141–150 of 204 posts
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…
When you expand on something core to another company's platform, that is sometimes referred to as "picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer."
When the profit pays back the initial investment quickly, and the risk is that you have negligible losses but stop making more money, that's not a bulldozer.
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Why should Shopify be allowed to decide what two other businesses (merchant and OP) willingly do just because they own the platform? No, they shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole, I'd argue they shouldn't be allowed to.
What OP did was bypass Shopify entirely for the checkout part of the process, thereby taking away Shopify's revenue for OP's customers. That's not software freedom, that's theft. Any two businesses are welcome to transact with each other, as long as they're not using resources that belong to a third party who doesn't want to be involved in the transaction.
And if shopify actually didn't want to be involved they would just fire those customers.
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…
Atlassian has this policy for 3rd-party developers too. It feels pretty reasonable, to be honest. Developers still get to advertise against phrases relevant to their niche (and I have to imagine the keyword “shopify” would be a poor performer anyway unless you’re building a shopify competitor).
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You did not read my post. I did not bid on Shopify. I bid on "e-commerce sales" Shopify is insisting, and in the new terms mandating, I add a "Negative search term" of Shopify to my bid for "e-commerce sales" Go look up negative search terms if you aren't familiar.
You didn’t specify but I assume you are only required to add [shopify] (exact match) as a negative KW, which is very different from shopify (broad match).
> Our affiliate program was simple. You bring a customer and we pay you 15-25% of the revenue we make from that customer. Forever. there is a very thin line between a pyramid/ponzi scheme and a generous affiliate program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
For checkout x it's a negligible amount and there's a free trial.
It's just a generous affiliate program.
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Yeah, the story isn't one of those "THIS IS SO UNFAAAAAAIR" things. It's just a description of what happened. Depending on the costs, 600,000 euros a month is pretty good even if it doesn't last forever. > If I sound bitter - I’m not. I like Shopify. I own Shopify stock. I believe they’re completely dominating the e-commerce platform space and none of their current competitors stand a chance of catching up. I know th…
I don’t understand how Shopify can maintain market dominance as just a middleman value extractor. Probably why they’re forcing their app. I deleted my account and haven’t used Shopify since they wouldn’t let me get my order tracking any way besides the app. As someone who worked adjacent to logistics it was just the hardest hard “no” of all time for me. Money moves to easily now days to build a monopoly on e-commerce…
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> You are effectively doing the product/market fit for them, for free. Once they see that your solution works, they will just knock it off, or ban you altogether. Or buy you. https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/01/apple-shortcuts-workflow-mana... In this case, the TFA notes that Shopify offered the ISV a path forward and Mr. Leteyski chose "go to war" (Option B). He killed the business, not Shopify. He may chalk that up as a…
> Shopify offered the ISV a path forward ... It sounded more like the "path forward" was to wait 2 years for the new Shopify APIs to come out. That's not even slightly a credible in-good-faith option. :(
So they waited two years and couldn't sign up any new customers during that time. How is that better?
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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…
EXCLUDE Shopify. I did not bid on Shopify. I bid on "e-commerce sales" 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…
But it strikes me at first glance as obviously anti-competitive, and reaching out or filing a complaint with the FTC and its international equivalents would be one starting point.
The FTC has been paying attention these days, you might actually get something moving.
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…
These ideas are only bootstrappable, because nobody is going to put their money into it, apart from founders having a dream, but everyone else seeing that competitor can wipe them by just assigning a team to build that extra feature in their product.
Don't get me wrong - it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. If you don't care much about money and value experience more, that is an extremely exciting journey to take oneself through and also sometimes dreams come true!