[omouse]

some open source people

Hey now, stop with the name-calling :P I work on and use proprietary end to end solutions for ecommerce (but not Shopify).

Woocommerce wins for me because it lowers development costs and costs are lower overall. My perspective is definitely someone who has developed ecommerce sites, not solely as a non-technical user, and for me it's very advantageous to lower costs by using and modifying GPL'd plugins and themes.

I guess Shopify has 4000 employees and enough cash and enough direction to come out of box with a good UX and good defaults and that's good enough for nontechnical users.

[organsnyder]

I'm a technical user, and good UX and good defaults are something I often spend money on.

[larrywright]

I’m a technical user, and if I needed to sell goods online I’d use Shopify. It’s precisely because I’m a technical user: I know all the things you you have to worry about, and I’d rather not. There surely a scale where it makes sense to roll your own e-commerce platform, but it’s substantially higher than people seem to think.

[organsnyder]

Yup. I've taken some MBA classes, and one (in retrospect obvious) thing I latched onto is the idea of opportunity cost: you can never do everything you are capable of doing, and each thing you do comes at the expense of something else. So, focus on doing the things that (depending on your goal) are most fulfilling and/or most profitable.

Amusingly, grasping that concept was a big factor in my decision to put my MBA degree on hold...

[bluGill]

There is one other reason to do things: you cannot trust anyone else to do it. Fullfilling and/or profitable are hopefully the only ones that apply, but sometimes you have to do something because the risk is too high...

[larrywright]

I’m not sure that applies to the Shopify argument here, but maybe you didn’t intend it to.

[bluGill]

Hopefully - for Shopifys sake - it doesn't apply.

An example of how it could apply is if shopify were to "go down" often thus driving your customers to your competitors that roll their own solution that has good uptime.