Interestingly over here in Australia, those who went with Amazon AU left for different reasons; mainly that the platform just doesn't attract much sales volume and the costs were astronomical. Even eBay does better here.
At the company I work for, we operate a fulfillment center for eCommerce sellers and we've been booming lately from businesses choosing to leave the closed ecosystems and marketplaces like Amazon and run their own Shopify, WooCommerce and others while still having a third party handle their fulfillment needs.
I’ve found that Amazon AU fulfils fairly specific niches. But it’s not a one stop shop. If I look around I can get a better deal or faster delivery from somewhere local.
As a consumer, I found Amazon here (AU) ridiculously overpriced. The shipping is fast, so if they have the thing I want and I need it urgently sometimes it's worth it, but generally you'll get it cheaper at the local online stores like Big W/Target/Kmart/JB/GoodGuys/etc, or the small independent stores who run their own websites. Discoverability sucks, and sometimes you spend a couple hours (or even a few nights) searching around all the little local stores buried 5-10 pages down the search results to find what you need, but it's generally worth the effort for the better prices and local support.
Ebay is even worse than Amazon now though. I was an avid Ebay user from when they first came here until not long ago, but in the last year or 2 I find it's just chock full of scams, fake products, lies about shipping (advertised as local stock with 2-5 day shipping, arrives 4 weeks later with postage marks from China), etc etc. I flat out just don't trust anything on Ebay anymore unless it's an actual local individual selling something used and I'm picking it up.
> generally you'll get it cheaper at the local online stores like Big W/Target/Kmart/JB/GoodGuys/etc, or the small independent stores who run their own websites. Discoverability sucks, and sometimes you spend a couple hours (or even a few nights) searching around all the little local stores buried 5-10 pages down the search results to find what you need, but it's generally worth the effort for the better prices and local support.
Room for someone to be a discoverability platform? One stop discoverability, whichsometimes is all Amazon is for a particular transaction.
Find it at IFoundIt, and then directed to the seller's store.
Shopify seems to be working towards exactly this, and recently announced their new Shop app: https://www.shopify.com/shop
It only includes Shopify sellers, and of those only the ones that choose to be listed on Shop, but with the Shop app and their new fulfillment network, I think Shopify is currently best positioned to become a real threat to Amazon.
They're individual websites run by the stores themselves, so you need to find them the old fashioned way by finding the store that sells what you want. I definitely think there's space for "local" directories (eg by country or state maybe) for online stores. Google Shopping and all the big sites that attempt it are an absolute joke, full of SEO gaming and manipulation. An old school Yahoo-list style index of local stores that's searchable would be killer right now.
Source: consumer who buys lots online, almost daily, and would absolutely love to support local (national) stores.
I think the main problem is both Amazon and Google (and all the similar ecosystems) have a vested interest in rigging the results towards personal profits.
I see this more like an open index of local online stores, curated and not using scrapers/bots to index but by stores submitting their URL and search endpoint for meta-search across all their products. Let the user sort the results by price, location, etc.
Obviously there's always going to be people trying to game the system but it would still be better than what we have now, which is us consumers needing to use Google/DDG/etc to scrape through the 99:1 noise:signal ratio of search results these days just to try fluke upon a local online store that has what we want.
Solving this seems like a lay up for Shopify. Some sort of "shopify universe" product that takes products & categorization information and brings it all together would be a huge move forward.
They've just launched an app for that. Shop.app. An aggregator of all Shopify merchants searchable and proximity-aware. Haven't tried it yet though, if it's any good.
On websites specialized on comparison shopping.
I don't know about the US, but when I was in Italy I used to use a lot one of such websites [1].
Think like shopping on Amazon except that you are redirected to the seller's website for details and actually buying the product, no ads, no SEO, and the rating is about the seller, not the product.
On the other side, you no longer have a central entity helping you with issues such as warranty, scams etc, but given the behavior of late of Amazon, I don't think that it is a big deal.
Same thing here in Czech Republic - you go to a comparison website, check the prizes, availability and reviews of both the think your are looking for and the shops selling them. Then you pick a shop and go to their website (in some cases there is also integration for buying directly via the comparison site).
It kinda seem like Amazon has been a bit too successful in some parts of the world, to the point people can't imagine alternative online shopping workflows.
In countries with a functioning market and healthy competition (high number of online stores per capita), there are online store aggregators where you just search for the product you want and it gives you links to all the stores. Sorted by price, rating, etc.
Yeah, it's quite fragile and hacky at the moment. A quick abstract from a portion of an old project. Will probably do this properly this weekend. Filter by region/country is doable.
Give it a test; the short-form URLs shown in each card are also referred in each href, so "website.com/your_prod..." is what's literally provided as the url when you click through.
This is a great search UI but when you click a link the provided URL is cut off. IE search for journals, click a link and you get sent to the following url:
I initially jokingly searched for pizza, but was blown away when I found a ton of great looking frozen pizzas. There seems to be a shortage of chicken breasts in my area right now as well and some of the options here look nice. This app seems very useful to me and I will probably be ordering some items today!
I can say as an employee for a dev agency that has historically specialized in e-commerce, we’ve seen a massive increase in work since this all started. Our clients are all selling more which means they need to scale more and we’re getting paid to make optimizations to balance infrastructure costs due to demand.
Shopify has said they’re serving Black Friday levels of traffic and volume every day since this started and our clientele on their platform supports that data point.
Depending on how the next 6 weeks goes for “opening up” around the world, it will be interesting to see how much of this increased demand sticks around.
As someone who advocates for owning your own data, I think it’s a good thing to move away from these larger platforms when you can. Going from amazon to Shopify is a good step. When you need more customization or data control, WooCommerce is a decent choice given the unlimited flexibility of the platform (though this comes with downsides if you are not aware how to run it in a way that is performant).
The demand won’t remain permanently this high, but a lot of it will remain.
Despite the cultural ubiquity of Amazon, not everyone was getting items delivered for their day to day needs. One barrier is that not everyone got around to creating accounts for online shopping, a barrier that’s been forcibly overcome for basically everyone. The chances of 100% of those people reverting to prior behavior is very, very low.
> Going from amazon to Shopify is a good step. [..] WooCommerce is a decent choice given the unlimited flexibility of the platform
Just took a look at both those sites, and on the consumer side I don't see how these are even remotely comparable: I don't see any way to search for products. They seem geared to creating independent stores that must be linked to from some other location.
> on the consumer side I don't see how these are even remotely comparable
Consumer side isn't relevant here. These are two backend ecommerce platforms. The platform part doesn't extend to anything that consumers know they're interacting with.
Not surprised. Amazon has been completely useless since the pandemic hit the US. Everything I want is out of stock or shipping in weeks. I guess some people must be getting orders though.
It largely depends on what you want and where the items are in their warehouse network. Also depends on item size too it seems. A good amount of items I’m looking at I can still get next day here in Fort Lauderdale, but not everything. I was able to get a USB-C to DisplayPort cable shipping next day for Saturday delivery an hour ago. Yubikeys are also in stock. It is seemingly random since not all small items (but still equally tech-y) are in stock, but I don’t have the big picture look at it I guess.
I disagree with it being useless in the US. Amazon is still how I am largely getting most of my essentials (like groceries) and the occasional non essential right now.
Sure I may have to wait a bit longer to get what I need, but there have only been a few cases where something has been completely out of stock (except for the things that Amazon has publicly said they are no longer selling to consumers and only sending to hospitals, like disinfectant and other medical items)
Like pcpartpicker but for everything else? I'd pay a few bucks for such a service that respects privacy but collecting no user data and has a perfectly level playing field that actively polices shops.
It would be cool if there were some open format and standard URL structure (or a meta link) that points to it so that any online shop can publish a full table of what they have for sale, so aggregators can slurp up all of the data from all known webshops.
There somewhat is - many retailers offer data feeds. The formats and quality vary widely though. Google shopping has a feed format that many retailers implement.
The subscription fee should be enough to hire enough staff to design fraud resistant systems and police the rest of the network with bounties for whistle blowers and PoCs. The server cost for essentially a forum, even with trillions of page views a month, is nothing compared to tens of millions of paying subscribers and the requisite army of business moderators.
No; I mean a specific metadata format for online stores to publish machine readable (so json probably) lists of what they have for sale, and prices, and product page links, sort of like rss but for shopping.
If finding the product or reviews of the product are the problem then just search Amazon, and order from your favourite alternative store.
Knowing if some random store is safe is more of an issue I suppose. Usually I find it pretty easy to tell and avoid them. Trustpilot (and a couple of similar services i forget) seem to be pretty reliable, in Europe at least.
Not familiar with Shopify, is it obvious if a store is using their platform? I guess if they do some due diligence on the businesses they host that provides a basic level of safety.
There are tons of things for sale on the web (or even just eBay or Etsy) that are never listed on Amazon.
Also, I don’t have a favorite alternative store, nor do I know of very many alternatives in the first place. An aggregator would be helpful, or even an index.
> Once the decision has been made to move their products off of Amazon [...]
There is another valid decision: Diversify your channels and sell on multiple platforms. This way, you're not completely dependent on Amazon anymore, but still present on the biggest eCommerce marketplace.
Sell on your own shop (and, if you do marketing, direct it there) but also on Amazon, eBay and probably other marketplaces that work well for your niche.
This can be done with Shopify and probably most of the other solutions listed in the post as well.
Disclaimer: I work for commercetools, an API-first eCommerce platform.
In the US I've found Amazon is so slow to ship something that it's led me to buy the product directly from the company or from eBay. I actually will continue this even if Amazon shipping times returns to normal. The only benefit of Amazon is discoverability, at this point. I ordered some vitamins that said would arrive from Amazon in a month but shipped the same day I ordered them directly from the company.
Regardless of shipping speed, I'm concerned about quality and co-mingling with knock-offs. Especially with something medical like vitamins. But everything else too.
We checked seller growth on competing marketplaces like eBay, Walmart, Google Shopping, etc. and found it to be the opposite - none are seeing accelerated seller growth.
There is only a single chart for Walmart. All other platforms are discussed with no numbers and no sources beyond "our ecommerce analysis platform" and the vague description of analyzing "millions of data points".
Not having heard of this company, I can only take their analysis with the same grain of salt that I would with other 'market research' firms that don't have access to actual transaction data or don't conduct surveys with representative samples of sellers.
FWIW, when I was a tech reporter at Inc. I found Marketplace Pulse helpful in covering ecommerce, and their data trends roughly matched what I heard from merchants directly.
We don't have data on this, but Shopify is not growing because of Amazon sellers opening up Shopify stores. The sets of businesses on Shopify vs Amazon are largely distinct. For example, most Amazon sellers are resellers of brand products; few of these are shifting to sell though their own e-commerce website.
As a big seller, yes that's the goal. Off all platforms and own your own stack. Be able to email retarget call text and shopify and click funnels allow this. None of these should be growing as they all are closed in a sense. Your own store and 3pl is the growth trend and for good reasons.
The article mentions BigCommerce and WooCommerce as alternatives to Shopify.
I was always wondering what the selling point of this alternatives are - isn't this a winner takes all market? Shopify has the biggest app-store and its most convient to work with since most information is available to people getting startedn - or do I miss something?
Well for WooCommerce, the big selling point is likely that it can be self hosted; you don't have to use their hosting platform if you don't want to (and as far as I know, they don't directly offer one anyway, WordPress.com/Automattic does).
That's its own advantage for some people. It means you can sell in countries the US has trade restrictions against, integrate your shop with your WordPress site and modify the source code to your heart's content. Can't really do that with Shopify.
As for the hosted platforms? Eh, I guess like with anything, the market is still big enough for multiple players, even if one of them has a huge percentage of it overall. Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace still manage to do well, even if AWS has more users. GitLab still exists despite GitHub having far more of the market. Etc.
BigCommerce, from what I've heard, offers a lot more out of box, where as you have to accomplish the same thing with apps in Shopify.
WooCommerce, Magento, Spree, etc. are often chosen for customizability, since Shopify doesn't always serve every need (even with apps). And for control over the platform.
I head up customer experience at Re:amaze and we work with merchants on Shopify, Bigcommerce, and WooCommerce. These alternatives all have something to offer that is unique to a particular merchant's business preference. Shopify is much easier to set up and offers more direct access to marketplaces. Bigcommerce is a bit more powerful for high volume, high GMV businesses looking for headless commerce. WooCommerce is, of course, low cost and works with WordPress and that's a huge plus for many merchants. These are very basic differences but merchants should look at every platform to see which one suits them best.
As a consumer, Shopify just doesn't cut it because of discoverability.
On Amazon, there's on search bar on top where I can search thousands of sellers.
For Shopify, there's just hundreds (thousands?) of smaller shops with no centralised search. Many products I want might be there, but they're not easy to find.
(Disclaimer: Amazon is unaffected in my region and continues to deliver all products as usual, so I quite biased)
10 years ago or so there was a YC company Storenvy that tried to do be similar to Shopify but with a shared cart and marketplace search across all their stores. It was suppose to be like an online mall for independent sellers I believe.
> As a consumer, Shopify just doesn't cut it because of discoverability.
Fair point, but it's not that hard to do a Google search after an Amazon search. I usually check Amazon first, and then the manufacturer's website to see if they link to the Amazon storefront. If not, I jump to a 3rd party reseller.
For me, it doesn't matter whether or not a specialty storefront is a Shopify one. I would pay a premium for that extra trust that I'm getting an authentic item. For instance, I buy my fountain pens from Goulet Pens [1] which is Shopify but you would never know it. I've tried buying fountain pens and consumables off Amazon but have received enough fakes to drive me toward specialty storefronts.
But for dish soap and other stuff that are not worth counterfeiting, sure, I get them off Amazon. Fulfilled by Amazon is slightly better, but I've still gotten duds.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of these stores were pushed on Amazon FBA sellers that were frustrated with Amazon by Facebook "masterminds" hawking "Shopify Courses". These stores will see zero sales or will be forced to purchase so much in Facebook ads that the margins are drilled into negative territory. What I do has been the opposite. I run niche sites for products not selling on Amazon and lately have moved into selling on Amazon MFN. Note to FBA sellers, just do MF and you'll be fine.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadAt the company I work for, we operate a fulfillment center for eCommerce sellers and we've been booming lately from businesses choosing to leave the closed ecosystems and marketplaces like Amazon and run their own Shopify, WooCommerce and others while still having a third party handle their fulfillment needs.
Ebay is even worse than Amazon now though. I was an avid Ebay user from when they first came here until not long ago, but in the last year or 2 I find it's just chock full of scams, fake products, lies about shipping (advertised as local stock with 2-5 day shipping, arrives 4 weeks later with postage marks from China), etc etc. I flat out just don't trust anything on Ebay anymore unless it's an actual local individual selling something used and I'm picking it up.
We also see that issue sometimes. I hope you ruthlessly leave negative feedback for those sellers, at least.
Room for someone to be a discoverability platform? One stop discoverability, whichsometimes is all Amazon is for a particular transaction.
Find it at IFoundIt, and then directed to the seller's store.
It only includes Shopify sellers, and of those only the ones that choose to be listed on Shop, but with the Shop app and their new fulfillment network, I think Shopify is currently best positioned to become a real threat to Amazon.
Source: consumer who buys lots online, almost daily, and would absolutely love to support local (national) stores.
(Though, of course, the team behind the alternative might be better at resisting the gaming? Google, the company, isn't magic.)
I see this more like an open index of local online stores, curated and not using scrapers/bots to index but by stores submitting their URL and search endpoint for meta-search across all their products. Let the user sort the results by price, location, etc.
Obviously there's always going to be people trying to game the system but it would still be better than what we have now, which is us consumers needing to use Google/DDG/etc to scrape through the 99:1 noise:signal ratio of search results these days just to try fluke upon a local online store that has what we want.
Amazon's interface, without the centralization.
I can use a 34" for Amazon, I'm not gonna switch to comparing products on my phone. Especially given that I'm locked so my computer is always nearby.
On the other side, you no longer have a central entity helping you with issues such as warranty, scams etc, but given the behavior of late of Amazon, I don't think that it is a big deal.
[1] https://www.trovaprezzi.it
The main Czech sites:
https://www.heureka.cz/
https://www.zbozi.cz/
It kinda seem like Amazon has been a bit too successful in some parts of the world, to the point people can't imagine alternative online shopping workflows.
https://geizhals.at/ https://heureka.cz/
I'd also like to filter by region, since I don't want to buy small, cheap items from the other side of the world.
https://www.oberondesign.com/collections/journals...
which the website reports as a 404
Shopify has said they’re serving Black Friday levels of traffic and volume every day since this started and our clientele on their platform supports that data point.
Depending on how the next 6 weeks goes for “opening up” around the world, it will be interesting to see how much of this increased demand sticks around.
As someone who advocates for owning your own data, I think it’s a good thing to move away from these larger platforms when you can. Going from amazon to Shopify is a good step. When you need more customization or data control, WooCommerce is a decent choice given the unlimited flexibility of the platform (though this comes with downsides if you are not aware how to run it in a way that is performant).
Despite the cultural ubiquity of Amazon, not everyone was getting items delivered for their day to day needs. One barrier is that not everyone got around to creating accounts for online shopping, a barrier that’s been forcibly overcome for basically everyone. The chances of 100% of those people reverting to prior behavior is very, very low.
Just took a look at both those sites, and on the consumer side I don't see how these are even remotely comparable: I don't see any way to search for products. They seem geared to creating independent stores that must be linked to from some other location.
Consumer side isn't relevant here. These are two backend ecommerce platforms. The platform part doesn't extend to anything that consumers know they're interacting with.
Its basically back to pre Prime days where stuff would take a week to show up.
I expected them to have a much stronger setup in the US.
Sure I may have to wait a bit longer to get what I need, but there have only been a few cases where something has been completely out of stock (except for the things that Amazon has publicly said they are no longer selling to consumers and only sending to hospitals, like disinfectant and other medical items)
I would love to give Amazon less business, but Google’s results aren’t super helpful a lot of the time either.
The fact that there is not some global “hey i have x for sale” machine readable message bus is sort of crazy to me.
Eg: review fraud, selling stolen items, counterfeits, inventory comingling, inconsistent return policy, warehouse worker/driver treatment, terrible search/discovery, bad ux, etc.
I'd worry about that problem when it's a reality not before.
But they seem to have died out
Knowing if some random store is safe is more of an issue I suppose. Usually I find it pretty easy to tell and avoid them. Trustpilot (and a couple of similar services i forget) seem to be pretty reliable, in Europe at least.
Not familiar with Shopify, is it obvious if a store is using their platform? I guess if they do some due diligence on the businesses they host that provides a basic level of safety.
Also, I don’t have a favorite alternative store, nor do I know of very many alternatives in the first place. An aggregator would be helpful, or even an index.
There is another valid decision: Diversify your channels and sell on multiple platforms. This way, you're not completely dependent on Amazon anymore, but still present on the biggest eCommerce marketplace.
Sell on your own shop (and, if you do marketing, direct it there) but also on Amazon, eBay and probably other marketplaces that work well for your niche.
This can be done with Shopify and probably most of the other solutions listed in the post as well.
Disclaimer: I work for commercetools, an API-first eCommerce platform.
Report here https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/sellers-are-not-di...
Not having heard of this company, I can only take their analysis with the same grain of salt that I would with other 'market research' firms that don't have access to actual transaction data or don't conduct surveys with representative samples of sellers.
That's its own advantage for some people. It means you can sell in countries the US has trade restrictions against, integrate your shop with your WordPress site and modify the source code to your heart's content. Can't really do that with Shopify.
As for the hosted platforms? Eh, I guess like with anything, the market is still big enough for multiple players, even if one of them has a huge percentage of it overall. Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace still manage to do well, even if AWS has more users. GitLab still exists despite GitHub having far more of the market. Etc.
WooCommerce, Magento, Spree, etc. are often chosen for customizability, since Shopify doesn't always serve every need (even with apps). And for control over the platform.
On Amazon, there's on search bar on top where I can search thousands of sellers.
For Shopify, there's just hundreds (thousands?) of smaller shops with no centralised search. Many products I want might be there, but they're not easy to find.
(Disclaimer: Amazon is unaffected in my region and continues to deliver all products as usual, so I quite biased)
Fair point, but it's not that hard to do a Google search after an Amazon search. I usually check Amazon first, and then the manufacturer's website to see if they link to the Amazon storefront. If not, I jump to a 3rd party reseller.
For me, it doesn't matter whether or not a specialty storefront is a Shopify one. I would pay a premium for that extra trust that I'm getting an authentic item. For instance, I buy my fountain pens from Goulet Pens [1] which is Shopify but you would never know it. I've tried buying fountain pens and consumables off Amazon but have received enough fakes to drive me toward specialty storefronts.
But for dish soap and other stuff that are not worth counterfeiting, sure, I get them off Amazon. Fulfilled by Amazon is slightly better, but I've still gotten duds.
I just hate wasting money on counterfeits.
[1] https://www.gouletpens.com/
A google search is usually dominated by products that don't.
Partly C19 related, but I was moving away from them in the before-times, as well.