We run Shopify across a plurality of domains.
Over the last 12 months, especially with the release of "Shopify Payments" (Stripe Connect) - they have become a lot more opaque, greedy and dangerous for merchants.<p>Anecdota:
- Their "Shopify Payments" onboarding is highly shady. They onboard you _without_ performing KYC. Once you are committed to the platform, they perform KYC. They refuse to perform KYC before moving to their platform.<p>- Once you commit, you can't go back to Stripe - they remove Stripe from the list of providers. In the past, support would reenable it upon request. Now they refuse.<p>- We have a high volume site that migrated to Shopify Payments, after 4 years of Stripe without issue. Two weeks later, they sent an email stating we were not eligible Shopify Payments, refused to let us return to Stripe (would not reactivate it), and held the money collected for three months.<p>- On another store, a competitor issued a trademark infringement email. Shopify pulled all products immediately, without communication - and refused to reinstate, despite letters from our legal team showing proof of capitulation from the accusatory party.<p>The _platform_ is great. It out performs Magento, Presta, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc etc with its interface, product management, raw performance and core feature set.<p>However, it is most definitely the PayPal of the eCommerce world: they can, have, and will happily kill accounts and clients based on their whims.
I found Shopify app store excessively expensive and risky. Most plugins are subscription based with poor support, no guarantee of future updates and just reeks of poor quality. I am not a store owner so I can't comment on how useful some of these plugins are but the whole idea of business critical services (such as a store front) needs rock solid foundation and support, without it I would get extremely nervous.<p>Imagine if I have 8 plugins that I pay anywhere from $10-30 a month, per plugin. That's 8 things that can break when Shopify changes some API related things and now I have 8 <i>different</i> parties that I need to seek support from to get my store up and running. God forbid if the developer ceases to exist and bailed out of Shopify ecosystem. I am getting nervous just thinking about this whole "app store" model for business critical infrastructure.<p>May be I am not well informed in this space, but there are also services that help glue various other services such as IFTTT, and a few others that combine GSuite, Asana, Dropbox, Slack, etc... I can't remember them but I wonder what kind of nightmares I would have to rely on fragmented infrastructure that consists of chained API calls managed by independent companies. Mind you, the middle broker of API also wants the slice of the business so they're going to either charge $/month or worse - ads. Then there is the whole privacy/security aspect. Holycrap what a mess!
This of course is one side of the story. Looking forward to hear the Mailchimps side of things.<p>Edit: here we are <a href="https://mailchimp.com/shopify-statement/" rel="nofollow">https://mailchimp.com/shopify-statement/</a>
So Shopify is mad that Mailchimp isn’t sharing data with them?<p>I’m no fan of mailchimp (for e-commerce customers I recommend Klaviyo) but Shopify+ is hell to work with. I haven’t had as much grief with a platform as I’ve had building e-commerce stores on Shopify (and I come from Magento). For the price of plus, you get practically nothing. Clients ask me incredulously why they don’t have something as basic as Wishlist support or access to custom fields inside their product pages. Shopify’s own sync tool for dealing with multiple stores doesn’t sync much and their answer to the admin hell of managing multiple stores is to give us a single login and a store selector. For everything else well there’s an app for that.<p>Yes there’s an API. Yes you can build apps. But that’s an investment and at that point you might as well build something on Woocommerce or Magento. Yes you have to maintain a server and updates on the other platforms but you’ll need that for Shopify anyway. If you want to roll your own Wishlist app (you’ll want to when you see what’s on offer from the shopify store) you’ll need a server, a database - the architecture that Shopify says you don’t need to begin with.
Shopify's Plus offering is also really shady. If you ever choose to try it out, they will not let you return to your previous payment processing rates (credit-card fees). We had been grandfathered in to their old (good) rates. But after trying Plus they gave us their new (much worse) rate and refused to give us the old ones. And this was after they lied about the rate we'd be getting with Plus. And after they gave us a low teaser rate to try out Plus.
> The data captured on behalf of our merchants belongs to those merchants, it’s as simple as that.<p>No, it doesn't. It's the end users data.<p>> and this isn’t possible when Mailchimp locks in their data<p>Complaints about lock-in from you is pretty rich.<p>> Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants’ online stores and email opt-out preferences.<p>You're intentionally misleading the reader here. This isn't about opt out preferences. That's just a useful excuse.<p>Any idiot can see you're trying to build up a complete picture about user's spanning across stores.<p>This isn't about your customers, this is about you wanting to push mailchimp out.
Well, Mailchimp is starting their own “ecommerce platform” after hiring people from the now defunct LemonStand. How about that for the real reason for pulling them off the Shopify app store? :)
I used to use Shopify about 5 years ago and remember thinking they were one of the good ones (company wise). Good platform, easy to work with API, etc.. I even created a few custom apps for a client's site that ended up doing 100k+ through Shopify's POS hardware in a month.<p>But from all of the comments here it sounds like they've gone down hill. I haven't used Shopify since then mainly because I haven't tried to pick up new work where I manage an ecommerce store for people but is it really that bad now?<p>How many of you are really going to use an alternative solution for an ecommerce site?
as a small wholesale business owner I was shocked that I have to pay $300 a month to Shopify system that lacks a million things and then I need to pay 30-50 dollars a month for each plugin and it was my job to figure out how they will work with each other. I am not even talking about support and where I should get it from after spending around $500/month on the whole 'solution'. Instead of paying $6k per year or close to $20k for 3 years I got my own ecommerce system custom built.
Shopify and all other service providers MUST stop letting people comment announcements like this. No one is adding anything valuable but advertising their own product. This announcement just looks like Quora spams.
Last week was about Apple VS Spotify, now Shopify VS Mailchimp. I just can't understand why big companies can't get along while there is so much money to make or lose.<p>I tend to support opensource apps like Magento or WooCommerce. Shopify is extremely easy but I don't get how they can complain when they actually hold all the ropes of their clients and say something about another services' data collection. What's the logic behind it exactly? Users want to use Mailchimp, and it is not always e-commerce related.
I use MailChimp with my Shopify store and it's pretty irritating to be impacted and have to plan to deal with this. I put quite a few hours into getting everything set up as it is now with our MailChimp followup emails (products left in the shopping cart, etc). From my view, I don't care at all to have my MailChimp account more connected with the Shopify API. Shopify has plenty of data on me why do they need more? And, I don't need or want to control my followup emails from within Shopify. I obviously like MailChimp enough to chose them, independently. So, I smell BS in reading this Shopify post.
Sorry Shopify, I think I buy MailChimp's side of the story more. I wonder what percentage of Shopify stores are just drop shipping fronts. I can see that hurting MailChimp's deliverability.
Off Topic: recommendation for a payment processer for a market place?<p>So this is a market place for virtual goods. Maybe 10K users, with $10-$1000/month/user paying into OUR ACCOUNT, and about 100-1000 users are sellers, pulling in about $10K/month from OUR SHARED ACCOUNT.<p>Our biggest concern is not commission or speed. It is simply not being arbitrarily black listed !!
Very interesting. Our company just announced switching to Shopify from Magento (against my advice). We don’t use Mailchimp but this doesn’t sound good from the Shopify side.<p>And from some of the comments here, given that we have a highly customized Magento site (with deep integration to our ERP system) and 100K+ SKUs, I’m very worried what this will do to our site. I wouldn’t be surprised if our company will be shocked at the how limiting and expensive it will be.
I'm curious what good alternatives to Mailchimp exist? My experience working with them is that they're a solid but outdated option.<p>For example I went to import some contacts today and was surprised that Mailchimp was unable to automatically correct basic syntax errors such as "usergmail.com", "user@gmail" or even "user@gmail.com <FirstName LastName>"<p>The fact that their product management team never thought it was a priority to include such an easy time-saving feature makes me think they have a rather hard-headed culture that is missing the boat on a lot of things. I can see why they would be difficult for Shopify to work with.