8 ms·

Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon

248 points by bgrynol 7y ago

sosuke 7y ago
But Shopify has no central search platform that I know of. The sites aren't connected to each other.
- swsieber 7y ago
  That makes it all the more impressive.
- bhouston 7y ago
  I feel that is likely coming at some point - but who knows... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411992 Also with the recent postal changes in the US I think that will hurt AliExpress, Banggood and help Shopify and Amazon.
  - Bombthecat 7y ago
    Aren't most drop ship sites on shopify? I feel like every few articles and blog is "be a drop shipper" with those three simple services..
    - bduerst 7y ago
      Drop shippers are on all e-commerce platforms, from the shopify 1-pagers to merchants on ebay and Amazon. It's saturated the entire market at this point.
  - subpixel 7y ago
    They already did this, it didn't work, and it would be foolish to try again and join Amazon's race to the retail bottom. And there would almost certainly be no money in it until, you know, they beat Amazon at their own game. Pretty sure Shopify's head is screwed-on straighter than that.
- pmart123 7y ago
  I don’t think that’s their intention. By being the anti-amazon, it’s about having each store be it’s own brand, supplying the backend plumbing infrastructure instead.
- Angostura 7y ago
  Indeed. I suspect Wordpress is bigger
- Mengkudulangsat 7y ago
  A central search platform for Shopify stores... you mean Google?
  - sosuke 7y ago
    Hah! I laugh but getting found in Google is incredibly difficult compared to say selling the same produce on Etsy.
- HackR 7y ago
  Why should they be connected to each other? Tesla.com is powered by Shopify. They sell all of their vehicles through their site since they don't deal with dealerships. Likewise Kylie Cosmetics is powered by Shopify. That's a billion dollar brand that's not going to be OK with being placed in a dusty corner of Amazon. They have enough brand value to drive their own audience through their own channels (Instagram, Snap, Twitter, etc).
  - kevindong 7y ago
    > Tesla.com is powered by Shopify. They sell all of their vehicles through their site since they don't deal with dealerships. While this may have been true in the past, it is no longer the case. Neither the main Tesla store/website [0] nor the merchandise store (for t-shirts, assorted knick-knacks, some chargers; basically everything except the cars) [1] use Shopify. You can validate by going to those websites and Ctrl-F through all of the sources of the webpage for "shopify". The main Tesla website uses Salesforce (Ctrl-F through the sources for "salesforce"). [0]: https://www.tesla.com https://www.tesla.com (definitely Salesforce) [1]: https://shop.tesla.com https://shop.tesla.com (it appears that Tesla rolled their own implementation of a store)
    - HackR 7y ago
      Fair and thank you for that updated information (I knew they were using it as recent as 2017 but didn't know they had changed it), but it still goes to show the types of companies being built on the Shopify platform versus the drop-shipping flea market bins of Amazon. If you're building a real brand, you're building a relationship with your customers that you own. You're going to do it on your own terms because you can drive your own audience.
nategri 7y ago
So weird. Literally cannot remember if I've ever bought something from Shopify.
- izzydata 7y ago
  This is the first I've heard of it. Is this a thing with people under 21 or something?
  - procinct 7y ago
    It’s an e-commerce platform. It’s completely white label so you could buy from a Shopify website without ever knowing it.
  - maitredusoi 7y ago
    The platform is only known by rubyist, this mean that you are either a javascript guy or a phpist one ;) ;) ;) Sorry that private joke was to easy not to be made....
- primordialsoup 7y ago
  But you most likely might have bought something that was powered by Shopify. And Shopify wants to keep it that way.
  - steve_adams_86 7y ago
    That's how it is. I worked with Pixel Union, an agency which serves Shopify customers pretty much exclusively. They built British Columbia's online cannabis store on Shopify. They built countless online shoe stores for notable brands. Sunglasses, women's fashion, men's fashion, watches, rental services. None of them look like they have anything to do with Shopify.
- 1123581321 7y ago
  I didn’t become aware I had been shopping on Shopify-hosted sites until I created one.
- 7y ago
tempsy 7y ago
Shopify's stock has been on an incredible tear. I think it's 3x'd since the beginning of the year? And 10x'd in maybe 2.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  You could’ve quickly and easily checked. Not 3x with the price drop in past month or two. And 10x would be over 3 years ago. 2 years ago is close to 3x to 4x.
alphadog 7y ago
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?
- gkoberger 7y ago
  Well, Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/Etsy all are platforms that let other people sell things. I get your point (and might even agree with you), however if you look at it from the perspective of "I want to sell something... where do I go?", they're competition. They do discovery, checkout, inventory, fulfillment, etc. It just happens to have a slightly different approach than the others.
  - dawnerd 7y ago
    Not really the same thing though, Amazon/eBay/Etsy you can browse multiple "stores". Shopify is just a platform so it really isn't that fair. It'd be like including every single Magento powered site to say Magento is the X largest platform.
    - tjchear 7y ago
      Yeah but that's from the perspective of buyers, so OP's point still stands.
    - mtgx 7y ago
      You can look at it as a "decentralized platform". Adding search across stores = centralized.
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    They do discovery? At Amazon and eBay most purchases come via Amazon's and eBay's search engines. Shopify doesn't have a search engine other than the ones inside individual stores. It's a very different business.
  - meerita 7y ago
    Not really, type shopify.com and let me know if you can buy a pair of shoes. You can't. You go to eBay and you can. Shopify is just the platform and the entire ecosystem supports the amount of transactions.
mtw 7y ago
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.
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  Yeah, that's what I susp3too. It's is a bit of a hype.. I guess shopify will run out of "dreamers" in two years or so.. Then they probably go from flat to "pay per article" or so and call it better customer service and pricing :)
  - seibelj 7y ago
    I have a niche e-commerce business I run mostly for fun, although it does make a decent profit vs. the time I put into it. I originally had woocommerce, a paid theme, digital ocean, MySQL, backups, stripe integration, etc. and honestly it was a hassle. I switched everything and now pay Shopify my $30 per month and don’t even think about it. $360 per year is pocket change vs. my stress level.
- jonknee 7y ago
  No, this just means that Shopify has a high stock market valuation. This isn't looking at sales figures at all. And since they just rent software to people who sell things I'm not sure it makes sense to compare them to more traditional eCommerce plays (if you started selling homes through Shopify somehow it would hugely increase "sold goods", but not in a way that impacts anything).
  - xal 7y ago
    This article isn't clear about it but yes - its about the amount people sell on both platforms, not stock price. Now, is that a useful basis of comparison? It's fun fact but not much more given the difference of the platforms.
headmelted 7y ago
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. 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. 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.
nikanj 7y ago
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. 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. Ebay started out as "Yard sales, except on the internet", and nowadays it's more like Ali Express.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Like a lot of things, sell through a reputable dealer (like KEH in the case of cameras). But you’ll get less that a non-scammy sale and they’ll be picky about what they’ll even take. Amazon can also be easy and safe if they want what you want to sell. But you won’t get the best possible price. Still I’ve done it as the path of least resistance.
- bscphil 7y ago
  The only time I ever tried to sell some stuff on Ebay, I had a very weird experience. I put it up for auction with a minimum, and a week later someone won the auction at what I thought was a decent price. Then... they deleted their account instead of paying for the item. I raised the issue with Ebay, and they gave me a credit in the amount I had paid for the listing. So I listed it again, and someone won the auction once again ... and the same thing happened! They deleted their entire Ebay account instead of paying for the item they presumably had wanted to purchase. At that point I gave up. I think I have $14 in Ebay seller credit still in my account from 10 years ago. My guess is that there was some kind of malfunction or someone was using a bot to bid on particular products. Weird experience. I've moved to selling stuff on Craigslist, and never had a problem with a sale.
- spinach 7y ago
  You could try in person selling like on kijiji, I've sold a fair bit of stuff on there with no problem. I just meet in a public place (a nearby storefront) for safety.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  I’ve bought and sold a bunch of vintage camera stuff on eBay, and it’s mostly been okay. Just a hobby type thing for me. Not much in the last couple of years though. A couple of times there were minor issues. The fees really are bad, though.
jonknee 7y ago
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: > 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. 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.
- palebluedot 7y ago
  No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.
  - sieabahlpark 7y ago
    But that defeats the purpose of reading an article and pick and choose what you want to talk about.
    - jonknee 7y ago
      I read the article and the FT article, it's all about market cap. But since Shopify isn't actually a shopping site this is all a moot point.
  - Guvante 7y ago
    The given link is hard pay walled and I don't see any more explanation of the number. Did they actually have more sales of consumer goods to consumers than eBay or are they saying the company which is on paper a competitor to eBay had more sales total which isn't the same thing. If you want to compare Amazon vs eBay as a platform you wouldn't look at AWS to give an example of what I am talking about.
  - jonknee 7y ago
    But the link doesn't actually say that. It is also talking about market cap. From the Financial Times article: > The stock has climbed more than 150 per cent since the beginning of 2019, making Shopify more valuable than well-known internet companies including Twitter, Square and Spotify. Its market capitalisation — now more than $40bn — surpassed that of ecommerce pioneer eBay earlier this year. It's all rather silly, it's sort of like saying Square is the second largest seller of coffee because a lot of coffee shops transact with it. AWS also hosts a ton of other eCommerce infrastructure, we have to include all sales made using AWS if you want this sort of comparison. It's a bunch of nonsense. tl;dr If you sell shovels you can't claim you're one of the world's biggest miners.
paulpauper 7y ago
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.
- jonknee 7y ago
  This very website exists because this very thing was done 25 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  They also power a large number of real businesses too.
unvs 7y ago
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. [1] https://github.com/Shopify/slate https://github.com/Shopify/slate
otroquecorre 7y ago
Really? and what about Aliexpress? I think it could be on the top 5...
jsingleton 7y ago
They appear to take the environment seriously too, much like Stripe and some others. https://www.shopify.com/about/environment https://www.shopify.com/about/environment https://news.shopify.com/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon https://news.shopify.com/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon
cagataygurturk 7y ago
eBay Q2 2019 GMV is $22.6 billion whereas Shopify's is $13.8 billion. 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.
dragonsh 7y ago
An article put forward by marketing. Not sure why many HNr's like this kind of article. 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. 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. 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. 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. Someone from shopify's marketing might be working to contain critical comments.
- freehunter 7y ago
  In fact the founder of YC and HN has an essay decrying this exact kind of article: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- xal 7y ago
  We really don't think these are good articles to be written about Shopify. Shopify is a company that got big by totally being in the background and making other brands look good instead of itself. I fear what happened in the last little while is that we became too big to be ignored and the Shopify vs Amazon vs Ebay angle seems to be the most accessible angle for writing. It seems to be working though, for whatever reason this made it on Hacker news even though in the same week as this article was written we also bought a robotics company for $450m to automated warehouses and announced a $5m carbon sequestration fund which should really be appreciated on hacker news. Alas we talk about GMV number comparisons.
iask 7y ago
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: 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. 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. The platform is for small self managed stores. It definitely has an A+ front end, but the backend needs to be more flexibility for the enterprise.
- Axsuul 7y ago
  Can I ask what sort of apps you were looking into?
ruchirule 7y ago
This had to happen as they are one of the mordern providers for shopping. Ebay is old, still one of the top sites but OLD!!!
stanislavb 7y ago
Note: Ruby on Rails cannot scale /sarcasm
- allanmacgregor 7y ago
  Well, you are assuming that the platform doesn't have any technology challenges or significant issues and/or drawbacks that might stem from the technology and current architecture. Hint: There is plenty of stuff like that.
aphroz 7y ago
What about chinese websites like tmall or taobao? They seems to have more visitors than Amazon, do they have less sales?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bgrynol 7y ago
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 1) It is an E-comm platform for selling Goods & Services 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) 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 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.

248 points by bgrynol 7y ago

sosuke 7y ago

But Shopify has no central search platform that I know of. The sites aren't connected to each other.

swsieber 7y ago
That makes it all the more impressive.
bhouston 7y ago
I feel that is likely coming at some point - but who knows... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411992 Also with the recent postal changes in the US I think that will hurt AliExpress, Banggood and help Shopify and Amazon.
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  Aren't most drop ship sites on shopify? I feel like every few articles and blog is "be a drop shipper" with those three simple services..
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Drop shippers are on all e-commerce platforms, from the shopify 1-pagers to merchants on ebay and Amazon. It's saturated the entire market at this point.
- subpixel 7y ago
  They already did this, it didn't work, and it would be foolish to try again and join Amazon's race to the retail bottom. And there would almost certainly be no money in it until, you know, they beat Amazon at their own game. Pretty sure Shopify's head is screwed-on straighter than that.
pmart123 7y ago
I don’t think that’s their intention. By being the anti-amazon, it’s about having each store be it’s own brand, supplying the backend plumbing infrastructure instead.
Angostura 7y ago
Indeed. I suspect Wordpress is bigger
Mengkudulangsat 7y ago
A central search platform for Shopify stores... you mean Google?
- sosuke 7y ago
  Hah! I laugh but getting found in Google is incredibly difficult compared to say selling the same produce on Etsy.
HackR 7y ago
Why should they be connected to each other? Tesla.com is powered by Shopify. They sell all of their vehicles through their site since they don't deal with dealerships. Likewise Kylie Cosmetics is powered by Shopify. That's a billion dollar brand that's not going to be OK with being placed in a dusty corner of Amazon. They have enough brand value to drive their own audience through their own channels (Instagram, Snap, Twitter, etc).
- kevindong 7y ago
  > Tesla.com is powered by Shopify. They sell all of their vehicles through their site since they don't deal with dealerships. While this may have been true in the past, it is no longer the case. Neither the main Tesla store/website [0] nor the merchandise store (for t-shirts, assorted knick-knacks, some chargers; basically everything except the cars) [1] use Shopify. You can validate by going to those websites and Ctrl-F through all of the sources of the webpage for "shopify". The main Tesla website uses Salesforce (Ctrl-F through the sources for "salesforce"). [0]: https://www.tesla.com https://www.tesla.com (definitely Salesforce) [1]: https://shop.tesla.com https://shop.tesla.com (it appears that Tesla rolled their own implementation of a store)
  - HackR 7y ago
    Fair and thank you for that updated information (I knew they were using it as recent as 2017 but didn't know they had changed it), but it still goes to show the types of companies being built on the Shopify platform versus the drop-shipping flea market bins of Amazon. If you're building a real brand, you're building a relationship with your customers that you own. You're going to do it on your own terms because you can drive your own audience.

nategri 7y ago

So weird. Literally cannot remember if I've ever bought something from Shopify.

izzydata 7y ago
This is the first I've heard of it. Is this a thing with people under 21 or something?
- procinct 7y ago
  It’s an e-commerce platform. It’s completely white label so you could buy from a Shopify website without ever knowing it.
- maitredusoi 7y ago
  The platform is only known by rubyist, this mean that you are either a javascript guy or a phpist one ;) ;) ;) Sorry that private joke was to easy not to be made....
primordialsoup 7y ago
But you most likely might have bought something that was powered by Shopify. And Shopify wants to keep it that way.
- steve_adams_86 7y ago
  That's how it is. I worked with Pixel Union, an agency which serves Shopify customers pretty much exclusively. They built British Columbia's online cannabis store on Shopify. They built countless online shoe stores for notable brands. Sunglasses, women's fashion, men's fashion, watches, rental services. None of them look like they have anything to do with Shopify.
1123581321 7y ago
I didn’t become aware I had been shopping on Shopify-hosted sites until I created one.
7y ago

tempsy 7y ago

Shopify's stock has been on an incredible tear. I think it's 3x'd since the beginning of the year? And 10x'd in maybe 2.

skinnymuch 7y ago
You could’ve quickly and easily checked. Not 3x with the price drop in past month or two. And 10x would be over 3 years ago. 2 years ago is close to 3x to 4x.

alphadog 7y ago

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?

gkoberger 7y ago
Well, Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/Etsy all are platforms that let other people sell things. I get your point (and might even agree with you), however if you look at it from the perspective of "I want to sell something... where do I go?", they're competition. They do discovery, checkout, inventory, fulfillment, etc. It just happens to have a slightly different approach than the others.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  Not really the same thing though, Amazon/eBay/Etsy you can browse multiple "stores". Shopify is just a platform so it really isn't that fair. It'd be like including every single Magento powered site to say Magento is the X largest platform.
  - tjchear 7y ago
    Yeah but that's from the perspective of buyers, so OP's point still stands.
  - mtgx 7y ago
    You can look at it as a "decentralized platform". Adding search across stores = centralized.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  They do discovery? At Amazon and eBay most purchases come via Amazon's and eBay's search engines. Shopify doesn't have a search engine other than the ones inside individual stores. It's a very different business.
- meerita 7y ago
  Not really, type shopify.com and let me know if you can buy a pair of shoes. You can't. You go to eBay and you can. Shopify is just the platform and the entire ecosystem supports the amount of transactions.

mtw 7y ago

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.

Bombthecat 7y ago
Yeah, that's what I susp3too. It's is a bit of a hype.. I guess shopify will run out of "dreamers" in two years or so.. Then they probably go from flat to "pay per article" or so and call it better customer service and pricing :)
- seibelj 7y ago
  I have a niche e-commerce business I run mostly for fun, although it does make a decent profit vs. the time I put into it. I originally had woocommerce, a paid theme, digital ocean, MySQL, backups, stripe integration, etc. and honestly it was a hassle. I switched everything and now pay Shopify my $30 per month and don’t even think about it. $360 per year is pocket change vs. my stress level.
jonknee 7y ago
No, this just means that Shopify has a high stock market valuation. This isn't looking at sales figures at all. And since they just rent software to people who sell things I'm not sure it makes sense to compare them to more traditional eCommerce plays (if you started selling homes through Shopify somehow it would hugely increase "sold goods", but not in a way that impacts anything).
- xal 7y ago
  This article isn't clear about it but yes - its about the amount people sell on both platforms, not stock price. Now, is that a useful basis of comparison? It's fun fact but not much more given the difference of the platforms.

headmelted 7y ago

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. 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. 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.

nikanj 7y ago

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. 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. Ebay started out as "Yard sales, except on the internet", and nowadays it's more like Ali Express.

ghaff 7y ago
Like a lot of things, sell through a reputable dealer (like KEH in the case of cameras). But you’ll get less that a non-scammy sale and they’ll be picky about what they’ll even take. Amazon can also be easy and safe if they want what you want to sell. But you won’t get the best possible price. Still I’ve done it as the path of least resistance.
bscphil 7y ago
The only time I ever tried to sell some stuff on Ebay, I had a very weird experience. I put it up for auction with a minimum, and a week later someone won the auction at what I thought was a decent price. Then... they deleted their account instead of paying for the item. I raised the issue with Ebay, and they gave me a credit in the amount I had paid for the listing. So I listed it again, and someone won the auction once again ... and the same thing happened! They deleted their entire Ebay account instead of paying for the item they presumably had wanted to purchase. At that point I gave up. I think I have $14 in Ebay seller credit still in my account from 10 years ago. My guess is that there was some kind of malfunction or someone was using a bot to bid on particular products. Weird experience. I've moved to selling stuff on Craigslist, and never had a problem with a sale.
spinach 7y ago
You could try in person selling like on kijiji, I've sold a fair bit of stuff on there with no problem. I just meet in a public place (a nearby storefront) for safety.
Finnucane 7y ago
I’ve bought and sold a bunch of vintage camera stuff on eBay, and it’s mostly been okay. Just a hobby type thing for me. Not much in the last couple of years though. A couple of times there were minor issues. The fees really are bad, though.

jonknee 7y ago

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: > 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. 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.

palebluedot 7y ago
No, the article goes on to explicitly state: Data also shows the platform recently overtook competitor eBay, once a powerhouse in this space, in terms of quarterly sales.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  But that defeats the purpose of reading an article and pick and choose what you want to talk about.
  - jonknee 7y ago
    I read the article and the FT article, it's all about market cap. But since Shopify isn't actually a shopping site this is all a moot point.
- Guvante 7y ago
  The given link is hard pay walled and I don't see any more explanation of the number. Did they actually have more sales of consumer goods to consumers than eBay or are they saying the company which is on paper a competitor to eBay had more sales total which isn't the same thing. If you want to compare Amazon vs eBay as a platform you wouldn't look at AWS to give an example of what I am talking about.
- jonknee 7y ago
  But the link doesn't actually say that. It is also talking about market cap. From the Financial Times article: > The stock has climbed more than 150 per cent since the beginning of 2019, making Shopify more valuable than well-known internet companies including Twitter, Square and Spotify. Its market capitalisation — now more than $40bn — surpassed that of ecommerce pioneer eBay earlier this year. It's all rather silly, it's sort of like saying Square is the second largest seller of coffee because a lot of coffee shops transact with it. AWS also hosts a ton of other eCommerce infrastructure, we have to include all sales made using AWS if you want this sort of comparison. It's a bunch of nonsense. tl;dr If you sell shovels you can't claim you're one of the world's biggest miners.

paulpauper 7y ago

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.

jonknee 7y ago
This very website exists because this very thing was done 25 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb
james_s_tayler 7y ago
They also power a large number of real businesses too.

unvs 7y ago

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. [1] https://github.com/Shopify/slate https://github.com/Shopify/slate

otroquecorre 7y ago

Really? and what about Aliexpress? I think it could be on the top 5...

jsingleton 7y ago

They appear to take the environment seriously too, much like Stripe and some others. https://www.shopify.com/about/environment https://www.shopify.com/about/environment https://news.shopify.com/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon https://news.shopify.com/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon

cagataygurturk 7y ago

eBay Q2 2019 GMV is $22.6 billion whereas Shopify's is $13.8 billion. 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.

dragonsh 7y ago

An article put forward by marketing. Not sure why many HNr's like this kind of article. 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. 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. 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. 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. Someone from shopify's marketing might be working to contain critical comments.

freehunter 7y ago
In fact the founder of YC and HN has an essay decrying this exact kind of article: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
xal 7y ago
We really don't think these are good articles to be written about Shopify. Shopify is a company that got big by totally being in the background and making other brands look good instead of itself. I fear what happened in the last little while is that we became too big to be ignored and the Shopify vs Amazon vs Ebay angle seems to be the most accessible angle for writing. It seems to be working though, for whatever reason this made it on Hacker news even though in the same week as this article was written we also bought a robotics company for $450m to automated warehouses and announced a $5m carbon sequestration fund which should really be appreciated on hacker news. Alas we talk about GMV number comparisons.

iask 7y ago

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: 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. 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. The platform is for small self managed stores. It definitely has an A+ front end, but the backend needs to be more flexibility for the enterprise.

Axsuul 7y ago
Can I ask what sort of apps you were looking into?

ruchirule 7y ago

This had to happen as they are one of the mordern providers for shopping. Ebay is old, still one of the top sites but OLD!!!

stanislavb 7y ago

Note: Ruby on Rails cannot scale /sarcasm

allanmacgregor 7y ago
Well, you are assuming that the platform doesn't have any technology challenges or significant issues and/or drawbacks that might stem from the technology and current architecture. Hint: There is plenty of stuff like that.

aphroz 7y ago

What about chinese websites like tmall or taobao? They seems to have more visitors than Amazon, do they have less sales?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bgrynol 7y ago

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 1) It is an E-comm platform for selling Goods & Services 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) 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 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.