[_csoo]

Shopify is just the next closed-source iteration of WordPress and Magento. WordPress has one of the largest platforms and they've taken over (and open-sourced) blogging, content management, learning management systems, and ecommerce. They and Magento are better examples of a platform than Shopify.

In the long-term, "platforms" like Shopify lose because they don't have nearly enough developers. They have ~3000 "apps" listed in their app store: https://apps.shopify.com/browse/all?pricing=all&requirements...

WooCommerce has 285 plugins, and WordPress has 54,000+ plugins. Magento has ~5000 plugins.

It would be cool if Stratechery took a look at free/open source on the platform/aggregator spectrum.

[nickjj]

I think a big difference is Shopify's core product has a bunch of really useful things to help sell things. You don't need plugins or third party apps written by other developers to get a superb selling experience (note: I don't work at Shopify but I used the platform a few years ago and even wrote some custom apps / templates for it).

The benefit is the core product is insanely battle hardened and you can depend on it having a high degree of reliability (both from an up-time and code quality level).

Where as with WP, are you really going to cobble together a bunch of plugins written by anyone and then hope everything works? Maybe, but you'll also have to host it yourself too and now suddenly you're on the hook for site reliability -- unless you use a closed source WP hosting platform and now you're in the same boat as Shopify except it's worse because you have no idea what you're getting when it comes to reliability.

I think Shopify is a good example of how a niched down product can be successful. If you want to sell things, you want a platform designed to sell things. Not a generic CMS where you need to assemble a custom solution. This is especially true if you're not technical.

[unixhero]

You didn't mention Magneto, Prestashop ir WooCommerce in your comment.

[collinmanderson]

Shopify's core product is much better than Magneto and WooCommerce. (I don't have experience with Prestashop.)

Example: Shopify sends abandoned cart emails by default. With Magento you can't even see what items are in carts in the core product.

[thirdsun]

I used all of them and it’s really no comparison. Shopify is leagues ahead of them - for non-tech-savvy users and developers alike in my opinion.

[jasonlotito]

My wife had an Etsy store before moving to Shopify. I'm a developer, and we still moved to Shopify. We went with Shopify because out of the box, it had everything you needed, even things you don't think you need. ecommerce is more than just accepting payments and a shopping cart. Shopify is, in effect, a curated experience. Other options required a lot of effort to setup to run at least as easily as Shopify was out of the box.

And here is the thing you forget: no one with a store is interested in dealing with setting up and managing a web store. They are busy with their business. The web store is the side effect of that. SEO, taxes, shipping management, etc? All that needs to come out of the box, or a no brainer.

54,000 plugins doesn't help with that. With Shopify, we only installed a few, and they did exactly what we wanted them to.

So, if you are going to compare open-source options with Shopify, you need to actually compare it with a turn-key solution.

i.e. Where do I create a woocommerce store that is setup correctly from the beginning, which includes updates, SEO, shipping, taxes, payouts, billing, and everything else Shopify provides out the gate.

Because I'm busy running a business, and that business isn't running a web site.

[thirdsun]

Yes, and even if want to get your hands dirty or need custom features they offer extensive developer tools and great documentation - we use their API a lot and it’s a joy to work with.

[pxue]

Here's my hot take (with 2 years of running a #1 trending shopify app + multiple attempt in starting a store)

Shopify DOES NOT help you sell. Period.

Amazon will win in the long run because at the end of the day it's all about if the "platform" can move merchandize or not. Amazon captures top of the funnel all the way down to personalized targeting.

Shopify will never do that. they are just the tool to help you figure out all that yourself. Outsiders / beginners looking in would say Shopify is amazing because the ecosystem and how many "tools" there are to help you sell. but it's all load of horsesh*t. The merchant ultimately is the one responsible to run the ad campaigns, find the customers, run promotional pricing on BFCM.

[drchiu]

I echo your sentiment as well (also from a background of having ran a Shopify app with thousands of installs).

There's a lot of misconception of how much hard work it is amongst beginner Shopify merchants in order to generate sufficient traffic. Amazon, at the very least, provides an audience -- which solves a very major problem for any business (to get traffic).

There's a lot of success stories running on Shopify, but these companies would have pretty done well creating their own custom solution.

At the end of the day, it's a piece of software (ie. shovel) to sell to people who want to try and make money online (ie. the gold rush).

[quickthrower2]

Why not do both? Amazon gets you your first orders. You ship with a note saying visit mystore.com for the full range, and sign up for discounts at mystore.com/discounts.

[ganeshkrishnan]

This would get you quickly banned on Amazon.

[quickthrower2]

Really. I’m not a seller so I didn’t know. But that’s almost serfdom.

[gruez]

How is not being able to freeload off a platform for free advertising even close to serfdom?

[owenwil]

And this is the difference between building a brand and trying your fate blindly to a platform's whims. One of these is impossibly hard, but if you win, you control your destiny. The other means your business dies when someone over there decides the "pivot to video" is over, as we have seen repeatedly with Facebook. I know I wouldn't want to be in the latter boat.

[sushilewis]

That's a great take that others miss. Marketing is 100X harder than setting up a platform.

[MuffinFlavored]

Devil's advocate: go make a listing on Amazon for a product that already has other competitors selling. How are you going to "market" yours to the top?

[rchaud]

The answer is to pay even more money to Amazon to place yourself as a "sponsored" listing that goes right to the top of search results. Partly why Amazon is rapidly becoming a dumpster fire of an e-shop. It looks more like the search results page on Google these days.

[moate]

Exactly why having a simple to set up platform is valuable. It allows you to focus on the things that create the product or visibility of the product.

[hammock]

So it's the difference between setting up a store (Shopify) and selling to a store (Amazon)

[iamnothere]

The problem for sellers on Amazon is that buyers there have little loyalty, and it is easy for people to come in and cut their customers out from under them with lower-priced clone products. Shopify at least gives you the opportunity to create some kind of customer loyalty to the merchant brand, and with the right kind of marketing you can get repeat business depending on what you sell.

I agree that most small companies aren't up to the challenge of managing an online business. The 3PL integration will help a little bit, and I imagine that Shopify will continue to chip away at the problem by integrating other services.

[r00fus]

Is there a good example of someone being successful doing both?

Seems like if Shopify is a way to create your own venue, and Amazon is a venue in-and-of itself, there might be a case for doing both.

[robryan]

Amazon while solving a lot of problems comes with massive risks for a business, Amazon can and will send you out of business on a whim. You will be trying to convince lowly paid people in India going down a checklist that you should be allowed back on the platform.

[enobrev]

At varying degrees of "success", I know a couple sellers who make a great living by combining multiple platforms; Selling on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and their own custom site (on Shopify and other customizable platforms).

[loceng]

I have a theory Shopify does sell - however only from their own stores and with access to the data goldmine deciding what to sell, who to target in advertising, etc.

[MuffinFlavored]

I don't think "number of plugins" is a good comparison metric here.

The Shopify app store is regulated + tested by Shopify before getting the approval to go live.

WordPress plugins are the wild west, many of them incompatible with each other.

[owenwil]

Wait until you see what Magento plugins are like

[omouse]

Regulated meaning a tightly controlled and closed "market"?

Number of plugins isn't the greatest metric but it's a good leading indicator. It's kinda hard to estimate how many merchants and customers and volume of transactions have been processed when they aren't being tracked by a central entity ;)

[Miss_Vee22]

What was meant was moderation. Shopify works with developers to ensure the plugin's code will be compatible/quality more similar to how Apple does moderation.

[wc91]

If only Shopify was some sort of publicly traded company that publicly reported these numbers. If only...

[asaph]

It is publicly traded on the NYSE. Ticker symbol: SHOP.

[skinnymuch]

The OP was being sarcastic.

[hw]

The WordPress plugin ecosystem is so fragmented, and most of the 54,000+ plugins are really low quality and good luck getting support for them when something breaks.

Magento/Magento2 is dying, if not dead. I work in the e-commerce space and have seen more businesses move off Magento into Shopify, or BigCommerce.

Shopify's app store has only ~3000 apps for a reason - Most of the functionality of a core shopping / merchant experience is already built into Shopify so you don't need to go through 50,000 apps to do what you need to do to sell. The apps on the Shopify app store also go through a review process that ensures the quality of the apps.

[rafaelm]

To add to this, Shopify is the equivalent of Medium for blogging vs WordPress.

Sure, it's easy to get started, but once you're locked into their platform and you need a more custom solution, it's going to be hard to move out of it.

[rchaud]

That analogy only works partially. Medium has a more attractive front-end than Wordpress, as does Shopify vs. WordPress/WooCommerce.

But people post on Medium primarily for visibility. Same with people who sell via Amazon; that's where the people are. In that respect, Shopify is more like Wordpress; as the article says, you can't buy anything on shopify.com, just like you can't find any content to read on Wordpress.com

[cleong]

It's funny as a previous dev that worked with Magento, they said that Shopify did not pose any threat to their business. But I think it's getting clear now that Magneto/Adobe's positioning in the market (enterprise/large-ish medium businesses) is still a good niche but seems like their losing a lot of the SMB customers that made the Magento community what it was.

[j4_hnews]

WordPress (Automattic) acquired WooCommerce a few years ago.

Marketshare: https://trends.builtwith.com/shop

[owenwil]

As someone who was running tech at an e-commerce/hardware startup with $xxM+ in annual online sales, and ran on top of Magento 2, it is an unmitigated disaster that will sink any business that doesn't have endless money to throw at it.

We had great Magento developers working on it and could barely keep it stable under even moderate load. To scale up, if you're a heavily trafficked store, you need to pay a six figure annual license fee, or you can't shard/load balance your database. Without the Enterprise plan, your site can't easily do zero-downtime deploys, and deploys take about 30 minutes of full outages to get out the door. Editing anything took about 36 clicks, which carried the risk of corrupting a language you weren't editing. Deploying a language pack requires an outage. Deploying new CSS requires an outage. There were ways around this, which we used, but the extensions and ecosystem are so poor that I wouldn't encourage anyone to use them—we ran into one instance where installing an extension would bring the site to it's knees, at random, because the developer had hand-rolled an image-resizer for some reason to build thumbnails.

I'm an infrastructure engineer/developer originally, and I figure, how bad can it be? We'll ignore the snake oil and scale up with good developers and cloud hosting, along with best practices.

I can list how incredibly poorly built Magento 2 is for hours, but I've never seen anything like it. We made it work, but it cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it to "doesn't break" level of stability.

It's outrageous particularly because the entire ecosystem is designed to shunt you toward expensive licensing that requires NDAs to be signed, certified developers to be used, and ever-escalatingly ridiculous hosting fees (at one point, I was quoted a $1500/month virtual machine to properly handle our environment).

Meanwhile, when we wanted to do a flash sale, Magento was so complicated and slow to deal with, we made the call to literally create a second store, using Shopify, to run our limited time sale. Not only did it take maybe 1-2 days to get it set up and working, we ran 1M in sales through it within the first 8 hours of it being online, without any outages, stability issues or anything else, without ever needing to do a payment gateway's time consuming PCI compliance security audit, either. We got paid out within a few days of even first signing up.

I think people underestimate, often, how expensive open source can be, and one red flag, in the case of Magento should be that anyone that isn't a "Magento developer" is terrified of touching it. (I have stories about how hard it is to even develop on your own machine, and how literally all roads lead to their Enterprise plan, with no way out, but that's for another day)

[jonny_eh]

How many plugins does a site need?

[leviathant]

It depends on the complexity of your business, although every Shopify site is going to need a handful of plugins to do the basics. Things like the email signup modal aren't base features, but require a plugin.

If you've got even a moderately complex business, plugins add up pretty quickly, and each Shopify app you add to your site slows down your pageload. When Shopify pitches you, they show you some really great looking sites, but after you've bought in, you find out that they're not only operating with 35 apps (at an additional cost of thousands a month), that some of them are hacky custom workarounds, and even though status.shopify.com is all green lights, the servers these third party apps are running on aren't on the same infrastructure, and you're dealing with dozens of points of failure on black Friday...

But thousands of shops are on the Shopify platform, and the "Just Grow Bro" Sales Lead told me they do B2B and international, so how bad could it be?