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I know that a lot of activity on Shopify is from ambitious but deluded people setting up dropshipping businesses. Shopify is just selling picks and shovels to a

I know that a lot of activity on Shopify is from ambitious but deluded people setting up dropshipping businesses. Shopify is just selling picks and shovels to a lot of prospectors in a particularly unfruitful gold rush. I'm wondering whether they'll see a contraction as the enthusiasm wears off.

blairanderson 7y ago
Your point is accurate, but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops. Their biggest investments are for their subscribers that ACTUALLY sell stuff. Dropship-dreamers are super scared of actually subscribing but they are the vocal majority because of guru's and such. Its all about growing GMV / PLUS / CAPITAL / FULFILLMENT and those are all hitting +50% YOY
- markdown 7y ago
  > but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops. This makes no sense. Why would any company that starts making serious money continue to give SquareSpace money for a template. There's nothing you can do in SquareSpace that you can't do better in a custom app running on one of the many free software CMS's out there. I don't get this.
  - grandmczeb 7y ago
    For lots of brands, the core competency is marketing and every other aspect of the company is outsourced. E.g. Kylie Cosmetics which has 360M+/yr in revenue and uses Shopify.
    - askafriend 7y ago
      A more provocative example is Tesla. Literally their whole car buying experience is powered by Shopify. They did ~$21B in sales last year.
      - gavinballard 7y ago
        I don't think this is true - I believe it's only their merchandise store that's on Shopify. Car purchases are done through their own, custom platform. That said, there are definitely plenty of huge merchants running on Shopify turning over hundreds of millions of dollars through the platform - we work with quite a few of them.
  - jimnotgym 7y ago
    I can give Squarespace $10 a month and get a beautiful page with modern templates, https, hosting, CDN, and a CMS that even my graphic designers can use. Or I could get Wordpress, pay for hosting, pay a developer, buy an ssl certificate, leave wp admin on a default url and get hacked... Now I know how to fix those things with cheap hosting, Lets Encrypt, etc... but my graphic designers don't. $10 a month is very very cheap for a business.
    - markdown 7y ago
      Except it isn't $10/month. You give them a significant cut of every sale, don't you?
chrischen 7y ago
I run a non-Shopify online store and maybe like 80% of my competitors are running a Shopify-powered drop-shipping operation. There's always new ones of these Shopify stores popping and and disappearing every few months.
- mkorfmann 7y ago
  I place 50 virtual chips on your shop going out of business in the next 2 years.
  - dimator 7y ago
    You must be fun at parties.
    - mkorfmann 7y ago
      You must be a pleb. I'm a Jeff Bezos type of guy, no one likes me.
askafriend 7y ago
Tesla sells every car they make through their website powered by Shopify. It's not just small boutique stores using Shopify.
- kevindong 7y ago
  Tesla runs off of Salesforce, not Shopify. You can pretty easily validate this but viewing the website resources and Ctrl-F-ing for "shopify" and "salesforce".

blairanderson 7y ago

Your point is accurate, but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops. Their biggest investments are for their subscribers that ACTUALLY sell stuff. Dropship-dreamers are super scared of actually subscribing but they are the vocal majority because of guru's and such. Its all about growing GMV / PLUS / CAPITAL / FULFILLMENT and those are all hitting +50% YOY

markdown 7y ago
> but they also power some massive eCommerce businesses and growing number of enterprise shops. This makes no sense. Why would any company that starts making serious money continue to give SquareSpace money for a template. There's nothing you can do in SquareSpace that you can't do better in a custom app running on one of the many free software CMS's out there. I don't get this.
- grandmczeb 7y ago
  For lots of brands, the core competency is marketing and every other aspect of the company is outsourced. E.g. Kylie Cosmetics which has 360M+/yr in revenue and uses Shopify.
  - askafriend 7y ago
    A more provocative example is Tesla. Literally their whole car buying experience is powered by Shopify. They did ~$21B in sales last year.
    - gavinballard 7y ago
      I don't think this is true - I believe it's only their merchandise store that's on Shopify. Car purchases are done through their own, custom platform. That said, there are definitely plenty of huge merchants running on Shopify turning over hundreds of millions of dollars through the platform - we work with quite a few of them.
- jimnotgym 7y ago
  I can give Squarespace $10 a month and get a beautiful page with modern templates, https, hosting, CDN, and a CMS that even my graphic designers can use. Or I could get Wordpress, pay for hosting, pay a developer, buy an ssl certificate, leave wp admin on a default url and get hacked... Now I know how to fix those things with cheap hosting, Lets Encrypt, etc... but my graphic designers don't. $10 a month is very very cheap for a business.
  - markdown 7y ago
    Except it isn't $10/month. You give them a significant cut of every sale, don't you?

chrischen 7y ago

I run a non-Shopify online store and maybe like 80% of my competitors are running a Shopify-powered drop-shipping operation. There's always new ones of these Shopify stores popping and and disappearing every few months.

mkorfmann 7y ago
I place 50 virtual chips on your shop going out of business in the next 2 years.
- dimator 7y ago
  You must be fun at parties.
  - mkorfmann 7y ago
    You must be a pleb. I'm a Jeff Bezos type of guy, no one likes me.

askafriend 7y ago

Tesla sells every car they make through their website powered by Shopify. It's not just small boutique stores using Shopify.

kevindong 7y ago
Tesla runs off of Salesforce, not Shopify. You can pretty easily validate this but viewing the website resources and Ctrl-F-ing for "shopify" and "salesforce".