[RickS]

I am plenty technical to do this and it still sucks. We moved to shopify from a plumbed-together solution like that and it's a world of difference.

First, shopify is like $30 for a month. I'm $30 for a few minutes. The cost savings are laughably huge. And shopify's better anyway! Their plugin ecosystem is great, the admin tools are built specifically for merchant admin types (as opposed to boil-the-ocean blog admin UI with merchant UI hacked on top of it), so my cofounder/brother, who handled listing and fulfillment and that sort of thing, had a much easier time with it.

Shopify could literally 10x their price and it would still be a great deal. And this is for a lifestyle-sized biz. few $k/mo in transactions. For anyone doing this "for real", it's a rounding error.

Their plugin and theming is a joy on the dev side as well. Great docs, easy to get a sandbox account, theming in Liquid is a joy for anyone who's done jinja/handlebars/etc, their default themes have beautifully documented CSS.

I would, as the developer, literally pay my own money for shopify to be part of the stack just to abstract all that crap away from me. The time savings for me alone justify it.

[odorousrex]

I wish I had 100 upvotes to give you.

I'm currently converting a homegrown multi-million dollar eccommerce platform to Shopify and it's been a dream. Most of the significant lifting was done in less than 2 weeks.

Their graphql api has just been amazing, not to mention all the other developer services they provide.

OFC, I do feel like I'm coding myself out of a job, as I've spent the last 7 years building and maintaining that system.

[russelh15]

Have you decided which software you'll be using for fulfilling your orders? Or will you be outsourcing fulfillment?

[odorousrex]

In the interim we are using our legacy system. I wrote a connector that uses the Shopify admin api to fetch unfullfilled orders and fulfill them.

Long term we are thinking Ship Station or maybe ZenDesks ecommerce offering.

[russelh15]

O nice. If you're doing a lot of volume (1k+ orders/month) you might want to take a look at ShipHero. You'll begin running into inventory issues with ShipStation at that volume.

Disclaimer: I work for ShipHero.

[lifeisstillgood]

Can you talk more about the home grown multimillion part?

[odorousrex]

Well I'm not in marketing, and I attribute tons of our growth to good marketing - but I was responsible for the development and deployment of our tech stack. Basically rewrote a legacy platform I inherited (.NET 1.0 WebForms yall on a single Windows server with SQL 2003) from scratch. (2 devs and me as lead). Added a headless CMS (they were literally FTPing .ASPX pages up every night to update the home page). Deployed the whole thing with containers on azure and increase site speed and reliability by a few orders of magnitude.

And now I'm switching it all to shopify plus with no regrets. I learned a hell of a lot coding my own ecommerce platform, and would love to work for a company like Shopify.

[joking]

you seem to forget about the credit card rates, which are the 2.9% of your sales. I don't know in other countries, but where I live you can get the same conditions than for a physical pos terminal from a bank with around 1% rate. a 2% of your sales can easily grow to something that you can optimize.

[RickS]

I did almost mention those. Negotiating POS rates is in the realm of much bigger shops than I've run. At the 100k/mo mark, that's $2k/mo, which... I'd honestly still take shopify, but yeah, it starts to be worth asking about.

Shopify is a hair more expensive than some competing processors, but when I last dealt with it, they were in league of paypal, stripe, square, etc, so it wasn't a differentiating factor for us, and I suspect that's true for most businesses of our size.

[rhizome]

Of course it's not perfect and would eventually be re-engineered, but I'd happily pay $3K/mo to make $100K/mo.

[joking]

if you take in account that when selling physical items the selling margins are between 15% and 25%, you are paying 3k to make 15K profits, thats a 20% of your benefits. In much cases those 3k could be the difference between a profitable business and one that isn't profitable.

[robryan]

Yeah, that is the issue we have. Something like Stripe at 2.9% you don't think twice with a high margin SASS product, on 15% margins and enough volume though it makes sense to go through some pain to setup with a cheaper processor.

[JacobDotVI]

This isn't necessarily a fair comparison - card not present transactions have always had a much higher rate than point of sale transactions due to the increased risk of fraud. There's an open-ended question of if new entrants like Apple Pay can bring down those card not present fees thanks to their integration into your apple id, but tbd.

[joking]

at least in europe with 3d secure authentication, it's easy to get rates under 1% for a new business. If you have big volume is easy to go downwards from that.

I get that using stripe or paypal it's easier sometimes, but for woocoomerce and alikes you usually have plugins already developed to use other payment platforms.

[nemothekid]

For 40 hrs/wk at $60/hr, is $10,000/mo.

If Shopify means they hire this guy for a tenth of the time, they save $9000.

They would have to be moving 300k/mo for hiring a full time to even break even.

In any case you can do what everyone else does, bake the fee into your prices and call it a day - it's not like you can compete with Amazon on the low-prices front anyways.

[workinnow]

2.9% is the rate for their $30 a month plan, their $300 plan is 2.4% which leaves you within 1% from most of the cheapest payment processors while getting a ton more 'value' IMO.

[thirdsun]

In europe it’s even 1.8% on their $300 plan.

[woah]

They let you choose among a wide range of processors

[rnotaro]

It`s important to note that they add a 2%/1%/0.5% transaction fee on top of your processor fee with Basic Shopify / Shopify / Advanced Shopify plans, respectively.

[brightball]

I'm always curious to see Shopify compared to something like Square's ecosystem.