[ethbr0]

The Shopify features you outlined are the "how", but not the "why". As in, why would I buy from a Shopify store, if an equivalent product were offered by a bundler?

1,000,000 stores using Shopify are effectively the same as 1,000,000 products on Amazon, only less convenient.

I think the overall takeaway is that trust doesn't scale to Amazon-now-size: i.e. one of the biggest retail companies on the planet.

What it did scale to (and very well) was Amazon-1995-2010-size (eg Etsy or eBay), and there's a lot of size between D2C and those variants of Amazon.

I'm open for convincing, but I don't see a path to "D2C eats the world," when for relatively modest amounts of capital one could create a smaller, right-size Amazon that could bundle and dominate.

[mbesto]

> As in, why would I buy from a Shopify store, if an equivalent product were offered by a bundler?

Simple. I know I'm going to get a genuine product. That's the problem with Amazon, people regularly get cheap imitations.

[ethbr0]

I was under the impression Shopify didn't promise anything about genuine goods to their customers, and were having to deal (haphazardly) with the same fake problems as their larger competitors. [0]

From reading back through their statements over the years it seemed to have shifted from (initial) 'we're a store platform, and take no responsibility for the content of the store' to (now) 'we have [unspecified] teams dedicated to IP infringement and fraudulent stores.'

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/24/i-feel-ch...