Shopify isn't a homogeneous marketplace that is comparable to Amazon.com. It's a SaaS ecommerce platform. I've seen these comparisons made lately and I don't understand it. What am I missing?
For everyone that's trying to compare Shopify to marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, you really can't. They are apples to oranges. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that gives you your own website where you’re required to do your own marketing, SEO, and develop your own customer base. Selling on eBay and Amazon on the other hand gives you the advantage of putting your products in front of millions of customers who are actively window shopping. The former gives you ownership of the customer while the latter doesn’t.
Both types of sales channels have their own value props and are complimentary to each other. Furthermore, even each marketplace attracts their own customer archetypes so they can also be complimentary to each other. This isn’t a binary strategy where you choose to sell on one or the other!
I’m the founder of Trunk[1] which helps online e-commerce stores sync their inventory in real-time across their sales channels. Most of my customers on average sell on least 3 places (e.g. Shopify, eBay, and Amazon).
Congrats to Tobias and his team. He’s come a long way from being a Rails core team member back in the day!
This looks incredibly useful. Real-time inventory sync is a big headache for some of our customers. (We provide a native mobile sales channel for retailers with only a traditional web presence. Think Tapcart (https://tapcart.co/), but not just for Shopify). I'd like to know what your plans are for which platforms to support next, and if you've got ideas for opening up an API at some point as well?
Thanks! The next integrations are looking to be either WooCommerce, QuickBooks Online, or Wix. NetSuite is also a big one but they are super slow in getting back to me. I’d be very interested in learning more about your product and customers, sounds great! The API has been something that’s been requested before but probably not a 2019 initiative. If you guys have an API that I can work with, that'll also work. Either way, let’s get in touch! You can email me at: james@trunkinventory.com
Trunk looks useful... my side business is handmade leather goods (https://coastleather.com) and cross posting between my own website, ebay, etsy and amazon is a pain, so I just don't bother. This has meant that channels other than my website became stale and I shut down the stores.
Do you have plans to include syncing for woocommerce stores?
Yea, we do! WooCommerce is one of our most requested integrations and I’ll be getting to it soon. Trunk doesn’t yet support cross-posting however but this will be a Q4 intiative. Would inventory syncing be enough for you to get value from Trunk at the moment? I’d love to get in touch: james@trunkinventory.com
Well, Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/Etsy all are platforms that let other people sell things. I get your point (and might even agree with you), however if you look at it from the perspective of "I want to sell something... where do I go?", they're competition.
They do discovery, checkout, inventory, fulfillment, etc. It just happens to have a slightly different approach than the others.
Not really the same thing though, Amazon/eBay/Etsy you can browse multiple "stores". Shopify is just a platform so it really isn't that fair. It'd be like including every single Magento powered site to say Magento is the X largest platform.
They do discovery? At Amazon and eBay most purchases come via Amazon's and eBay's search engines. Shopify doesn't have a search engine other than the ones inside individual stores. It's a very different business.
Not really, type shopify.com and let me know if you can buy a pair of shoes. You can't. You go to eBay and you can. Shopify is just the platform and the entire ecosystem supports the amount of transactions.
The seller side is the perspective that matters in this comparison. If you have wares to sell and want to start selling through the internet though a managed platform, amazon, ebay, etsy and shopify are competing options for you.
A main difference is shoppify you do still need to bring your own consumer traffic to your site, others have a captive audience of shoppers already, but will likely cost you more out of each sale because of that.
Both types of sales channels have their own value props and are complimentary to each other. Furthermore, even each marketplace attracts their own customer archetypes so they can also be complimentary to each other. This isn’t a binary strategy where you choose to sell on one or the other!
I’m the founder of Trunk[1] which helps online e-commerce stores sync their inventory in real-time across their sales channels. Most of my customers on average sell on least 3 places (e.g. Shopify, eBay, and Amazon).
Congrats to Tobias and his team. He’s come a long way from being a Rails core team member back in the day!
1. https://trunkinventory.com