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.
In Canada, yes - but only because of our awful CBSA, the absurdly low de minimus exception in NAFTA, and the fact that the Canadian retail sector is fat and uncompetitive (and yet Shopify is Canadian??!)
Amazon is the only online retailer that’s figured out shipping and the CBSA here. Everyone else is awful. Walmart online ordering is awful. Home Depot is awful. What’s left of toys r us is awful. Canadian Tire online is so witheringly, eye-watering awful that it turned me off of even going to the store.
Walmart, Costco, The Bay all did more than a billion in revenue for 2019. Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Home Depot had more than 500 million and less than a billion.
They wouldn't be doing these numbers if the state of e-commerce was as "eye-watering awful" as you make it out to be.
These numbers are for the Canadian market which ended with about 40 billion in total "e-commerce" sales for 2019.
Online? Those are all great retailers in-store. But online? That’s their online revenue? I doubt it.
Home Depot advertises 2 day shipping but then waits a week before actually starting the clock on their shipping. At least here in Canada. Walmart is the same.
Let me tell you about ordering from Canadian tire online. I did this once. I chose in-store pickup. When I got to the service desk (which actually had an “online pickup” sign on it), and asked for my order, the staff looked at me like I was from Mars. And this was a showcase-store on Grandview here in Vancouver - not some backwater CDN tire off in Moose Jaw. Then they discovered that actually, they don’t have that item. The website said my order was ready to pick up, but they didn’t have it set aside and they didn’t even stock it and had no idea how this “online pickup” worked. So I asked for a refund. And they couldn’t do it! It’s a separate company and they didn’t even have my order in their system to be able to refund me! I asked them what I was supposed to do at that point, and the store manager (of the largest CDN tire store in vancouver) actually advised me to dispute the charge on my credit card and get the charge reversed!
Yes, that was their online sales revenue in 2019, unless you think giants like Wal Mart (with nearly 400 supercenter stores in Canada) and Costco are doing only 1 billion in brick and mortar sales.
These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.
Your Canadian Tire anecdote sounds unbelievable unless it was many years ago.
Canadian Tire is one of the few Canadian stores in 2020 where can check store stock/inventory online down to the aisle of the store. They had already started implementing pickup lockers in their store before covid.
I've placed a few online orders with them and have never had any issues (including in store pickup).
FYI, they did close to $600 million in e-commerce sales in 2019.
Walmart, Loblaws, etc process same day grocery pickup online (and they did this before the pandemic).
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
I tried to use Canadian tire for I store pickup and it was the most awful thing - “ready next day” and after 5 days I had to go into a store to cancel my order, then order it on amazon for 5% more and it arrived the next day < 24 hours later. I will never attempt it again.
These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.
That’s kind of my whole point - Canada is different. I read all sorts of accounts from Americans about how e-commerce and online retail in the US has matured and you can reliably order goods from lots of big retailers online and expect to get your goods on a predictable date. And that just hasn’t happened in Canada yet. Online retail here is still comprehensively awful. Amazon is the only online option that delivers predictably and on time.
Just within the last two years I’ve ordered from both Walmart and Home Depot and both of them have sat on my order for 2 weeks before actually shipping it. I’ve had Home Depots delivery courier actually throw a box of light bulbs across my yard onto my concrete steps. And yes, that CDN tire incident was about 2 years ago. IKEA wants $20 shipping to send me a box of screws. The only bright spot in any of this is grocery delivery as you point out. But even then, Save-on’s payment processor has glitched my orders on two occasions.
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
It’s still about 10 years behind the US. I still see too many retailers who are basically charging what their US equivalents are + the shipping cost difference to traverse the CBSA moat. The big retailers here can’t get it together and the small retailers are still just arbitraging Canada’s weird retail import tariffs. Super high shipping costs, bungled and lost orders, and unpredictable and late delivery is still the norm outside Amazon, or at least it was in 2019. Hard to say now with c19.
Amazon.ca and Amazon.com accounted for about 10% of all e-commerce sales in Canada for 2019.
I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"
Link I found for 2018 e-commerce net sales in Canada [0] has amazon and amazon.ca combined for 4.7b, costco at 1b, walmart 0.9, apple 0.79, the bay 0.47 etc.
So amazon eclipses the other other 7 competitors all on its own.
Most of my packages from Amazon will have just one item in it but when I go to a store, like walmart, I will more often than not have a cart of multiple items I am buying.
I am not saying I represent everyone, but rather, it is hard to compare the two without knowing more data.
IIRC, Amazon's total revenue is less than 300 billion while Walmarts is over 500 billion.
Only anecdotal but Amazon has to deliver most goods, Walmart and other physical retailers can provide pickup services for online purchases (which I prefer for some goods).
Or quality, or getting what you actually paid for, or not supporting a wanna-be trillionare technocrat that would rather satisfy his fantasy to colonize mars than treat his warehouse workers humanely or help his neighbors here on earth in general.
You're right that Walmart is massive but Amazon is the biggest ecommerce player in the US and it's not even close. 38% Amazon to next closest Walmart at 5.8% [1]. Pre-COVID Amazon was about 44%.
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.
I hope shopify understands the extremely long history of how walmart has dealt with their corporate partners in the past. Walmart typically extends a friendly hug and then slowly squeezes their corporate partners to death. They had better be ready to unravel the relationship at any sign of trouble and be working on a parallel plan to replace walmart. It seems like an unnecessary shorcut that may backfire.
It used to be a popular app called Arrive for automatically tracking packages by parsing tracking numbers from connected email accounts. Arrive was also the branding for shipping updates by check in Shopify Checkout on all Shopify based eCommerce sites.
A few months ago Shopify:
1. Rebranded the app as "Shop"
2. Rebranded every Shopify site's checkout to "Shop Pay."
3. Began forcing users on Shopify based sites to create a "Shop" account at checkout
4. Changed the Arrive SMS shipping updates feature to text you an app store link for the Shop App (which you already have an account for now)
5. Integrated every item from every Shopify based eCommerce site with the Shop App for direct purchase, using the universal Shop account you just created.
So they took an already popular app with high engagement, forced people to make accounts for it, used dark UX patterns to get millions to text themselves a download link.
In a matter of months they went from being one of the largest eCommerce platforms for independent retailers to being a one-stop "shop" for every eCommerce site that used them, with millions of daily active users.
Thanks. I just downloaded it without going through a previous Shopify checkout workflow and it asks you to add a 'store' with no prompting or list of 'popular stores'. Just a search box.
It badly needs a prominent browse feature if it wants to take on Amazon. Or maybe I just missed something in my brief tour.
You might want to check out the Honey app, which actually lets you search for items across 100s of stores. Plus gives ‘gold’ bonuses on top of the coupon testing it does
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 think the Shop app isn't all that important actually. Or do people really seek out Shopify stores in particular? That seems ridiculous to me.
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 transform every single brick-and-mortar shop using that POS software into a fulfillment center. It would create abasically global dropshipping network. Withou any real fix costs, while Amazon is building fulfillment centers by the dozens.
Amazon could have done so, but they didn't. Shopify can do so building upon there Webshop and POS environment. And they seem to do.
I seek out places where I'm not going to have to reenter my payment information and/or roll the dice on a new customer-service UI. At the moment that means Amazon, Ebay or Etsy. If Shopify are offering some equivalent experience then I'm certainly interested.
I do though. I tried to place an order on an online service providers website to get some work done that I couldn't do on my own with my work laptop. They used shopify to process all payments and my order got denied. Not by the provider, not by my bank. But by shopify. I got a hold of one of the companies cs staff who looked into it and told me I was sol. Shopify had flagged my transaction as fraudulent and there's nothing he could do. Calling my bank didn't help, they didn't see the transaction as suspicious and would have authorized the transfer. Ultimately I gave up and will have a vile taste in the back of my mouth whenever I hear of shopify. The company I tried to patronize lost a customer, and shopify gets free bad press from me.
So, while shopify doesn't need discovery or awareness among customers, shopify can't afford to get bad press without decent consumer ad spend else their actual customers may jump ship to avoid being tainted by their brand.
If shopify fubars this deal with walmart that could start a snowball.
You can do it on Walmart. In fact, I was just about to post that this announcement is a negative for me. I have such a hard time shopping on Amazon these days and tend to try Walmart first but always select Walmart.com from the retailer filter. I don't want to see a bunch of random junk that I have no desire to purchase.
Having to do this is why Walmart is down my list of places I shop online. I'm not looking for third party sellers when I'm looking for a trusted company to buy from.
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.
I just bought from Newegg for the first time in probably a decade and was surprised to see third-party sellers. I went there specifically because I remembered them being reputable, but came away with a different feeling entirely.
Shopify clearly announced its intentions when it went ahead with Google Cloud couple years back and the bets placed are lining up pretty nicely with recent partnerships with Facebook and now Walmart. Although it also begs the question if Walmart's discontinuance of Jet.com might have prompted this deal? [1]
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 bullet points about how Shopify is really knocking it out of the park. Including the "Facebook deal".
Actually the Facebook deal is FB pulling the cart & payments features into their FB & Instagram apps. So, effectively killing Shopify web store use. Apparently FB is doing something special for Shopify so that Shopify can charge 2% on top of FB's 5% fee. But sellers can also just make their shops directly on FB and skip the 2% Shopify surcharge.
I would have expected fellow programmers to understand a bit of math & show some constraint with bubble valuation stocks!
I think healthy skepticism is in order, but for now the markets have spoken. We'll have to wait for future earning reports to see what effect this has.
This. I simply don’t get the hype behind Shopify. They’re not making money even this year. That’s saying a lot about the business model which is why they are forced to show “fluff” top line growth through these deals. The problem Shopify solves in the e-commerce space is really trivial. If anything, the real gem of this decade is Stripe.
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.
The idea behind it is "headless commerce" -- a shop owner can operate single backend while diversifying the front-end channels from which customers are able to transact (marketplace, webshop, third-party, mobile app). It's a value-add service that all ecommerce sites will eventually move toward to retain customers.
With higher transaction volumes, provided customer data is collected and passed through, the shopkeeper can now access analytics for multi-channel targeting, marketing etc. Shopify can then sell all kinds of value-added services based on this data.
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.
It’s really Instagram right? I want to say something like 95% of small shops selling under Shopify market under Instagram. It’s just that Facebook never took e-commerce seriously enough. If they spent _some_ capital in more useful endeavors oppose to Zuckerberg’s flavor of the year projects such as Libra, FB would be as big as AMZN. They have all the infrastructure already in place to pull it off.
I have to say I'm concerned about Shopify's growing dominance in the e-commerce market. They're selling a 'David vs Goliath' story about taking on Amazon, while at the same time becoming a Goliath themselves.
They are gradually building what seems to be an unassailable lead: preferential card processing rates with Stripe, hard-to-match discounts on shipping with the major logistics companies, warehousing to help retailers fulfil products, an anti-competitive app only for Shopify retailers, an exclusive arrangement with Facebook for Facebook Shops, and now a partnership with Walmart.
Why is that a bad thing? The point of capitalism is that a company will grow if it can grow. We let Amazon do it why not this? Anyways it's better that Amazon has competition minimally, right?
WooCommerce still powers more eCom sites than Shopify. Shopify is definitely growing, but this is a place where OSS is and will continue to be a quality alternative that owns a lot of the market.
Shopify isn't remotely close to joining the big tech club, outside of their comically inflated bubble valuation (trading for 56 times sales).
Let's compare, trailing four quarters.
Amazon, $296b sales, $14b operating income
Apple, $268b sales, $65b operating income
Alphabet, $166b sales, $35b operating income
Microsoft, $138b sales, $52b operating income
Facebook, $73b sales, $26b operating income
Netflix, $21b sales, $3b operating income
Shopify, $1.7b sales, negative $178m operating income
One of these is very much not like the others. Investors think they've found the next Amazon, it's not. It's a slightly better Etsy as a business, and if they're really lucky, in 10 years they might be an eBay. Amazon is only what it is today, thanks to the AWS margins and op profit (not because of its retail business, which has very low growth and terrible margins). There's no evidence of stellar margins hiding in Shopify's business. 14 years, zero profit, and a weak gross profit margin (eBay's gross profit margin is 2x that of Shopify, and was even better in years past; even Etsy has a far better gross profit margin).
Compare Square to Shopify to further amplify the obviousness of the context:
Square has $5.1b in sales (3x larger, trading for 8 times sales), an operating profit for 2019, still growing fast, and is worth about 2/5 what Shopify is.
SHOP's valuation is obviously lunacy, which is quite common in this market at the moment (the Dave Portnoy market). See: Nikola or most any cloud company. It'll end in tears or a decade-long stagnation in the stock, there are no other possibilities. How long will it take SHOP to generate a $3b annual profit? That's the future stagnation clue, their market cap represents a decade or more of returns pulled forward (if everything goes right for them). The only thing qualifying SHOP for consideration among big tech, is their market cap.
If we were going to spread the insanity around more evenly, ETSY, adjusting for its slower growth rate relative to SHOP, should have a $25-$30 billion market cap. Every investor generation thinks their bubble is the one that is different and is going to last.
Shopify is incredible at marketing themselves, and so far they've been able to churn their way out of the bubbles this creates, but it's going to catch up with them.
I wonder if Shopify is going to help Walmart with warehouse automation as part of this deal. Last year, they purchased 6 River Systems (https://6river.com/), a company very similar to Kiva (Amazon Robotics).
Amazon has a "good" part: high quality goods of known provenance delivered quickly. Consumers love this part. And they have a bad part: random sellers with zero vetting selling garbage from an infinite number of procedurally-generated storefronts (love buying from Cayzzzqq, that's the store for me!). Consumers hate this part. (I ignore the human costs of Amazon's warehouses and look only at consumer perception.)
Walmart sees this and decides: let's double down on the bad part!
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
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.
I opened a Wal-Mart account precisely because I needed to buy a specialty tool from a vendor that was on Amazon but I couldn't purchase because of "reserved for Prime" BS. The same vendor magically had it available via Wally world. Amazon doesn't have everything in house.
I vet the sellers that seem legit but I don't want my financials and contact info lingering in their sketchy backend systems. There are plenty of good businesses out there with poor IT skills where Amazon/Wal-Mart/Shopify can be a trusted middleman.
People that sell used books professionally usually have them listed on amazon and ebay and the inventory is synced periodically. There must be some kind of automated inventory management system that they use, because pricing gets updated periodically also, based on the other available prices seemingly.
I'm buying a lot from third parties, even though I have Amazon Prime.
I don't mind buying books from Amazon, but there's so much counterfeit stuff on Amazon these days that I actually try to buy from either the original vendor or a third-party with a regular supply chain like Target.
I was looking for hand-soap a month ago (when the supply was scarce both online and in B&M stores). Amazon had some from 3rd party sellers but they were listed with very high markups and their authenticity was questionable. So on a whim, I visited the vendor's site (JR Watkins), added some to cart (and they were cheaper than on Amazon!), and the checkout process with Apple Pay (on what was a Shopify backend I believe) was seamless (less than 10s).
I didn't have to create an account (!) or enter my credit card number or address -- Apple Pay handled everything after I scanned my face.
I'm seeing more and more specialty vendors with Shopify store fronts these days, and the experience is so seamless that I'm much more open to buying from Shopify storefronts rather than Amazon, especially it's something of value that could end up being a counterfeit listing on Amazon.
I am not sure why this is getting much attention. Walmart is selective about which merchants they will take and Shopify is estimating only 1.200 will be onboarded by years end. Shopify claims to have 500,000 stores so this penetration is so minuscule its really not worth mentioning. In the same vein, this was all already possible using a couple of third-party Shopify Apps and merchants have already been doing this for years. All I see is PR being created to drive stock price?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadSeemingly 50% of every package sitting on anyone's doorstep has the familiar Amazon branded packing tape surrounding it as well.
They're definitely dominant.
Amazon is the only online retailer that’s figured out shipping and the CBSA here. Everyone else is awful. Walmart online ordering is awful. Home Depot is awful. What’s left of toys r us is awful. Canadian Tire online is so witheringly, eye-watering awful that it turned me off of even going to the store.
Besides amazon, what else is there here?
Walmart, Costco, The Bay all did more than a billion in revenue for 2019. Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Home Depot had more than 500 million and less than a billion.
They wouldn't be doing these numbers if the state of e-commerce was as "eye-watering awful" as you make it out to be.
These numbers are for the Canadian market which ended with about 40 billion in total "e-commerce" sales for 2019.
Home Depot advertises 2 day shipping but then waits a week before actually starting the clock on their shipping. At least here in Canada. Walmart is the same.
Let me tell you about ordering from Canadian tire online. I did this once. I chose in-store pickup. When I got to the service desk (which actually had an “online pickup” sign on it), and asked for my order, the staff looked at me like I was from Mars. And this was a showcase-store on Grandview here in Vancouver - not some backwater CDN tire off in Moose Jaw. Then they discovered that actually, they don’t have that item. The website said my order was ready to pick up, but they didn’t have it set aside and they didn’t even stock it and had no idea how this “online pickup” worked. So I asked for a refund. And they couldn’t do it! It’s a separate company and they didn’t even have my order in their system to be able to refund me! I asked them what I was supposed to do at that point, and the store manager (of the largest CDN tire store in vancouver) actually advised me to dispute the charge on my credit card and get the charge reversed!
That’s eye-wateringly bad.
These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.
Your Canadian Tire anecdote sounds unbelievable unless it was many years ago.
Canadian Tire is one of the few Canadian stores in 2020 where can check store stock/inventory online down to the aisle of the store. They had already started implementing pickup lockers in their store before covid.
I've placed a few online orders with them and have never had any issues (including in store pickup). FYI, they did close to $600 million in e-commerce sales in 2019.
Walmart, Loblaws, etc process same day grocery pickup online (and they did this before the pandemic).
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
That’s kind of my whole point - Canada is different. I read all sorts of accounts from Americans about how e-commerce and online retail in the US has matured and you can reliably order goods from lots of big retailers online and expect to get your goods on a predictable date. And that just hasn’t happened in Canada yet. Online retail here is still comprehensively awful. Amazon is the only online option that delivers predictably and on time.
Just within the last two years I’ve ordered from both Walmart and Home Depot and both of them have sat on my order for 2 weeks before actually shipping it. I’ve had Home Depots delivery courier actually throw a box of light bulbs across my yard onto my concrete steps. And yes, that CDN tire incident was about 2 years ago. IKEA wants $20 shipping to send me a box of screws. The only bright spot in any of this is grocery delivery as you point out. But even then, Save-on’s payment processor has glitched my orders on two occasions.
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
It’s still about 10 years behind the US. I still see too many retailers who are basically charging what their US equivalents are + the shipping cost difference to traverse the CBSA moat. The big retailers here can’t get it together and the small retailers are still just arbitraging Canada’s weird retail import tariffs. Super high shipping costs, bungled and lost orders, and unpredictable and late delivery is still the norm outside Amazon, or at least it was in 2019. Hard to say now with c19.
I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"
Link I found for 2018 e-commerce net sales in Canada [0] has amazon and amazon.ca combined for 4.7b, costco at 1b, walmart 0.9, apple 0.79, the bay 0.47 etc.
So amazon eclipses the other other 7 competitors all on its own.
[0] https://www.statista.com/forecasts/871090/canada-top-online-...
Most of my packages from Amazon will have just one item in it but when I go to a store, like walmart, I will more often than not have a cart of multiple items I am buying.
I am not saying I represent everyone, but rather, it is hard to compare the two without knowing more data.
IIRC, Amazon's total revenue is less than 300 billion while Walmarts is over 500 billion.
[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/walmart-surpasses-ebay-in-...
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.
I think Shopify is in a much better bargaining position than Walmart.
It used to be a popular app called Arrive for automatically tracking packages by parsing tracking numbers from connected email accounts. Arrive was also the branding for shipping updates by check in Shopify Checkout on all Shopify based eCommerce sites.
A few months ago Shopify:
1. Rebranded the app as "Shop"
2. Rebranded every Shopify site's checkout to "Shop Pay."
3. Began forcing users on Shopify based sites to create a "Shop" account at checkout
4. Changed the Arrive SMS shipping updates feature to text you an app store link for the Shop App (which you already have an account for now)
5. Integrated every item from every Shopify based eCommerce site with the Shop App for direct purchase, using the universal Shop account you just created.
So they took an already popular app with high engagement, forced people to make accounts for it, used dark UX patterns to get millions to text themselves a download link.
In a matter of months they went from being one of the largest eCommerce platforms for independent retailers to being a one-stop "shop" for every eCommerce site that used them, with millions of daily active users.
It badly needs a prominent browse feature if it wants to take on Amazon. Or maybe I just missed something in my brief tour.
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 think the Shop app isn't all that important actually. Or do people really seek out Shopify stores in particular? That seems ridiculous to me.
Amazon could have done so, but they didn't. Shopify can do so building upon there Webshop and POS environment. And they seem to do.
That's how thousands of businesses have operated for decades or more.
I do though. I tried to place an order on an online service providers website to get some work done that I couldn't do on my own with my work laptop. They used shopify to process all payments and my order got denied. Not by the provider, not by my bank. But by shopify. I got a hold of one of the companies cs staff who looked into it and told me I was sol. Shopify had flagged my transaction as fraudulent and there's nothing he could do. Calling my bank didn't help, they didn't see the transaction as suspicious and would have authorized the transfer. Ultimately I gave up and will have a vile taste in the back of my mouth whenever I hear of shopify. The company I tried to patronize lost a customer, and shopify gets free bad press from me.
So, while shopify doesn't need discovery or awareness among customers, shopify can't afford to get bad press without decent consumer ad spend else their actual customers may jump ship to avoid being tainted by their brand.
If shopify fubars this deal with walmart that could start a snowball.
Walmart sounds just like Amazon.
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.
So no idea what is happening but makes me think there are lots of sellers shipping from different locations potentially for competing sites.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/walmart-says-it-will-disco...
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 bullet points about how Shopify is really knocking it out of the park. Including the "Facebook deal".
Actually the Facebook deal is FB pulling the cart & payments features into their FB & Instagram apps. So, effectively killing Shopify web store use. Apparently FB is doing something special for Shopify so that Shopify can charge 2% on top of FB's 5% fee. But sellers can also just make their shops directly on FB and skip the 2% Shopify surcharge.
I would have expected fellow programmers to understand a bit of math & show some constraint with bubble valuation stocks!
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.
The idea behind it is "headless commerce" -- a shop owner can operate single backend while diversifying the front-end channels from which customers are able to transact (marketplace, webshop, third-party, mobile app). It's a value-add service that all ecommerce sites will eventually move toward to retain customers.
With higher transaction volumes, provided customer data is collected and passed through, the shopkeeper can now access analytics for multi-channel targeting, marketing etc. Shopify can then sell all kinds of value-added services based on this data.
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.
I have to say I'm concerned about Shopify's growing dominance in the e-commerce market. They're selling a 'David vs Goliath' story about taking on Amazon, while at the same time becoming a Goliath themselves.
They are gradually building what seems to be an unassailable lead: preferential card processing rates with Stripe, hard-to-match discounts on shipping with the major logistics companies, warehousing to help retailers fulfil products, an anti-competitive app only for Shopify retailers, an exclusive arrangement with Facebook for Facebook Shops, and now a partnership with Walmart.
They are rapidly becoming the next FAANG.
Shopify isn't remotely close to joining the big tech club, outside of their comically inflated bubble valuation (trading for 56 times sales).
Let's compare, trailing four quarters.
Amazon, $296b sales, $14b operating income
Apple, $268b sales, $65b operating income
Alphabet, $166b sales, $35b operating income
Microsoft, $138b sales, $52b operating income
Facebook, $73b sales, $26b operating income
Netflix, $21b sales, $3b operating income
Shopify, $1.7b sales, negative $178m operating income
One of these is very much not like the others. Investors think they've found the next Amazon, it's not. It's a slightly better Etsy as a business, and if they're really lucky, in 10 years they might be an eBay. Amazon is only what it is today, thanks to the AWS margins and op profit (not because of its retail business, which has very low growth and terrible margins). There's no evidence of stellar margins hiding in Shopify's business. 14 years, zero profit, and a weak gross profit margin (eBay's gross profit margin is 2x that of Shopify, and was even better in years past; even Etsy has a far better gross profit margin).
Compare Square to Shopify to further amplify the obviousness of the context:
Square has $5.1b in sales (3x larger, trading for 8 times sales), an operating profit for 2019, still growing fast, and is worth about 2/5 what Shopify is.
SHOP's valuation is obviously lunacy, which is quite common in this market at the moment (the Dave Portnoy market). See: Nikola or most any cloud company. It'll end in tears or a decade-long stagnation in the stock, there are no other possibilities. How long will it take SHOP to generate a $3b annual profit? That's the future stagnation clue, their market cap represents a decade or more of returns pulled forward (if everything goes right for them). The only thing qualifying SHOP for consideration among big tech, is their market cap.
If we were going to spread the insanity around more evenly, ETSY, adjusting for its slower growth rate relative to SHOP, should have a $25-$30 billion market cap. Every investor generation thinks their bubble is the one that is different and is going to last.
Also, as for Facebook Shops, I don’t think that’s a good thing for Shopify. It’s a forced marriage, with a divorce planned for future.
what are your needs?
https://xconomy.com/boston/2019/09/10/shopify-buys-6-river-s...
Walmart sees this and decides: let's double down on the bad part!
I hope your experience(s) had neither of those?
I don't mind buying books from Amazon, but there's so much counterfeit stuff on Amazon these days that I actually try to buy from either the original vendor or a third-party with a regular supply chain like Target.
I was looking for hand-soap a month ago (when the supply was scarce both online and in B&M stores). Amazon had some from 3rd party sellers but they were listed with very high markups and their authenticity was questionable. So on a whim, I visited the vendor's site (JR Watkins), added some to cart (and they were cheaper than on Amazon!), and the checkout process with Apple Pay (on what was a Shopify backend I believe) was seamless (less than 10s).
I didn't have to create an account (!) or enter my credit card number or address -- Apple Pay handled everything after I scanned my face.
I'm seeing more and more specialty vendors with Shopify store fronts these days, and the experience is so seamless that I'm much more open to buying from Shopify storefronts rather than Amazon, especially it's something of value that could end up being a counterfeit listing on Amazon.
i built one.