Note that they are not the second biggest shopping site by any reasonable metric (sales, visitors, unique shoppers, orders, SKUs, really anything). This article is using market cap:<p>> The company has quickly become the most popular online shopping destination, second only to Amazon, thanks to an astronomical increase of its shares in the past year. So far this year, stock has soared 160% with revenue coming in at $362 million during its last quarter.<p>Shopify has a high stock price is the only take away from this article. It's not an ecommerce destination and is not comparable to Amazon or Ebay.
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?
An article put forward by marketing. Not sure why many HNr's like this kind of article.<p>By no stretch Shopify is bigger than eBay, market cap is a game played by investors and this kind of article are used to boost it. If someone is holding Shopify stocks it will be the best time to sale.<p>Funny enough by this ridiculous metrics SAP's commerce cloud and Adobe's Magento will become the largest shopping site miles and miles ahead of shopify.<p>This kind of articles I believe are paid for to affect the stock prices to move market, I am sure it will result in large stock sales after increase in prices.<p>Shopify has consistently been loss making so it's very hard to see light at the end of tunnel given it is similar to many open source platform and commerce platform. It's just trying to outspend it's way to take over SAP, Adobe and Salesforce commerce offerings, let's see how long it continues.<p>Someone from shopify's marketing might be working to contain critical comments.
Having not checked in on Shopify for a good few years, kudos to Tobias and his team for all they've achieved in growing to the level they have.<p>I still remember using liquid templates back in the early days of Rails as it was a problem no-one else in the space was really running at.<p>I had absolutely no idea they were making that kind of revenue these days. It's nice to see that hard work can still pay off.
I've built some stores for clients with Shopify's Slate[1] tool, which was a better dev experience than I had expected. I was pretty surprised and disappointed to see that they put it in "low maintenance" mode while still in beta. Hope they'll pick it up again soon.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/Shopify/slate" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Shopify/slate</a>
Does it really mean that Shopify is selling more than eBay? There are lots of indie entrepreneurs who open a site with shopify and pay for the Shopify subscription only to discover that they don't have nowhere near the the number of sales or even visitors they hoped.
I have a bunch of old camera gear that I'd like to sell. I've been led to believe that on eBay, I'll very likely get scammed, and the customer support always sides with the scammer.<p>This doesn't concern the massive drop shippers operating 10k transactions per month, as they can easily eat the cost of the occasional scammer. It is very effective deterrent against casual sellers like me, though.<p>Ebay started out as "Yard sales, except on the internet", and nowadays it's more like Ali Express.
They appear to take the environment seriously too, much like Stripe and some others.<p><a href="https://www.shopify.com/about/environment" rel="nofollow">https://www.shopify.com/about/environment</a><p><a href="https://news.shopify.com/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon" rel="nofollow">https://news.shopify.com/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon</a>
eBay Q2 2019 GMV is $22.6 billion whereas Shopify's is $13.8 billion.<p>eBay also owns a classifieds business with around $250 million quarterly revenue which does not originate from GMV due to the nature of classifieds business.
Shopify is not enterprise ready. It’s designed for smaller self-managed stores. We recently looked into the platform to run a few large E-commerce stores. Two of the biggest issues are:<p>1. Payment processing. You’re forced to use their Shopify Payments. There’s no flexibility for managing that via API. Once something goes in there it’s stuck. Our particular requirement entails tokenized card info. And we needed to access the tokenized card for recurring orders. Shopify told us that was impossible. And want us to use one of the handful subscriptions app, which btw, also have no flexibility. We then hired a 3rd party to see if they can extend the cart...nada. So, if you already have an internal recurring/subscription system - trust me, Shopify will not work for your e-commerce platform. Dont waste your time.<p>2. Most of the apps are shady. We spoke with two regarding upsells and cross-sells, they couldn’t give us a clear answer if our customer data they collect will never be shared or sold.<p>The platform is for small self managed stores.<p>It definitely has an A+ front end, but the backend needs to be more flexibility for the enterprise.
Without a doubt, Shopify is an incredible platform for other's to build upon. It has generated commerce and contributed to Global GDP in so many ways<p>1) It is an E-comm platform for selling Goods & Services<p>2) It is an app development platform that allows other businesses to be built on top of it with sites and apps (ie- the apps are integrated to manage distribution, inventory, warehousing, invoicing, marketing, CRM, etc)<p>As an example, Bold Commerce has become a significant company because of the Shopify platform. They are the largest developer of custom Shopify apps and sites in the world – they recently raised $16.5M (USD) to scale further<p>Overall, Shopify processes a huge amount of GMV through the platform and, of that, its Net Revenue is still in the Billions each quarter. The article may be misleading to some, given the headline, but Shopify has a significant impact on the economy globally.
Shopify seems like something that should have been done 15 years ago. It is just a website that allows anyone to set up a digital storefront for a monthly fee. The fee part is the most lucrative. Most people set up the store and sell little or nothing and forget to cancel , so Shopify keeps printing $ from the recurring subs, much like AOL does.