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Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal

212 points by elsewhen 6y ago

brianwawok 6y ago
Crazy time to be in e-commerce!!
delfinom 6y ago
O great, yet another site that'll be filled with fake reviews, shitty support and the like.
jasonlingx 6y ago
Amazon is likely grateful for the “competition” amid greater scrutiny from regulators around the world.
- alharith 6y ago
  I am not sure why people think Amazon is such a dominate force on the commerce front, especially with respects to Walarmt. It isn't even close between the two. I am more worried about the cloud technology space being down to basically two choices now.
  - flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
    Not sure where you live, but in Ontario Amazon delivery trucks outnumber all other delivery trucks combined. Seemingly 50% of every package sitting on anyone's doorstep has the familiar Amazon branded packing tape surrounding it as well. They're definitely dominant.
    - CountSessine 6y ago
      In Canada, yes - but only because of our awful CBSA, the absurdly low de minimus exception in NAFTA, and the fact that the Canadian retail sector is fat and uncompetitive (and yet Shopify is Canadian??!) Amazon is the only online retailer that’s figured out shipping and the CBSA here. Everyone else is awful. Walmart online ordering is awful. Home Depot is awful. What’s left of toys r us is awful. Canadian Tire online is so witheringly, eye-watering awful that it turned me off of even going to the store. Besides amazon, what else is there here?
      - WrkInProgress 6y ago
        That's a bit of hyperbole. Walmart, Costco, The Bay all did more than a billion in revenue for 2019. Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Home Depot had more than 500 million and less than a billion. They wouldn't be doing these numbers if the state of e-commerce was as "eye-watering awful" as you make it out to be. These numbers are for the Canadian market which ended with about 40 billion in total "e-commerce" sales for 2019.
        CountSessine 6y ago
        Online? Those are all great retailers in-store. But online? That’s their online revenue? I doubt it. Home Depot advertises 2 day shipping but then waits a week before actually starting the clock on their shipping. At least here in Canada. Walmart is the same. Let me tell you about ordering from Canadian tire online. I did this once. I chose in-store pickup. When I got to the service desk (which actually had an “online pickup” sign on it), and asked for my order, the staff looked at me like I was from Mars. And this was a showcase-store on Grandview here in Vancouver - not some backwater CDN tire off in Moose Jaw. Then they discovered that actually, they don’t have that item. The website said my order was ready to pick up, but they didn’t have it set aside and they didn’t even stock it and had no idea how this “online pickup” worked. So I asked for a refund. And they couldn’t do it! It’s a separate company and they didn’t even have my order in their system to be able to refund me! I asked them what I was supposed to do at that point, and the store manager (of the largest CDN tire store in vancouver) actually advised me to dispute the charge on my credit card and get the charge reversed! That’s eye-wateringly bad.
        WrkInProgress 6y ago
        Yes, that was their online sales revenue in 2019, unless you think giants like Wal Mart (with nearly 400 supercenter stores in Canada) and Costco are doing only 1 billion in brick and mortar sales. These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry. Your Canadian Tire anecdote sounds unbelievable unless it was many years ago. Canadian Tire is one of the few Canadian stores in 2020 where can check store stock/inventory online down to the aisle of the store. They had already started implementing pickup lockers in their store before covid. I've placed a few online orders with them and have never had any issues (including in store pickup). FYI, they did close to $600 million in e-commerce sales in 2019. Walmart, Loblaws, etc process same day grocery pickup online (and they did this before the pandemic). The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
    - WrkInProgress 6y ago
      Amazon.ca and Amazon.com accounted for about 10% of all e-commerce sales in Canada for 2019. I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"
      - alexashka 6y ago
        Can you provide a link for your stat? Link I found for 2018 e-commerce net sales in Canada [0] has amazon and amazon.ca combined for 4.7b, costco at 1b, walmart 0.9, apple 0.79, the bay 0.47 etc. So amazon eclipses the other other 7 competitors all on its own. [0] https://www.statista.com/forecasts/871090/canada-top-online-stores-canada-ecommercedb https://www.statista.com/forecasts/871090/canada-top-online-...
    - bestnameever 6y ago
      That doesn't say much about the volume. Most of my packages from Amazon will have just one item in it but when I go to a store, like walmart, I will more often than not have a cart of multiple items I am buying. I am not saying I represent everyone, but rather, it is hard to compare the two without knowing more data. IIRC, Amazon's total revenue is less than 300 billion while Walmarts is over 500 billion.
    - atwebb 6y ago
      Only anecdotal but Amazon has to deliver most goods, Walmart and other physical retailers can provide pickup services for online purchases (which I prefer for some goods).
  - FirefoxIsSlow 6y ago
    Especially if you actually care about price. Amazon isn't great.
    - alharith 6y ago
      Or quality, or getting what you actually paid for, or not supporting a wanna-be trillionare technocrat that would rather satisfy his fantasy to colonize mars than treat his warehouse workers humanely or help his neighbors here on earth in general.
  - petra 6y ago
    Amazon has 38% e-commerce market share, Walmart has 5.8%.
    - alharith 6y ago
      Note the key distinction I made: I said commerce in general, not strictly limited to e-commerce.
  - octodog 6y ago
    You're right that Walmart is massive but Amazon is the biggest ecommerce player in the US and it's not even close. 38% Amazon to next closest Walmart at 5.8% [1]. Pre-COVID Amazon was about 44%. [1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/walmart-surpasses-ebay-in-us-e-commerce-for-the-first-time-amazon-still-tops-emarketer-2020-06-15 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/walmart-surpasses-ebay-in-...
  - power78 6y ago
    Which third cloud provider aren't you considering, and why? Is it azure?
  - pgrote 6y ago
    > dominate force on the commerce front During the height of the pandemic Amazon's performance suffered for us. Prior to the pandemic 100% of our online purchases came from Amazon mostly due to inertia. Find something, order it, it shows up. Amazon faltered. Lots of things out of stock, delayed delivery, missing items in shipments. We then turned to ebay and shopify and experienced none of those things. The spending is probably now 50% ebay, 30% amazon and 20% shopify now. The decentralization approach to ecommerce is really coming through now ... at least for us. I was surprised what a great experience it was buying from ebay and shopify. I hope they don't work to centralize things in the future.
holidayacct 6y ago
I hope shopify understands the extremely long history of how walmart has dealt with their corporate partners in the past. Walmart typically extends a friendly hug and then slowly squeezes their corporate partners to death. They had better be ready to unravel the relationship at any sign of trouble and be working on a parallel plan to replace walmart. It seems like an unnecessary shorcut that may backfire.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Shopify* has three non-merchant-driven discovery channels now: Walmart, Facebook, and their own Shop app. I think Shopify is in a much better bargaining position than Walmart.
  - askafriend 6y ago
    [joke removed]
    - imjk 6y ago
      This is the first I’ve heard of this. Where have you heard this?
      - oxguy3 6y ago
        I think dannyw originally wrote "Spotify" instead of "Shopify", and askafriend was making a joke about it.
  - dmix 6y ago
    Is the Shop app popular? Just heard of this now.
    - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
      Very popular. It used to be a popular app called Arrive for automatically tracking packages by parsing tracking numbers from connected email accounts. Arrive was also the branding for shipping updates by check in Shopify Checkout on all Shopify based eCommerce sites. A few months ago Shopify: 1. Rebranded the app as "Shop" 2. Rebranded every Shopify site's checkout to "Shop Pay." 3. Began forcing users on Shopify based sites to create a "Shop" account at checkout 4. Changed the Arrive SMS shipping updates feature to text you an app store link for the Shop App (which you already have an account for now) 5. Integrated every item from every Shopify based eCommerce site with the Shop App for direct purchase, using the universal Shop account you just created. So they took an already popular app with high engagement, forced people to make accounts for it, used dark UX patterns to get millions to text themselves a download link. In a matter of months they went from being one of the largest eCommerce platforms for independent retailers to being a one-stop "shop" for every eCommerce site that used them, with millions of daily active users.
chirau 6y ago
Shopify is really going all out. Good for them. First the Facebook deal, now this.
yegle 6y ago
Dealing with third-party sellers is no fun. Newegg is probably the only major e-commerce website whose search feature can exclude third-party sellers.
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  You can do it on Walmart. In fact, I was just about to post that this announcement is a negative for me. I have such a hard time shopping on Amazon these days and tend to try Walmart first but always select Walmart.com from the retailer filter. I don't want to see a bunch of random junk that I have no desire to purchase.
  - yegle 6y ago
    Ah right, it was under the "retailer" filter (was looking for "Seller").
  - KWD 6y ago
    Having to do this is why Walmart is down my list of places I shop online. I'm not looking for third party sellers when I'm looking for a trusted company to buy from.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Newegg commingles inventory just like Amazon, so it's not much better. I don't know if Walmart does, but I try to spend money wherever I don't have to deal with sellers, and directly at the manufacturers website if possible nowadays.
  - Wingman4l7 6y ago
    I just don't understand why Amazon (and apparently Newegg) continue to do this. It's clear by now that sellers have abused it "launder" counterfeits into online retail fulfillment systems. Just charge an extra fee to the third-party seller to keep their inventory separate, have them stick a unique inventory barcode on it, and be done with it!
aritraghosh007 6y ago
Shopify clearly announced its intentions when it went ahead with Google Cloud couple years back and the bets placed are lining up pretty nicely with recent partnerships with Facebook and now Walmart. Although it also begs the question if Walmart's discontinuance of Jet.com might have prompted this deal? [1] 1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/walmart-says-it-will-discontinue-jet-com-which-it-acquired-for-3b-in-2016/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/walmart-says-it-will-disco...
codecamper 6y ago
Wow, Hacker News now used for stock pumping. nice. Now that the longs had their say, here is the short side. Shopify has an API. Someone wrote a plugin to allow a shop keeper to publish inventory into the Walmart API. When sellers sell on Walmart's platform, Shopify sees zero transactional revenue. That's the actual technical story. The linked "article" which actually included a quote from the COO includes a page of bullet points about how Shopify is really knocking it out of the park. Including the "Facebook deal". Actually the Facebook deal is FB pulling the cart & payments features into their FB & Instagram apps. So, effectively killing Shopify web store use. Apparently FB is doing something special for Shopify so that Shopify can charge 2% on top of FB's 5% fee. But sellers can also just make their shops directly on FB and skip the 2% Shopify surcharge. I would have expected fellow programmers to understand a bit of math & show some constraint with bubble valuation stocks!
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  I think healthy skepticism is in order, but for now the markets have spoken. We'll have to wait for future earning reports to see what effect this has.
- bitxbit 6y ago
  This. I simply don’t get the hype behind Shopify. They’re not making money even this year. That’s saying a lot about the business model which is why they are forced to show “fluff” top line growth through these deals. The problem Shopify solves in the e-commerce space is really trivial. If anything, the real gem of this decade is Stripe.
- thaway757383884 6y ago
  So sellers will create a different FB shop, a different Walmart shop, a different website shop, download and pay for a whole bunch of software to keep all the inventory in sync, and have to merge different interfaces and APIs to try and figure out what their final sales, revenue, etc are. Or they can use Shopify and get all of those, and manage their inventory, and pricing, and shipping rules, etc all from one place and pay Shopify a few hundred dollars a year, when they would have paid thousands in software annually to replicate the same anyways. Yeah, I can totally see why they would go the non Shopify route.
duud 6y ago
If well executed, Facebook Shops has the potential to crush both Shopify and Amazon. FB Marketplace already has 800 million monthly users, more than Amazon and eBay combined.
- bitxbit 6y ago
  It’s really Instagram right? I want to say something like 95% of small shops selling under Shopify market under Instagram. It’s just that Facebook never took e-commerce seriously enough. If they spent _some_ capital in more useful endeavors oppose to Zuckerberg’s flavor of the year projects such as Libra, FB would be as big as AMZN. They have all the infrastructure already in place to pull it off.
- pgrote 6y ago
  >800 million monthly users What is a monthly user? What part of the facebook ecommerce platform did they use? Facebook has the centralized marketplace, many local/regional sales groups and paid advertising.
donogh 6y ago
(Disclaimer: I work in the e-commerce space.) I have to say I'm concerned about Shopify's growing dominance in the e-commerce market. They're selling a 'David vs Goliath' story about taking on Amazon, while at the same time becoming a Goliath themselves. They are gradually building what seems to be an unassailable lead: preferential card processing rates with Stripe, hard-to-match discounts on shipping with the major logistics companies, warehousing to help retailers fulfil products, an anti-competitive app only for Shopify retailers, an exclusive arrangement with Facebook for Facebook Shops, and now a partnership with Walmart. They are rapidly becoming the next FAANG.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Why is that a bad thing? The point of capitalism is that a company will grow if it can grow. We let Amazon do it why not this? Anyways it's better that Amazon has competition minimally, right?
  - donogh 6y ago
    True that it’s good to see competition for Amazon. So long as they don’t have exclusivity with Walmart and Facebook Shops, I don’t see a problem.
- goatherders 6y ago
  WooCommerce still powers more eCom sites than Shopify. Shopify is definitely growing, but this is a place where OSS is and will continue to be a quality alternative that owns a lot of the market.
  - donogh 6y ago
    That’s a fair point. It is still a healthy market. I hope Facebook and Walmart don’t preclude other platforms and non-Shopify retailers.
- adventured 6y ago
  > They are rapidly becoming the next FAANG. Shopify isn't remotely close to joining the big tech club, outside of their comically inflated bubble valuation (trading for 56 times sales). Let's compare, trailing four quarters. Amazon, $296b sales, $14b operating income Apple, $268b sales, $65b operating income Alphabet, $166b sales, $35b operating income Microsoft, $138b sales, $52b operating income Facebook, $73b sales, $26b operating income Netflix, $21b sales, $3b operating income Shopify, $1.7b sales, negative $178m operating income One of these is very much not like the others. Investors think they've found the next Amazon, it's not. It's a slightly better Etsy as a business, and if they're really lucky, in 10 years they might be an eBay. Amazon is only what it is today, thanks to the AWS margins and op profit (not because of its retail business, which has very low growth and terrible margins). There's no evidence of stellar margins hiding in Shopify's business. 14 years, zero profit, and a weak gross profit margin (eBay's gross profit margin is 2x that of Shopify, and was even better in years past; even Etsy has a far better gross profit margin). Compare Square to Shopify to further amplify the obviousness of the context: Square has $5.1b in sales (3x larger, trading for 8 times sales), an operating profit for 2019, still growing fast, and is worth about 2/5 what Shopify is. SHOP's valuation is obviously lunacy, which is quite common in this market at the moment (the Dave Portnoy market). See: Nikola or most any cloud company. It'll end in tears or a decade-long stagnation in the stock, there are no other possibilities. How long will it take SHOP to generate a $3b annual profit? That's the future stagnation clue, their market cap represents a decade or more of returns pulled forward (if everything goes right for them). The only thing qualifying SHOP for consideration among big tech, is their market cap. If we were going to spread the insanity around more evenly, ETSY, adjusting for its slower growth rate relative to SHOP, should have a $25-$30 billion market cap. Every investor generation thinks their bubble is the one that is different and is going to last.
jpm_sd 6y ago
I wonder if Shopify is going to help Walmart with warehouse automation as part of this deal. Last year, they purchased 6 River Systems (https://6river.com/ https://6river.com/), a company very similar to Kiva (Amazon Robotics). https://xconomy.com/boston/2019/09/10/shopify-buys-6-river-systems-for-450m-to-boost-new-fulfillment-centers/ https://xconomy.com/boston/2019/09/10/shopify-buys-6-river-s...
jellicle 6y ago
Amazon has a "good" part: high quality goods of known provenance delivered quickly. Consumers love this part. And they have a bad part: random sellers with zero vetting selling garbage from an infinite number of procedurally-generated storefronts (love buying from Cayzzzqq, that's the store for me!). Consumers hate this part. (I ignore the human costs of Amazon's warehouses and look only at consumer perception.) Walmart sees this and decides: let's double down on the bad part!
dmalik 6y ago
This expands what merchants can do with the Shopify platform. Both Facebook and Walmart are channels for Shopify merchants to post their merchandise. Amazon has been one for a while. There are a lot more in their app store - https://apps.shopify.com/collections/sales-channels https://apps.shopify.com/collections/sales-channels
12bits 6y ago
In all honesty who is buying from these third parties, if something on Amazon isn’t fulfilled via Amazon, I’m not buying. If I’m looking for something on Best Buy the first thing I’m doing is looking for the Best Buy only toggle. Is it strictly to make points on the vendors sales? To give a false appearance of massive inventory? Could a third party vendor list “Item A” on eBay, Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart and have access to cross site APIs that when “Item A” is sold it’s removed from all market places? As a Canuck I’m happy for Shopify, as consumer I’m losing interest in online shopping, which might be futile with how everything is trending.
- jcomis 6y ago
  basically most people don't look or understand who they are buying from. They just click buy.
  - 12bits 6y ago
    Same reason phishing is a profession I suppose lol
    - sutterbomb 6y ago
      Not really at all, have you considered that not everyone shares your preferences? That's usually a good place to start.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  I opened a Wal-Mart account precisely because I needed to buy a specialty tool from a vendor that was on Amazon but I couldn't purchase because of "reserved for Prime" BS. The same vendor magically had it available via Wally world. Amazon doesn't have everything in house.
  - 12bits 6y ago
    That's fair, I personally avoid those third party sellers for the off chance you get ripped off or get a bootleg/knock off. I hope your experience(s) had neither of those?
mtnGoat 6y ago
I am not sure why this is getting much attention. Walmart is selective about which merchants they will take and Shopify is estimating only 1.200 will be onboarded by years end. Shopify claims to have 500,000 stores so this penetration is so minuscule its really not worth mentioning. In the same vein, this was all already possible using a couple of third-party Shopify Apps and merchants have already been doing this for years. All I see is PR being created to drive stock price?

212 points by elsewhen 6y ago

brianwawok 6y ago

Crazy time to be in e-commerce!!

delfinom 6y ago

O great, yet another site that'll be filled with fake reviews, shitty support and the like.

jasonlingx 6y ago

Amazon is likely grateful for the “competition” amid greater scrutiny from regulators around the world.

alharith 6y ago
I am not sure why people think Amazon is such a dominate force on the commerce front, especially with respects to Walarmt. It isn't even close between the two. I am more worried about the cloud technology space being down to basically two choices now.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
  Not sure where you live, but in Ontario Amazon delivery trucks outnumber all other delivery trucks combined. Seemingly 50% of every package sitting on anyone's doorstep has the familiar Amazon branded packing tape surrounding it as well. They're definitely dominant.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    In Canada, yes - but only because of our awful CBSA, the absurdly low de minimus exception in NAFTA, and the fact that the Canadian retail sector is fat and uncompetitive (and yet Shopify is Canadian??!) Amazon is the only online retailer that’s figured out shipping and the CBSA here. Everyone else is awful. Walmart online ordering is awful. Home Depot is awful. What’s left of toys r us is awful. Canadian Tire online is so witheringly, eye-watering awful that it turned me off of even going to the store. Besides amazon, what else is there here?
    - WrkInProgress 6y ago
      That's a bit of hyperbole. Walmart, Costco, The Bay all did more than a billion in revenue for 2019. Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Home Depot had more than 500 million and less than a billion. They wouldn't be doing these numbers if the state of e-commerce was as "eye-watering awful" as you make it out to be. These numbers are for the Canadian market which ended with about 40 billion in total "e-commerce" sales for 2019.
      - CountSessine 6y ago
        Online? Those are all great retailers in-store. But online? That’s their online revenue? I doubt it. Home Depot advertises 2 day shipping but then waits a week before actually starting the clock on their shipping. At least here in Canada. Walmart is the same. Let me tell you about ordering from Canadian tire online. I did this once. I chose in-store pickup. When I got to the service desk (which actually had an “online pickup” sign on it), and asked for my order, the staff looked at me like I was from Mars. And this was a showcase-store on Grandview here in Vancouver - not some backwater CDN tire off in Moose Jaw. Then they discovered that actually, they don’t have that item. The website said my order was ready to pick up, but they didn’t have it set aside and they didn’t even stock it and had no idea how this “online pickup” worked. So I asked for a refund. And they couldn’t do it! It’s a separate company and they didn’t even have my order in their system to be able to refund me! I asked them what I was supposed to do at that point, and the store manager (of the largest CDN tire store in vancouver) actually advised me to dispute the charge on my credit card and get the charge reversed! That’s eye-wateringly bad.
        WrkInProgress 6y ago
        Yes, that was their online sales revenue in 2019, unless you think giants like Wal Mart (with nearly 400 supercenter stores in Canada) and Costco are doing only 1 billion in brick and mortar sales. These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry. Your Canadian Tire anecdote sounds unbelievable unless it was many years ago. Canadian Tire is one of the few Canadian stores in 2020 where can check store stock/inventory online down to the aisle of the store. They had already started implementing pickup lockers in their store before covid. I've placed a few online orders with them and have never had any issues (including in store pickup). FYI, they did close to $600 million in e-commerce sales in 2019. Walmart, Loblaws, etc process same day grocery pickup online (and they did this before the pandemic). The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
  - WrkInProgress 6y ago
    Amazon.ca and Amazon.com accounted for about 10% of all e-commerce sales in Canada for 2019. I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"
    - alexashka 6y ago
      Can you provide a link for your stat? Link I found for 2018 e-commerce net sales in Canada [0] has amazon and amazon.ca combined for 4.7b, costco at 1b, walmart 0.9, apple 0.79, the bay 0.47 etc. So amazon eclipses the other other 7 competitors all on its own. [0] https://www.statista.com/forecasts/871090/canada-top-online-stores-canada-ecommercedb https://www.statista.com/forecasts/871090/canada-top-online-...
  - bestnameever 6y ago
    That doesn't say much about the volume. Most of my packages from Amazon will have just one item in it but when I go to a store, like walmart, I will more often than not have a cart of multiple items I am buying. I am not saying I represent everyone, but rather, it is hard to compare the two without knowing more data. IIRC, Amazon's total revenue is less than 300 billion while Walmarts is over 500 billion.
  - atwebb 6y ago
    Only anecdotal but Amazon has to deliver most goods, Walmart and other physical retailers can provide pickup services for online purchases (which I prefer for some goods).
- FirefoxIsSlow 6y ago
  Especially if you actually care about price. Amazon isn't great.
  - alharith 6y ago
    Or quality, or getting what you actually paid for, or not supporting a wanna-be trillionare technocrat that would rather satisfy his fantasy to colonize mars than treat his warehouse workers humanely or help his neighbors here on earth in general.
- petra 6y ago
  Amazon has 38% e-commerce market share, Walmart has 5.8%.
  - alharith 6y ago
    Note the key distinction I made: I said commerce in general, not strictly limited to e-commerce.
- octodog 6y ago
  You're right that Walmart is massive but Amazon is the biggest ecommerce player in the US and it's not even close. 38% Amazon to next closest Walmart at 5.8% [1]. Pre-COVID Amazon was about 44%. [1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/walmart-surpasses-ebay-in-us-e-commerce-for-the-first-time-amazon-still-tops-emarketer-2020-06-15 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/walmart-surpasses-ebay-in-...
- power78 6y ago
  Which third cloud provider aren't you considering, and why? Is it azure?
- pgrote 6y ago
  > dominate force on the commerce front During the height of the pandemic Amazon's performance suffered for us. Prior to the pandemic 100% of our online purchases came from Amazon mostly due to inertia. Find something, order it, it shows up. Amazon faltered. Lots of things out of stock, delayed delivery, missing items in shipments. We then turned to ebay and shopify and experienced none of those things. The spending is probably now 50% ebay, 30% amazon and 20% shopify now. The decentralization approach to ecommerce is really coming through now ... at least for us. I was surprised what a great experience it was buying from ebay and shopify. I hope they don't work to centralize things in the future.

holidayacct 6y ago

I hope shopify understands the extremely long history of how walmart has dealt with their corporate partners in the past. Walmart typically extends a friendly hug and then slowly squeezes their corporate partners to death. They had better be ready to unravel the relationship at any sign of trouble and be working on a parallel plan to replace walmart. It seems like an unnecessary shorcut that may backfire.

dannyw 6y ago
Shopify* has three non-merchant-driven discovery channels now: Walmart, Facebook, and their own Shop app. I think Shopify is in a much better bargaining position than Walmart.
- askafriend 6y ago
  [joke removed]
  - imjk 6y ago
    This is the first I’ve heard of this. Where have you heard this?
    - oxguy3 6y ago
      I think dannyw originally wrote "Spotify" instead of "Shopify", and askafriend was making a joke about it.
- dmix 6y ago
  Is the Shop app popular? Just heard of this now.
  - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
    Very popular. It used to be a popular app called Arrive for automatically tracking packages by parsing tracking numbers from connected email accounts. Arrive was also the branding for shipping updates by check in Shopify Checkout on all Shopify based eCommerce sites. A few months ago Shopify: 1. Rebranded the app as "Shop" 2. Rebranded every Shopify site's checkout to "Shop Pay." 3. Began forcing users on Shopify based sites to create a "Shop" account at checkout 4. Changed the Arrive SMS shipping updates feature to text you an app store link for the Shop App (which you already have an account for now) 5. Integrated every item from every Shopify based eCommerce site with the Shop App for direct purchase, using the universal Shop account you just created. So they took an already popular app with high engagement, forced people to make accounts for it, used dark UX patterns to get millions to text themselves a download link. In a matter of months they went from being one of the largest eCommerce platforms for independent retailers to being a one-stop "shop" for every eCommerce site that used them, with millions of daily active users.

chirau 6y ago

Shopify is really going all out. Good for them. First the Facebook deal, now this.

yegle 6y ago

Dealing with third-party sellers is no fun. Newegg is probably the only major e-commerce website whose search feature can exclude third-party sellers.

pottertheotter 6y ago
You can do it on Walmart. In fact, I was just about to post that this announcement is a negative for me. I have such a hard time shopping on Amazon these days and tend to try Walmart first but always select Walmart.com from the retailer filter. I don't want to see a bunch of random junk that I have no desire to purchase.
- yegle 6y ago
  Ah right, it was under the "retailer" filter (was looking for "Seller").
- KWD 6y ago
  Having to do this is why Walmart is down my list of places I shop online. I'm not looking for third party sellers when I'm looking for a trusted company to buy from.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
Newegg commingles inventory just like Amazon, so it's not much better. I don't know if Walmart does, but I try to spend money wherever I don't have to deal with sellers, and directly at the manufacturers website if possible nowadays.
- Wingman4l7 6y ago
  I just don't understand why Amazon (and apparently Newegg) continue to do this. It's clear by now that sellers have abused it "launder" counterfeits into online retail fulfillment systems. Just charge an extra fee to the third-party seller to keep their inventory separate, have them stick a unique inventory barcode on it, and be done with it!

aritraghosh007 6y ago

Shopify clearly announced its intentions when it went ahead with Google Cloud couple years back and the bets placed are lining up pretty nicely with recent partnerships with Facebook and now Walmart. Although it also begs the question if Walmart's discontinuance of Jet.com might have prompted this deal? [1] 1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/walmart-says-it-will-discontinue-jet-com-which-it-acquired-for-3b-in-2016/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/walmart-says-it-will-disco...

codecamper 6y ago

Wow, Hacker News now used for stock pumping. nice. Now that the longs had their say, here is the short side. Shopify has an API. Someone wrote a plugin to allow a shop keeper to publish inventory into the Walmart API. When sellers sell on Walmart's platform, Shopify sees zero transactional revenue. That's the actual technical story. The linked "article" which actually included a quote from the COO includes a page of bullet points about how Shopify is really knocking it out of the park. Including the "Facebook deal". Actually the Facebook deal is FB pulling the cart & payments features into their FB & Instagram apps. So, effectively killing Shopify web store use. Apparently FB is doing something special for Shopify so that Shopify can charge 2% on top of FB's 5% fee. But sellers can also just make their shops directly on FB and skip the 2% Shopify surcharge. I would have expected fellow programmers to understand a bit of math & show some constraint with bubble valuation stocks!

joelbluminator 6y ago
I think healthy skepticism is in order, but for now the markets have spoken. We'll have to wait for future earning reports to see what effect this has.
bitxbit 6y ago
This. I simply don’t get the hype behind Shopify. They’re not making money even this year. That’s saying a lot about the business model which is why they are forced to show “fluff” top line growth through these deals. The problem Shopify solves in the e-commerce space is really trivial. If anything, the real gem of this decade is Stripe.
thaway757383884 6y ago
So sellers will create a different FB shop, a different Walmart shop, a different website shop, download and pay for a whole bunch of software to keep all the inventory in sync, and have to merge different interfaces and APIs to try and figure out what their final sales, revenue, etc are. Or they can use Shopify and get all of those, and manage their inventory, and pricing, and shipping rules, etc all from one place and pay Shopify a few hundred dollars a year, when they would have paid thousands in software annually to replicate the same anyways. Yeah, I can totally see why they would go the non Shopify route.

duud 6y ago

If well executed, Facebook Shops has the potential to crush both Shopify and Amazon. FB Marketplace already has 800 million monthly users, more than Amazon and eBay combined.

bitxbit 6y ago
It’s really Instagram right? I want to say something like 95% of small shops selling under Shopify market under Instagram. It’s just that Facebook never took e-commerce seriously enough. If they spent _some_ capital in more useful endeavors oppose to Zuckerberg’s flavor of the year projects such as Libra, FB would be as big as AMZN. They have all the infrastructure already in place to pull it off.
pgrote 6y ago
>800 million monthly users What is a monthly user? What part of the facebook ecommerce platform did they use? Facebook has the centralized marketplace, many local/regional sales groups and paid advertising.

donogh 6y ago

(Disclaimer: I work in the e-commerce space.) I have to say I'm concerned about Shopify's growing dominance in the e-commerce market. They're selling a 'David vs Goliath' story about taking on Amazon, while at the same time becoming a Goliath themselves. They are gradually building what seems to be an unassailable lead: preferential card processing rates with Stripe, hard-to-match discounts on shipping with the major logistics companies, warehousing to help retailers fulfil products, an anti-competitive app only for Shopify retailers, an exclusive arrangement with Facebook for Facebook Shops, and now a partnership with Walmart. They are rapidly becoming the next FAANG.

ramraj07 6y ago
Why is that a bad thing? The point of capitalism is that a company will grow if it can grow. We let Amazon do it why not this? Anyways it's better that Amazon has competition minimally, right?
- donogh 6y ago
  True that it’s good to see competition for Amazon. So long as they don’t have exclusivity with Walmart and Facebook Shops, I don’t see a problem.
goatherders 6y ago
WooCommerce still powers more eCom sites than Shopify. Shopify is definitely growing, but this is a place where OSS is and will continue to be a quality alternative that owns a lot of the market.
- donogh 6y ago
  That’s a fair point. It is still a healthy market. I hope Facebook and Walmart don’t preclude other platforms and non-Shopify retailers.
adventured 6y ago
> They are rapidly becoming the next FAANG. Shopify isn't remotely close to joining the big tech club, outside of their comically inflated bubble valuation (trading for 56 times sales). Let's compare, trailing four quarters. Amazon, $296b sales, $14b operating income Apple, $268b sales, $65b operating income Alphabet, $166b sales, $35b operating income Microsoft, $138b sales, $52b operating income Facebook, $73b sales, $26b operating income Netflix, $21b sales, $3b operating income Shopify, $1.7b sales, negative $178m operating income One of these is very much not like the others. Investors think they've found the next Amazon, it's not. It's a slightly better Etsy as a business, and if they're really lucky, in 10 years they might be an eBay. Amazon is only what it is today, thanks to the AWS margins and op profit (not because of its retail business, which has very low growth and terrible margins). There's no evidence of stellar margins hiding in Shopify's business. 14 years, zero profit, and a weak gross profit margin (eBay's gross profit margin is 2x that of Shopify, and was even better in years past; even Etsy has a far better gross profit margin). Compare Square to Shopify to further amplify the obviousness of the context: Square has $5.1b in sales (3x larger, trading for 8 times sales), an operating profit for 2019, still growing fast, and is worth about 2/5 what Shopify is. SHOP's valuation is obviously lunacy, which is quite common in this market at the moment (the Dave Portnoy market). See: Nikola or most any cloud company. It'll end in tears or a decade-long stagnation in the stock, there are no other possibilities. How long will it take SHOP to generate a $3b annual profit? That's the future stagnation clue, their market cap represents a decade or more of returns pulled forward (if everything goes right for them). The only thing qualifying SHOP for consideration among big tech, is their market cap. If we were going to spread the insanity around more evenly, ETSY, adjusting for its slower growth rate relative to SHOP, should have a $25-$30 billion market cap. Every investor generation thinks their bubble is the one that is different and is going to last.

jpm_sd 6y ago

I wonder if Shopify is going to help Walmart with warehouse automation as part of this deal. Last year, they purchased 6 River Systems (https://6river.com/ https://6river.com/), a company very similar to Kiva (Amazon Robotics). https://xconomy.com/boston/2019/09/10/shopify-buys-6-river-systems-for-450m-to-boost-new-fulfillment-centers/ https://xconomy.com/boston/2019/09/10/shopify-buys-6-river-s...

jellicle 6y ago

Amazon has a "good" part: high quality goods of known provenance delivered quickly. Consumers love this part. And they have a bad part: random sellers with zero vetting selling garbage from an infinite number of procedurally-generated storefronts (love buying from Cayzzzqq, that's the store for me!). Consumers hate this part. (I ignore the human costs of Amazon's warehouses and look only at consumer perception.) Walmart sees this and decides: let's double down on the bad part!

dmalik 6y ago

This expands what merchants can do with the Shopify platform. Both Facebook and Walmart are channels for Shopify merchants to post their merchandise. Amazon has been one for a while. There are a lot more in their app store - https://apps.shopify.com/collections/sales-channels https://apps.shopify.com/collections/sales-channels

12bits 6y ago

In all honesty who is buying from these third parties, if something on Amazon isn’t fulfilled via Amazon, I’m not buying. If I’m looking for something on Best Buy the first thing I’m doing is looking for the Best Buy only toggle. Is it strictly to make points on the vendors sales? To give a false appearance of massive inventory? Could a third party vendor list “Item A” on eBay, Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart and have access to cross site APIs that when “Item A” is sold it’s removed from all market places? As a Canuck I’m happy for Shopify, as consumer I’m losing interest in online shopping, which might be futile with how everything is trending.

jcomis 6y ago
basically most people don't look or understand who they are buying from. They just click buy.
- 12bits 6y ago
  Same reason phishing is a profession I suppose lol
  - sutterbomb 6y ago
    Not really at all, have you considered that not everyone shares your preferences? That's usually a good place to start.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
I opened a Wal-Mart account precisely because I needed to buy a specialty tool from a vendor that was on Amazon but I couldn't purchase because of "reserved for Prime" BS. The same vendor magically had it available via Wally world. Amazon doesn't have everything in house.
- 12bits 6y ago
  That's fair, I personally avoid those third party sellers for the off chance you get ripped off or get a bootleg/knock off. I hope your experience(s) had neither of those?

mtnGoat 6y ago

I am not sure why this is getting much attention. Walmart is selective about which merchants they will take and Shopify is estimating only 1.200 will be onboarded by years end. Shopify claims to have 500,000 stores so this penetration is so minuscule its really not worth mentioning. In the same vein, this was all already possible using a couple of third-party Shopify Apps and merchants have already been doing this for years. All I see is PR being created to drive stock price?