I love this move by Shopify. As a merchant (in Canada, where typical shipping prices are extortionate) I'd love to give Shopify more money (but presumably less than we pay 3rd party shippers) for better overall delivery service for my customers.<p>As a buyer, I'd love to spend more with not-Amazon and get comparable service.<p>I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon is pushing me to smaller brands who have a face and stand behind their product for key purchases. This move by Shopify will just accelerate that transition away from Amazon.<p>Just waiting for the search bar to shop every Shopify store so I have a viable alternative to Amazon to buy whatever I need.
Amazon’s catalog quality and customer service is going downhill very fast. Shopify has a real opportunity to fill that void.<p>Amazon was known for maintaining high quality of their catalogue. But since opening up their store front for third party sellers it’s resembling flee market by the day. For example they had a very strict policy of one product one page I.e Single Detail Page (SDP), indexed by ASIN. But now exact same product has multiple ASINs. You don’t know if it’s a fake or genuine.
For those of us unfamilir with Delivrr:<p><i>Our Mission:<p>Large online marketplaces like Amazon have trained consumers to expect products delivered to their doorsteps within 1-2 days at no extra cost. As a result, millions of merchants on other marketplaces are falling behind, unable to cost-effectively deliver products to their customers within 1-2 days. Our mission is to enable any merchant, regardless of size, to delight their customers with fast and cost-effective fulfillment.</i>
I own an ecommerce business, and I recently moved away from my previous 3PL (third party logistics company, like Deliverr). In doing so, I evaluated a number of 3PLs, including Deliverr.<p>For those who aren't familiar, Amazon Multi Channel Fulfillment, which allows you to fulfill orders not placed on Amazon from their warehouses, is much cheaper than all alternatives for a lot of smaller packages. As an example, I have one item that's 2.5 pounds, and about 8.5"x4"x4". To ship it via USPS would cost me $10-12, depending on where it's going. Amazon charges me $6.77.<p>Deliverr, at least when I evaluated them about six months ago, matched Amazon's pricing exactly. That was pretty shocking to me, since Amazon's clearly only able to maintain those prices because they have their own fulfillment network and lots of revenue from elsewhere to subsidize the actual cost of delivery.<p>I am currently using Amazon MCF as my 3PL, and one of the reasons I went with them over Deliverr was a genuine concern that Deliverr had a money-losing business model that would only work at Amazon scale, which is obviously a nigh-impossible thing to achieve.<p>I'm glad to see they got acquired by Shopify, as I think the competition for Amazon is a good thing in the marketplace. That said, I'm definitely curious to see if Shopify will be able to maintain price parity with Amazon.
Anyone else worry that we don't really need <i>everything</i> "port to porch" in two days? It's impressive logistics, but I worry about the environmental impact when we so strongly stress urgency over efficiency.<p>Or are there ways to make rapid home deliveries efficient in ways I don't comprehend?
Holey moley, we're down to $400/share - the time machine to 2020 is complete. Is this a bargain yet? Can I buy it yet?<p>I have really enjoyed the Shopify checkout experience as a customer.
Great acquisition in the short-medium term for Shopify. I do wonder how Shopify will differentiate itself in the long term. From the outside it looks like Shopify’s plan to compete with Amazon is to handle more of the logistics, create an ad network, and ultimately drive discovery across Shopify stores (via unified search?).<p>That plan will result in the same issues that Amazon has today. There is nothing inherently higher quality about products sold through Shopify today. Shopify attracts brand-focused sellers that correlates with higher quality. In order to grow they will have to attract high-volume (lower quality) less brand focused sellers, ending up with the same issue.
Congratulations! We have been a partner with Deliverr since they were quite small, and has been fun to watch their growth. They help a lot of my clients ship packages fast.
SHOP stock has been absolutely slaughtered in the last 6 months.<p>They're either super geniuses with long term vision the markets can't see, or people have completely lost faith with them for exactly these kinds of moves.
Shopify seems to be moving from an asset-light to asset-heavy mode, but also significantly dialing down their investor communication: this is just so unlike them, considering how things have always been.
This is a classic example of "The best acquisitions start as partnerships." I'm not privy to any internal details of either, but reading the writing on the wall from Deliverr's website and posts around the web, Shopify was a huge integration for them (likely a majority of their business). I am willing to get they've worked together at a C-Suite level to make sure that's a good relationship for a while now, and that has a tendency to produce excellent terms for acquisition (for both parties)!
I been itching to work at Shopify for a little while now. This makes me even more excited for them! This should be interesting in how they are positioning themselves against the backdrop of Amazon and Walmart. Its strange to think that Shopify is almost the upstart against a giant like Walmart or Amazon in terms of capturing the retail end / customer experience side of things.<p>I suppose its a strategy to diverse their commerce portfolio.
I'm probably thinking about this backwards, but I'm embarrassingly well trained to search for anything I need on Amazon. if I want to support Shopify at Amazon's expense, is there a straightforward way of breaking out of this training and find what I need among Shopify-powered merchants? Without getting lost in SEO-spam or influencer peddling?
<p><pre><code> marketplaces like Amazon have trained consumers
to expect products delivered to their doorsteps
within 1-2 days
</code></pre>
I am always surprised that delivery takes so long. Why does it have to take days?<p>If I have a fleet of cars and/or bikes that constantly swarm out from my distribution center, why can't a delivery be done in hours or even minutes?
This was rumored about a couple weeks ago<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31102655" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31102655</a>