121–130 of 204 posts
Isn't this Shopify clearly engaging in theft? ... they locked us out of Upsell X and we couldn’t support it anymore. Even further - they kept charging merchants for Upsell X - but we never received those payouts.
Well, I can relate as I just got an email that Shopify changed their partner TOS today because of me. They had demanded that I add a negative keyword "Shopify" to all of my Google ads. I declined, because - it wasn't in our partnership agreement and I in fact DID want clients who used Shopify to find my business. (I am in the e-commerce space selling a product that works for many marketplaces including Shopify). Just…
Thanks Shopify.
Well, I can relate as I just got an email that Shopify changed their partner TOS today because of me. They had demanded that I add a negative keyword "Shopify" to all of my Google ads. I declined, because - it wasn't in our partnership agreement and I in fact DID want clients who used Shopify to find my business. (I am in the e-commerce space selling a product that works for many marketplaces including Shopify). Just…
So you have to exclude the word Shopify, or just not use it? Like if you bid on the phrase "Checkout Software" and people searching for "Shopify Checkout Software" were reaching you that would be against the TOS? You'd have to tell Google to suppress your ad from reaching people in that way? Or you're just not allowed to bid on the word "Shopify" if you're a partner or whatever? The latter seems inappropriate but at…
Shopify is insisting, and in the new terms mandating, I add a "Negative search term" of Shopify to my bid for "e-commerce sales" So it would be + "e-commerce sales" - "Shopify"
> But the former, where you're actually required to suppress the results, seems anti-competitive to the point of being actionable, and is certainly not an ethical business practice.
That's fine to say, but is a small fry like me to actually do?
The actual wording in the memo is
> In order to promote a fair ecosystem and maintain competitiveness, partners may need to include ‘Shopify’ as a negative keyword in advertising campaigns that utilize pay-per-click keywords or are promoted through a search engine.
"Crying to the regulator is a bitch move" I both understand the sentiment, but also how else are we going to stop 5 companies form running the world, and the rest of us eating grass?
I'm not a business expert or an entrepreneur, but I've been around this industry long enough to know: Unless your intention is to flip your startup into an acquisition, I would recommend against plays like this. Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. I am saying this because I work for a large-ish company where someone did thi…
This provider did an ok job, however at the volumes we were processing it meant we were paying them a pretty handsome sum - which the owners (we were privately held without any outside investment) wanted to reduce to increase their profit margin. We made an offer to buy this provider, but they knew how much we were depending on them, and made a counter offer much higher, which we refused.
We started building out our own platform to connect directly to the telecommunications companies, which if you've ever worked in this space, you will know it's no easy task. Although there are standards, each company does things slightly differently, so each integration is effectively from scratch. To make it even harder, the process of migrating phone numbers etc is effectively turn it off in one place and turn it on in the new place, there is no gradual switch over. After the failed negotiations our provider did not want to cooperate with this (any more than they legally had to) and they gave us a hard deadline after which they would turn off all our services. Any major issues during this migration could take weeks to resolve, and would surely result in large customers leaving which could be the end of our company.
But in the end we did it. The migration over to our platform worked without any major issues, and we were even able to build in extra features that our provider didn't have.
And the icing on the cake: a year or so later we bought that provider. As we were their biggest customer - by a long way - they lost a big chunk of business. What we paid for them was much lower than the original offer we made.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
After reading the article, I think the turning point was when Terms of Service were unilaterally changed to forbid selling his service to new customers. If he'd been permitted to keep selling to new customers, he'd have been able to continue. Would a good analogy would be Apple banning other web browsers on iPhone, because they are an important part of the iPhone experience? His conclusion was that this was a limited…
Apple bans other browser engines because can they run arbitrary code, which is not allowed per the store rules. They are fine with other browsers on top of WebKit.
They could just said that they do it for the safety of children and some would believe it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been the case for years. You weren’t allowed to bid on any search terms related to Shopify on Google Ads. Lots of Partners did though.
Pretty scummy practice. Not only does it drive out competition/innovation, it effectively reduces the cost of Shopify’s ad buy.