBay and Amazon on the other hand gives you the advantage of putting your products in front of millions of customers who are…

Trunk looks useful... my side business is handmade leather goods (https://coastleather.com) and cross posting between my own website, ebay, etsy and amazon is a pain, so I just don't bother. This has meant that channels other than my website became stale and I shut down the stores.

Do you have plans to include syncing for woocommerce stores?

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

#77
post #74

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?

For everyone that's trying to compare Shopify to marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, you really can't. They are apples to oranges. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that gives you your own website where you’re required to do your own marketing, SEO, and develop your own customer base. Selling on eBay and Amazon on the other hand gives you the advantage of putting your products in front of millions of customers who are…

This looks incredibly useful. Real-time inventory sync is a big headache for some of our customers. (We provide a native mobile sales channel for retailers with only a traditional web presence. Think Tapcart (https://tapcart.co/), but not just for Shopify). I'd like to know what your plans are for which platforms to support next, and if you've got ideas for opening up an API at some point as well?

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

#78

Note: Ruby on Rails cannot scale /sarcasm

Well, you are assuming that the platform doesn't have any technology challenges or significant issues and/or drawbacks that might stem from the technology and current architecture.

Hint: There is plenty of stuff like that.

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

#79
post #73
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sill…

Amazon and eBay are also selling shovels.

Amazon and eBay are selling shovels and claiming to be shovel merchants. Shopify is selling shovels and claiming to be a miner (as presented in this article).

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

#80
post #2

But Shopify has no central search platform that I know of. The sites aren't connected to each other.

A central search platform for Shopify stores... you mean Google?

Hah! I laugh but getting found in Google is incredibly difficult compared to say selling the same produce on Etsy.
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