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Why Mailchimp is no longer in the Shopify App Store

227 points by blackdogie 8y ago

blackdogie 8y ago
This of course is one side of the story. Looking forward to hear the Mailchimps side of things. Edit: here we are https://mailchimp.com/shopify-statement/ https://mailchimp.com/shopify-statement/
- aboutruby 8y ago
  Shopify: > Shopify has had growing concerns about Mailchimp’s app because of the poor merchant experience and their refusal to respect our Partner Program Agreement. Our terms require app partners to share all important data back to the merchant using Shopify’s API to help them run their businesses. Mailchimp: > Throughout these negotiations, we refused to agree to terms that jeopardize our users’ privacy and require us to hand over customer data acquired outside of Shopify. From our perspective, that's not our data to share.
  - torqueTorrent 8y ago
    Shopify: > We (Shopify) are totally addicted to your data and snooping on you so that we can get as much intelligence on as many people as possible so we can exploit everyone in pursuit of revenues, despite the consequences or risk.
  - hw 8y ago
    As an app developer the updated T&C really threw me off. How are they going to enforce apps sending back data to Shopify? What happens if a merchant has 5 apps, and each one of them sends back a different phone number or name for the customer? Also, how does one determine if data collected on behalf of an entity needs to be send back to Shopify? Say there's a contact form app. Anyone can fill out that form (investors, analysts, vendors, partners, as well as actual customers). Is the app then required to send that data back to Shopify? How does one make the differentiation, aside from only syncing back to Shopify if the customer exists on Shopify (this isn't clarified in the terms)
  - jonstaab 8y ago
    I had been working on an integration between our product and Shopify via an app for just about a week when their updated ToU came out. It is a pain in the butt. I side with MailChimp here, that customer data isn't ours to share with Shopify, especially since it concerns a whole different segment of our merchants' customers (brick and mortar vs ecommerce). What's not mentioned here is that they also updated the terms to prohibit selling anything on behalf of a merchant without using their checkout api, if your software is integrated with Shopify. But we make a special-purpose POS, that's our value-add. It appears that they just want their cut - of customer data and of fees. Edit: a link to the ToU discussion on the Shopify forums. https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/We-ve-updated-our-API-ToU-and-Partner-Program-Agreement/td-p/490397/highlight/false https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/We-ve-upda...
    - kartickv 8y ago
      Exactly what data is this dispute about? The article says "customer information captured on merchants’ online stores" but what exactly does that mean?
      - jonstaab 8y ago
        The definitions are frustratingly vague. "Any customer data excluding sensitive personal data", which doesn't exclude stuff that isn't relevant to them, or things that don't fit in the API. Also, it states that apps "not use an alternative to Shopify Checkout for web checkout or payment processing, or register any transactions through the Shopify API, without Shopify’s express written authorization". That's from 2.3.17-18 of the api terms of use: https://www.shopify.com/legal/api-terms https://www.shopify.com/legal/api-terms
- andreareina 8y ago
  Shopify Partner Terms of Service: https://www.shopify.com.ph/partners/terms https://www.shopify.com.ph/partners/terms Section 5.4. ("Proprietary Rights of Shopify") is the interesting bit.
danielfoster 8y ago
I'm curious what good alternatives to Mailchimp exist? My experience working with them is that they're a solid but outdated option. 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>" 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.
- gjs278 8y ago
  sendgrid or mailgun
- sdfsdfsdfsdf3 8y ago
  Mailchimp is a fucking disaster. Regularly get 503/500 in app when doing bulk operations - all the work happens on the request thread. I wouldn't be surprised if the damn thing was written in PHP
- kaslai 8y ago
  You say they are basic syntax errors but fixing them is not the place of the application. "usergmail.com" could have the @ at basically any spot before the I and be a totally believable email address. Sure, statistically speaking, "user@gmail.com" is the most likely option, but "usergm@ail.com" would be a perfectly believable email for a game master that manages ail.com. Given that mailchimp is a bulk email delivery service, I would hate to get spam at user@gmail.com just because someone forgot the @ on their "u@sergmail.com" entry.
  - danielfoster 8y ago
    That's a good point. I guess I'm looking at this from a UI / usability standpoint. I feel it is Mailchimp's job to speed up my email marketing-- that's the job I've hired it to do. If I just wanted to send email I would use a leaner service at a lower cost. Mailchimp already filters out bad email addresses (nospam@gmail.com, etc.). Most addresses have a format like "sallysanders11" or "michael.smith." The chances of there being another user on the same domain are scarce and indeed at least on my mailing list, 70% of the people signed up are on Gmail. There's no reason why a good piece of software should not be able to use a little bit of intelligence and ask me if I want to auto-correct my addresses-- within reason, of course.
spectramax 8y ago
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. 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 different 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. 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!
- dmix 8y ago
  Sounds like Heroku's business model and that works fine for a certain type of business/consumer. Of course you could spin up your own VPS or code your own Rails ecommerce app. But that's not always economical - up to a certain scale. API changes breaking sites is another matter entirely than their subscription plugin model which could be solved while maintaining that structure. This change by Spotify seems to be related to Mailchimp not providing a certain standard of service that they demand from other plugin-services on their platform. I could see that being a costly choice for any customer who has to now migrate to other services, but the intentions were largely good and pro-customer. Hopefully there was some sort of data migration process in place and some upfront warnings before your email marketing system gets cut-off.
  - spectramax 8y ago
    I think the problem I am describing goes deeper than just the API calls. It is about support and accountability. As a business owner, I want as few parties responsible for my infrastructure as possible with healthy portability possibilities (to avoid lock-in). With Shopify app store, the whole idea is insane to me - I have to now deal with Shopify + plugin developers individually to fix issues. Things break all the time, just go to Shopify forums for support. And then, there is the risk of a developer leaving Shopify ecosystem with a dangling plugin never to be maintained.
YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
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.
- dmix 8y ago
  "$20k for 3 years" instead of 3 years of custom development costs is nothing... sure it's expensive but that's positioned in a marketplace where the alternatives are far more expensive for the average non-technical e-commerce store owner. If $6k per year is a big expense for you then obviously this isn't the service for you, but enough people are willing to pay that where they are a billion dollar per yr in revenue company. If some half-baked open-source PHP ecommerce platform with a p/t solo developer over a couple yrs is sufficient to run your business, that's fine. But that was always an option before Shopify existed too and they probably found they weren't interested in that subsection of the market.
  - Something1234 8y ago
    What about woocommerce? It's not terrible, and seems like it's very flexible, plus a lot of the stuff is free.
    - dmix 8y ago
      I'm sure there are plenty of cheaper options. That's not really the point. I was only comparing it to custom development combined with a high quality service. You usually have to pay more for quality in the SaaS world, even more so than PaaS which is more of a commodity product than an ecommerce platform.
  - YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
    half baked open source thingy costs $50 a month, im talking about fully custom solution that actually can handle business cases that Shopify can not. such as this product is shipped by itself in a box. that product is actually a combination of the other 3 products. and give accurate shipping quote for an order is 3 boxes 37 pounds each not 1 big 111 pound box. you will need 17 different apps plugged into shopify to get this to work. and yeah you are right, there is a million generic stores that ship apparell and other random crap doesn't have specific inventory and shipping needs and thats Shopify's market. for anything more advanced you need to shell out $2000 per month for Shopify Plus. And let me guess your response to that will be "any serious business can afford that". its like businesses have hand over their cash to Shopify so that can claim to be a serious business. Shopify is a rip-off and clearly abuses their market dominance in the cases like with MailChimp
kweks 8y ago
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. 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. The _platform_ is great. It out performs Magento, Presta, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc etc with its interface, product management, raw performance and core feature set. 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.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  Can anyone explain what the problem is? I feel like there is plenty of competition. Isnt the change as easy as signing up for a new website and changing some Form code? Serious question. (doing this with mailchimp was annoying, but not impossible)
  - YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
    another painful thing about shopify is that they will add some code at the end of the URL of your product pictures when exporting products like .jpeg?v=blabla which prevents them from being automatically imported into somewhere else
    - brianwawok 8y ago
      You can easily read all images out of the api.
point78 8y ago
So they are both saying it's the other ones fault. And both saying because the other one is sharing private data....
- detaro 8y ago
  > And both saying because the other one is sharing private data.... No, they aren't. Shopify is saying that Mailchimp isn't sharing data Shopify insists be shared, Mailchimp says sharing that data is not acceptable, because it's private.
navs 8y ago
So Shopify is mad that Mailchimp isn’t sharing data with them? 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. 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.
- steve-benjamins 8y ago
  Shopify does include Wishlist and Custom Field features. They're available as apps— not in the core. The whole point of the app store is to avoid the mistakes of Magento: building a confusing, monolithic mess because they tried to shoehorn too many features into the core.
  - navs 8y ago
    They’re available by third parties. You can argue that customfields are supported by Shopify but wishlists aren’t. If you need a Wishlist you need a database externally storing customer and product data. So no, Shopify doesn’t have a Wishlist feature. Shopify lists other Saas’ that offer to fill in the many gaps. That may work for some retailers. As with Magento, some will like that approach and some won’t. But if you’re telling a retailer that Shopify offers a Wishlist feature you need to be sure to mention that it will cost them $x/month/store and that the app isn’t built nor supported by Shopify.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
good_guy 8y ago
"Our terms require app partners to share all important data back to the merchant using Shopify’s API to help them run their businesses." LOL
EvaldasMc 8y ago
If you are looking for a good alternative for Mailchimp, Top Rated email marketing tool Omnisend can be the best choice. They are offering discount at the moment.
EvaldasMc 8y ago
If you are looking for a good alternative for Mailchimp, Top Rated email marketing tool Omnisend can be the best choice. They are offering discount at the moment.
system2 8y ago
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.
system2 8y ago
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. 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.
- kokey 8y ago
  I suspect since easy investment money with no questions asked is slowing down and there's increasing IPO activity, companies are starting to care about their bottom line more and along comes with it strategic fights with potential competitors over a share of a smaller pie.
  - YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
    could be. reminds me of the times when Twitter/Facebook and all others first acted like a platform to build upon and after watching some companies become successful these 'platforms' tightened data access for the the apps/clients and pushed them out of business
- bigbadgoose 8y ago
  Rhymes with "quarterly stock reporting"
hrdwdmrbl 8y ago
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.
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  hey we are a small team that developed a multitenant ecommmerce system geared towards B2B type businesses. I would love to get your feedback about the solution that we built. please shoot me an email at hello@cartspark.com if you have 10 minutes to chat.
mancuso5 8y ago
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? :)
so_tired 8y ago
Off Topic: recommendation for a payment processer for a market place? 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. Our biggest concern is not commission or speed. It is simply not being arbitrarily black listed !!
nickjj 8y ago
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. 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? How many of you are really going to use an alternative solution for an ecommerce site?
- calibas 8y ago
  I was kind of shocked that they discontinued their WordPress integration. I get the feeling they want their customers to be completely dependent upon Shopify, which is part of why I avoid them when possible.
chuckgreenman 8y ago
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.
- briandear 8y ago
  How are drop shipping companies harming email deliverability?
  - chuckgreenman 8y ago
    There are a bunch of Shopify plugins that just let people sell Alibaba express items with no intermediate work. These kinds of drop shippers engage in shadier marketing campaigns. If email coming from MailChimp starts getting reported for spam, other legitimate mail coming from their ips will see delivery suffer.
lugg 8y ago
> The data captured on behalf of our merchants belongs to those merchants, it’s as simple as that. No, it doesn't. It's the end users data. > and this isn’t possible when Mailchimp locks in their data Complaints about lock-in from you is pretty rich. > Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants’ online stores and email opt-out preferences. You're intentionally misleading the reader here. This isn't about opt out preferences. That's just a useful excuse. Any idiot can see you're trying to build up a complete picture about user's spanning across stores. This isn't about your customers, this is about you wanting to push mailchimp out.
- bigbadgoose 8y ago
  Wait, when you supply your data to vendors … do they own rights to that supplication, ergo the data?
wdr1 8y ago
Reading this & Mailchimp's response, the crux of the debate is sharing things like the user's opt-out status?
4FNET7 8y ago
If you are larger merchant, we recommend Hubspot.
bobjordan 8y ago
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.
apple4ever 8y ago
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. 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.
- navs 8y ago
  I’d be very interested in hearing more about the switch. I’m a Magento dev that’s recently done a Shopify+ store and would love to hear from people in the trenches rather than marketing blog posts

227 points by blackdogie 8y ago

This of course is one side of the story. Looking forward to hear the Mailchimps side of things. Edit: here we are https://mailchimp.com/shopify-statement/ https://mailchimp.com/shopify-statement/

aboutruby 8y ago
Shopify: > Shopify has had growing concerns about Mailchimp’s app because of the poor merchant experience and their refusal to respect our Partner Program Agreement. Our terms require app partners to share all important data back to the merchant using Shopify’s API to help them run their businesses. Mailchimp: > Throughout these negotiations, we refused to agree to terms that jeopardize our users’ privacy and require us to hand over customer data acquired outside of Shopify. From our perspective, that's not our data to share.
- torqueTorrent 8y ago
  Shopify: > We (Shopify) are totally addicted to your data and snooping on you so that we can get as much intelligence on as many people as possible so we can exploit everyone in pursuit of revenues, despite the consequences or risk.
- hw 8y ago
  As an app developer the updated T&C really threw me off. How are they going to enforce apps sending back data to Shopify? What happens if a merchant has 5 apps, and each one of them sends back a different phone number or name for the customer? Also, how does one determine if data collected on behalf of an entity needs to be send back to Shopify? Say there's a contact form app. Anyone can fill out that form (investors, analysts, vendors, partners, as well as actual customers). Is the app then required to send that data back to Shopify? How does one make the differentiation, aside from only syncing back to Shopify if the customer exists on Shopify (this isn't clarified in the terms)
- jonstaab 8y ago
  I had been working on an integration between our product and Shopify via an app for just about a week when their updated ToU came out. It is a pain in the butt. I side with MailChimp here, that customer data isn't ours to share with Shopify, especially since it concerns a whole different segment of our merchants' customers (brick and mortar vs ecommerce). What's not mentioned here is that they also updated the terms to prohibit selling anything on behalf of a merchant without using their checkout api, if your software is integrated with Shopify. But we make a special-purpose POS, that's our value-add. It appears that they just want their cut - of customer data and of fees. Edit: a link to the ToU discussion on the Shopify forums. https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/We-ve-updated-our-API-ToU-and-Partner-Program-Agreement/td-p/490397/highlight/false https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/We-ve-upda...
  - kartickv 8y ago
    Exactly what data is this dispute about? The article says "customer information captured on merchants’ online stores" but what exactly does that mean?
    - jonstaab 8y ago
      The definitions are frustratingly vague. "Any customer data excluding sensitive personal data", which doesn't exclude stuff that isn't relevant to them, or things that don't fit in the API. Also, it states that apps "not use an alternative to Shopify Checkout for web checkout or payment processing, or register any transactions through the Shopify API, without Shopify’s express written authorization". That's from 2.3.17-18 of the api terms of use: https://www.shopify.com/legal/api-terms https://www.shopify.com/legal/api-terms
andreareina 8y ago
Shopify Partner Terms of Service: https://www.shopify.com.ph/partners/terms https://www.shopify.com.ph/partners/terms Section 5.4. ("Proprietary Rights of Shopify") is the interesting bit.

danielfoster 8y ago

I'm curious what good alternatives to Mailchimp exist? My experience working with them is that they're a solid but outdated option. 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>" 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.

gjs278 8y ago
sendgrid or mailgun
sdfsdfsdfsdf3 8y ago
Mailchimp is a fucking disaster. Regularly get 503/500 in app when doing bulk operations - all the work happens on the request thread. I wouldn't be surprised if the damn thing was written in PHP
kaslai 8y ago
You say they are basic syntax errors but fixing them is not the place of the application. "usergmail.com" could have the @ at basically any spot before the I and be a totally believable email address. Sure, statistically speaking, "user@gmail.com" is the most likely option, but "usergm@ail.com" would be a perfectly believable email for a game master that manages ail.com. Given that mailchimp is a bulk email delivery service, I would hate to get spam at user@gmail.com just because someone forgot the @ on their "u@sergmail.com" entry.
- danielfoster 8y ago
  That's a good point. I guess I'm looking at this from a UI / usability standpoint. I feel it is Mailchimp's job to speed up my email marketing-- that's the job I've hired it to do. If I just wanted to send email I would use a leaner service at a lower cost. Mailchimp already filters out bad email addresses (nospam@gmail.com, etc.). Most addresses have a format like "sallysanders11" or "michael.smith." The chances of there being another user on the same domain are scarce and indeed at least on my mailing list, 70% of the people signed up are on Gmail. There's no reason why a good piece of software should not be able to use a little bit of intelligence and ask me if I want to auto-correct my addresses-- within reason, of course.

spectramax 8y ago

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. 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 different 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. 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!

dmix 8y ago
Sounds like Heroku's business model and that works fine for a certain type of business/consumer. Of course you could spin up your own VPS or code your own Rails ecommerce app. But that's not always economical - up to a certain scale. API changes breaking sites is another matter entirely than their subscription plugin model which could be solved while maintaining that structure. This change by Spotify seems to be related to Mailchimp not providing a certain standard of service that they demand from other plugin-services on their platform. I could see that being a costly choice for any customer who has to now migrate to other services, but the intentions were largely good and pro-customer. Hopefully there was some sort of data migration process in place and some upfront warnings before your email marketing system gets cut-off.
- spectramax 8y ago
  I think the problem I am describing goes deeper than just the API calls. It is about support and accountability. As a business owner, I want as few parties responsible for my infrastructure as possible with healthy portability possibilities (to avoid lock-in). With Shopify app store, the whole idea is insane to me - I have to now deal with Shopify + plugin developers individually to fix issues. Things break all the time, just go to Shopify forums for support. And then, there is the risk of a developer leaving Shopify ecosystem with a dangling plugin never to be maintained.

YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago

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.

dmix 8y ago
"$20k for 3 years" instead of 3 years of custom development costs is nothing... sure it's expensive but that's positioned in a marketplace where the alternatives are far more expensive for the average non-technical e-commerce store owner. If $6k per year is a big expense for you then obviously this isn't the service for you, but enough people are willing to pay that where they are a billion dollar per yr in revenue company. If some half-baked open-source PHP ecommerce platform with a p/t solo developer over a couple yrs is sufficient to run your business, that's fine. But that was always an option before Shopify existed too and they probably found they weren't interested in that subsection of the market.
- Something1234 8y ago
  What about woocommerce? It's not terrible, and seems like it's very flexible, plus a lot of the stuff is free.
  - dmix 8y ago
    I'm sure there are plenty of cheaper options. That's not really the point. I was only comparing it to custom development combined with a high quality service. You usually have to pay more for quality in the SaaS world, even more so than PaaS which is more of a commodity product than an ecommerce platform.
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  half baked open source thingy costs $50 a month, im talking about fully custom solution that actually can handle business cases that Shopify can not. such as this product is shipped by itself in a box. that product is actually a combination of the other 3 products. and give accurate shipping quote for an order is 3 boxes 37 pounds each not 1 big 111 pound box. you will need 17 different apps plugged into shopify to get this to work. and yeah you are right, there is a million generic stores that ship apparell and other random crap doesn't have specific inventory and shipping needs and thats Shopify's market. for anything more advanced you need to shell out $2000 per month for Shopify Plus. And let me guess your response to that will be "any serious business can afford that". its like businesses have hand over their cash to Shopify so that can claim to be a serious business. Shopify is a rip-off and clearly abuses their market dominance in the cases like with MailChimp

kweks 8y ago

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. 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. The _platform_ is great. It out performs Magento, Presta, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc etc with its interface, product management, raw performance and core feature set. 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.

robertAngst 8y ago
Can anyone explain what the problem is? I feel like there is plenty of competition. Isnt the change as easy as signing up for a new website and changing some Form code? Serious question. (doing this with mailchimp was annoying, but not impossible)
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  another painful thing about shopify is that they will add some code at the end of the URL of your product pictures when exporting products like .jpeg?v=blabla which prevents them from being automatically imported into somewhere else
  - brianwawok 8y ago
    You can easily read all images out of the api.

point78 8y ago

So they are both saying it's the other ones fault. And both saying because the other one is sharing private data....

detaro 8y ago
> And both saying because the other one is sharing private data.... No, they aren't. Shopify is saying that Mailchimp isn't sharing data Shopify insists be shared, Mailchimp says sharing that data is not acceptable, because it's private.

navs 8y ago

So Shopify is mad that Mailchimp isn’t sharing data with them? 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. 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.

steve-benjamins 8y ago
Shopify does include Wishlist and Custom Field features. They're available as apps— not in the core. The whole point of the app store is to avoid the mistakes of Magento: building a confusing, monolithic mess because they tried to shoehorn too many features into the core.
- navs 8y ago
  They’re available by third parties. You can argue that customfields are supported by Shopify but wishlists aren’t. If you need a Wishlist you need a database externally storing customer and product data. So no, Shopify doesn’t have a Wishlist feature. Shopify lists other Saas’ that offer to fill in the many gaps. That may work for some retailers. As with Magento, some will like that approach and some won’t. But if you’re telling a retailer that Shopify offers a Wishlist feature you need to be sure to mention that it will cost them $x/month/store and that the app isn’t built nor supported by Shopify.
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good_guy 8y ago

"Our terms require app partners to share all important data back to the merchant using Shopify’s API to help them run their businesses." LOL

EvaldasMc 8y ago

If you are looking for a good alternative for Mailchimp, Top Rated email marketing tool Omnisend can be the best choice. They are offering discount at the moment.

EvaldasMc 8y ago

If you are looking for a good alternative for Mailchimp, Top Rated email marketing tool Omnisend can be the best choice. They are offering discount at the moment.

system2 8y ago

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.

system2 8y ago

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. 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.

kokey 8y ago
I suspect since easy investment money with no questions asked is slowing down and there's increasing IPO activity, companies are starting to care about their bottom line more and along comes with it strategic fights with potential competitors over a share of a smaller pie.
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
  could be. reminds me of the times when Twitter/Facebook and all others first acted like a platform to build upon and after watching some companies become successful these 'platforms' tightened data access for the the apps/clients and pushed them out of business
bigbadgoose 8y ago
Rhymes with "quarterly stock reporting"

hrdwdmrbl 8y ago

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.

YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
hey we are a small team that developed a multitenant ecommmerce system geared towards B2B type businesses. I would love to get your feedback about the solution that we built. please shoot me an email at hello@cartspark.com if you have 10 minutes to chat.

mancuso5 8y ago

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? :)

so_tired 8y ago

Off Topic: recommendation for a payment processer for a market place? 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. Our biggest concern is not commission or speed. It is simply not being arbitrarily black listed !!

nickjj 8y ago

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. 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? How many of you are really going to use an alternative solution for an ecommerce site?

calibas 8y ago
I was kind of shocked that they discontinued their WordPress integration. I get the feeling they want their customers to be completely dependent upon Shopify, which is part of why I avoid them when possible.

chuckgreenman 8y ago

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.

briandear 8y ago
How are drop shipping companies harming email deliverability?
- chuckgreenman 8y ago
  There are a bunch of Shopify plugins that just let people sell Alibaba express items with no intermediate work. These kinds of drop shippers engage in shadier marketing campaigns. If email coming from MailChimp starts getting reported for spam, other legitimate mail coming from their ips will see delivery suffer.

lugg 8y ago

> The data captured on behalf of our merchants belongs to those merchants, it’s as simple as that. No, it doesn't. It's the end users data. > and this isn’t possible when Mailchimp locks in their data Complaints about lock-in from you is pretty rich. > Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants’ online stores and email opt-out preferences. You're intentionally misleading the reader here. This isn't about opt out preferences. That's just a useful excuse. Any idiot can see you're trying to build up a complete picture about user's spanning across stores. This isn't about your customers, this is about you wanting to push mailchimp out.

bigbadgoose 8y ago
Wait, when you supply your data to vendors … do they own rights to that supplication, ergo the data?

wdr1 8y ago

Reading this & Mailchimp's response, the crux of the debate is sharing things like the user's opt-out status?

4FNET7 8y ago

If you are larger merchant, we recommend Hubspot.

bobjordan 8y ago

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.

apple4ever 8y ago

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. 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.

navs 8y ago
I’d be very interested in hearing more about the switch. I’m a Magento dev that’s recently done a Shopify+ store and would love to hear from people in the trenches rather than marketing blog posts