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Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

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Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#71
post #67

I’m kicking myself for not investing in Shopify when I saw it in the 100s this year. Given the size of my average investment I could have made a good $20k in profit. Wondering if I’m making the same mistake again. Could this be another $1000 stock?

Yes

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Reaction Commerce[0]. They are pitching themselves as an open-source Shopify competitor which you can host on your servers. [0] https://www.reactioncommerce.com/

From their docs “Reaction is built with JavaScript (ES6), Meteor, Node.js and works nicely with Docker.” Is Meteor still being actively developed?

Yes, it appears so:

https://github.com/meteor/meteor

looks like they're a monorepo now:

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/devel/packages

but its slow going, from the looks of it perhaps.

I think the meteor community is a shell of what it used to be, though.

I wonder how Smile Software is handling it, they were 'all in' on meteor when they announced their subscription pricing model.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#73
post #67

I’m kicking myself for not investing in Shopify when I saw it in the 100s this year. Given the size of my average investment I could have made a good $20k in profit. Wondering if I’m making the same mistake again. Could this be another $1000 stock?

Yes

My creds:

Worked in a german shopify partnered agency for ~3 months beginning this year (latori.com)

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#74
post #59

I don’t know why they don’t support 3rd party payment tokenization.

You don’t? They charge a premium over the CC processor as a big part of their revenue. Why would they give that up?

Yeah, but for challenging Amazon, the reason people choose Shopify Payments shouldn't be raw power.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#75
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopify grew revenue by 50% in Q2, eBay by 2%.

Yeah. 50% of a small number vs 2% of a much MUCH bigger number. It's a classic mistake that the statically-blind make.

A mistake?

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed -- same position here. The trouble with developing Shopify apps is that your own application churn is additive with Shopify's. While that's the case with every platform, Shopify's churn rate is eye-wateringly high.

I'm about to dev a Shopify app myself. How hard is it to stand out on the shopify app store and get some traction?

It's difficult, as others have mentioned. I have a few legacy side projects on Shopify. At this point, I would say treat it as a marketing channel for your SAAS, but don't rely on it solely as a means of distribution.

Some merchants on it are professionals and operate their business that way. Many merchants (and I don't have a percentage) are somewhere in the prosumer to wantrepreneur range and have unrealistic expectations.

Much of Shopify's strategy here, in developing a developer ecosystem, is to have developers effectively do technical support for its customer for free. I've troubleshooted (more times than I can count) theme, general platform, and other app issues. A while ago when Shopify was down after a merchant installed my app complained that I broke their Shopify store when in fact the entire Shopify platform was having a hiccup.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a "feature"? Not to discount the churn numbers - but being able to quickly and at low cost set up a high quality commerce site where folks don't have to be heavily invested seems like they're providing the service as intended. I enjoy the Shopify experience from the Vendors that use it and do stick around.

I suppose as a user you could definitely look at it that way. As an investor I'd be worried about losing their churned-out merchants to other platforms like Etsy and Woocommerce and Weebly and about ten other platforms hacking away at their knees. To be fair to Shopify though, I think they know they've already lost the battle for the little merchants and have fixated on other things.

I think you'll find the churn is mostly small businesses that go nowhere, not losses to other platforms.

Magento is probably the biggest loser to Shopify after making v.2 impossible for smaller merchants to maintain so they're moving their v.1 stores to Shopify instead. Shopify is also way simpler for your work-from-home new mum than setting up a WooCommerce store.

The only reasons to go to WooCommerce would be support for a specific payment gateway or content management which Shopify is still lacking. Maybe ongoing fees for some functionality that is standard in WooCommerce or can be had for a small one-off fee is a turn-off for some as well.

Coming from a background building stores in Magento 1 & 2, WooCommerce, ZenCart/OpenCart and now wrapping up a fairly complex Shopify integration I'm warming to it.

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#79
post #69

As someone who worked developing Shopify apps (NOT a Shopifyt employee to be clear), I can attest to the incredibly high percentage of shops that evaporate from the platform on a nonstop basis. Something like 80% of the people that would install our apps in their shops would be gone or in limbo after a couple months. (Not an app uninstall, their shops actually no longer existed.) The charts we see from Shopify like t…

A huge part of Shopify's revenue comes from Shopify Plus. We're also fellow app developers[1], and we've noticed that if you offer value to their higher end businesses, you'll be running at churn rates that are much lower than what you'd think you'd get with the "average Shopify merchant". Something like 70% of small businesses fail[2], so it's not surprising you'll see a large amount of churn if your audience is the…

Also a Shopify app developer here[1]. My software targets established online sellers and my churn is considered low.

[1] https://www.trunkinventory.com

Re: Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon

#80
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third-party sellers at Amazon don't have robots, and I suppose they fulfill a considerable amount of the volume.

Sure they do, Amazon fulfillment is a giant business. https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.h...

but it's not a Trump business
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