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Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

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Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Shopify really needs discovery or awareness among customers/buyers. Shopify's customers are merchants, businesses and manufacturers, each advertising their very own store and sales channels. For them it's hard not to consider Shopify as their ecommerce platform of choice. Meanwhile I'd argue that end customers couldn't care less about which ecommerce platform their store of choice is using. Therefore I…

As a fun fact, a former Directo of ine from Amazon, ops side, joined Shopify a while ago. A couple of years ago, I started to wonder what an ideal Amazon-"killer" would look like. And came to the conclusion it would something with aPOS-system, a rudimentary inventory management for bric and mortar shops, a webshop solution, the possibility to interface with fulfillment software and other marketplaces. That would tran…

Does Shopify have its own POS hardware? I wonder if they’ll buy one. Lots of companies are hurting and could be gobbled up in the cheap.

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#62
This expands what merchants can do with the Shopify platform. Both Facebook and Walmart are channels for Shopify merchants to post their merchandise. Amazon has been one for a while. There are a lot more in their app store - https://apps.shopify.com/collections/sales-channels

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#63
post #7

Amazon is likely grateful for the “competition” amid greater scrutiny from regulators around the world.

I am not sure why people think Amazon is such a dominate force on the commerce front, especially with respects to Walarmt. It isn't even close between the two. I am more worried about the cloud technology space being down to basically two choices now.

> dominate force on the commerce front

During the height of the pandemic Amazon's performance suffered for us. Prior to the pandemic 100% of our online purchases came from Amazon mostly due to inertia. Find something, order it, it shows up.

Amazon faltered. Lots of things out of stock, delayed delivery, missing items in shipments. We then turned to ebay and shopify and experienced none of those things. The spending is probably now 50% ebay, 30% amazon and 20% shopify now.

The decentralization approach to ecommerce is really coming through now ... at least for us.

I was surprised what a great experience it was buying from ebay and shopify. I hope they don't work to centralize things in the future.

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#64
post #41

If well executed, Facebook Shops has the potential to crush both Shopify and Amazon. FB Marketplace already has 800 million monthly users, more than Amazon and eBay combined.

>800 million monthly users

What is a monthly user? What part of the facebook ecommerce platform did they use?

Facebook has the centralized marketplace, many local/regional sales groups and paid advertising.

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#65
In all honesty who is buying from these third parties, if something on Amazon isn’t fulfilled via Amazon, I’m not buying. If I’m looking for something on Best Buy the first thing I’m doing is looking for the Best Buy only toggle. Is it strictly to make points on the vendors sales? To give a false appearance of massive inventory? Could a third party vendor list “Item A” on eBay, Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart and have access to cross site APIs that when “Item A” is sold it’s removed from all market places? As a Canuck I’m happy for Shopify, as consumer I’m losing interest in online shopping, which might be futile with how everything is trending.

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fun fact, a former Directo of ine from Amazon, ops side, joined Shopify a while ago. A couple of years ago, I started to wonder what an ideal Amazon-"killer" would look like. And came to the conclusion it would something with aPOS-system, a rudimentary inventory management for bric and mortar shops, a webshop solution, the possibility to interface with fulfillment software and other marketplaces. That would tran…

Does Shopify have its own POS hardware? I wonder if they’ll buy one. Lots of companies are hurting and could be gobbled up in the cheap.

They do: https://www.shopify.com/pos

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Shopify really needs discovery or awareness among customers/buyers. Shopify's customers are merchants, businesses and manufacturers, each advertising their very own store and sales channels. For them it's hard not to consider Shopify as their ecommerce platform of choice. Meanwhile I'd argue that end customers couldn't care less about which ecommerce platform their store of choice is using. Therefore I…

As a fun fact, a former Directo of ine from Amazon, ops side, joined Shopify a while ago. A couple of years ago, I started to wonder what an ideal Amazon-"killer" would look like. And came to the conclusion it would something with aPOS-system, a rudimentary inventory management for bric and mortar shops, a webshop solution, the possibility to interface with fulfillment software and other marketplaces. That would tran…

[deleted]

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#68

Wow, Hacker News now used for stock pumping. nice. Now that the longs had their say, here is the short side. Shopify has an API. Someone wrote a plugin to allow a shop keeper to publish inventory into the Walmart API. When sellers sell on Walmart's platform, Shopify sees zero transactional revenue. That's the actual technical story. The linked "article" which actually included a quote from the COO includes a page of…

So sellers will create a different FB shop, a different Walmart shop, a different website shop, download and pay for a whole bunch of software to keep all the inventory in sync, and have to merge different interfaces and APIs to try and figure out what their final sales, revenue, etc are.

Or they can use Shopify and get all of those, and manage their inventory, and pricing, and shipping rules, etc all from one place and pay Shopify a few hundred dollars a year, when they would have paid thousands in software annually to replicate the same anyways.

Yeah, I can totally see why they would go the non Shopify route.

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newegg commingles inventory just like Amazon, so it's not much better. I don't know if Walmart does, but I try to spend money wherever I don't have to deal with sellers, and directly at the manufacturers website if possible nowadays.

I just don't understand why Amazon (and apparently Newegg) continue to do this. It's clear by now that sellers have abused it "launder" counterfeits into online retail fulfillment systems. Just charge an extra fee to the third-party seller to keep their inventory separate, have them stick a unique inventory barcode on it, and be done with it!

Because retail is a low margin business, but being a platform and collecting 15% off of top line revenue is much higher margin. Walmart’s market cap is $338B, Amazon’s is $1.3T. Even though Walmart’s share of retail dwarfs Amazon’s, clearly there is not much profit to be made.

You don’t have to deal with complaints, vetting products, or supply chain issues. Just side with the buyer in a dispute, and outsource all the other tasks to the customers who spend their time browsing through all the garbage on Amazon to save an extra few dollars.

Re: Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would transform every single brick-and-mortar shop using that POS software into a fulfillment center. That's how thousands of businesses have operated for decades or more.

Sure, locally. Combined with a global E-Commerce platform, that is pretty powerful.

Not locally. Globally. My wife works with this sort of thing every day and has for her entire career.
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