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The main issue with BigCommerce is that they do not offer any compelling advantage over existing open source system. Moreover being a loss making entity like Sh

The main issue with BigCommerce is that they do not offer any compelling advantage over existing open source system. Moreover being a loss making entity like Shopify without any sticky system like marketplace which drives traffic, I doubt there is much value in it except that investors wants to cash-out given the current unrealistic stock market. In case a company use magento [1], Saleor [2], Sylius [3], Shuup [4], Solidus [5], Spree [6] combined with vue-storefront [7], storefront UI [8] and openflutttercommerce app [9] the amount of efforts to build a highly resilient and functional system is cheaper with complete control over customer, supply chain, pricing, product, marketing, sales and promotion data. Also the efforts will be similar to using shopify, bigcommerce with more cost-savings. Indeed shopify itself use many components from rails eco-system built by Spree and Solidus community. Its very easy to build a highly customized and resilient system using cloud offering combined with these open source systems. So I do not see why a mid-size business will choose shopify or bigcommerce. They are good for mom-pop shops and simple commerce, but for unique shopping experience they fall short and better to build customized one with complete control. [1] https://github.com/magento/magento2 https://github.com/magento/magento2 [2] https://github.com/mirumee/saleor https://github.com/mirumee/saleor [3] https://github.com/Sylius/Sylius https://github.com/Sylius/Sylius [4] https://github.com/shuup/shuup https://github.com/shuup/shuup [5] https://github.com/solidusio/solidus https://github.com/solidusio/solidus [6] https://github.com/spree/spree https://github.com/spree/spree [7] https://github.com/vuestorefront/vue-storefront https://github.com/vuestorefront/vue-storefront [8] https://github.com/Divanteltd/storefront-ui https://github.com/Divanteltd/storefront-ui [9] https://github.com/4seer/openflutterecommerceapp https://github.com/4seer/openflutterecommerceapp

nl 6y ago
Shopify is profitable[1] even with the high levels of growth they are undergoing. There's little reason to think BigCommerce would be anything else. Most commerce companies don't want or need complete control. They want a unique look and feel (which Shopify/BigCommerce gives) but beyond they they want reliability and ease of integration with things like stock control. [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200212005238/en/Shopify-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Full-Year-2019-Financial-Results https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200212005238/en/Sho...
- dragonsh 6y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble Shopify is loss making except when it was itself a small service provider. In 2020 has a loss of 132 million dollars so far. It's a listed entity so you can check Income, Balance Sheet and Cashflow. The most important thing cashflow and Incomes both are negative for shopify. Since it's listing never made a single dime of profit. So please before putting a link to news verify on their annual reports [1]. 2019-12-30: Total Revenue: 1.578173 billion dollars Operating Income : -141.147 million dollars Net Income: -124.842 million dollars (i.e. loss of 125 million dollars) To this month (TTM): Total Revenue: 1.727692 billion dollars Operating Income: -178.590 million dollars Net Income: -132.120 million dollars (i.e. loss of 132 million dollars) [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHOP/financials?p=SHOP https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHOP/financials?p=SHOP
  - nl 6y ago
    > So please before putting a link to news verify on their annual reports The link I had in my comment was to their 2019-12-30 financial release to the SEC. It has the same 2019 information you have: Net income (loss): (124,842) But that includes their selling and marketing expenses of over $400M, and their cash and cash equivalents at hand went from $1.97B (2018) to $2.46B (2019). They are making lots of money and they have good accountants. Astonishing..
    - dragonsh 6y ago
      > They have good accountant That’s true their accountant are good at sugar-coating the bad state of company, negative cashflow along with net income loss which is consistently increasing since listing. Not making one dime in profit and still claim profitable business. For $1 revenue they spend more than $1, so sorry they are loss making company not profitable and on top due to negative cash-flow much worse. The numbers speaks for itself without sugar coating that shopify is loss making venture. As long as investors money through stocks will keep coming they will survive and will be bought out by someone one day to cash-out those investors. Anyways with cost of borrowing 0, sooner or later someone will acquire it.
caseysoftware 6y ago
> Its very easy to build a highly customized and resilient system using cloud offering combined with these open source systems. For you, maybe. Odds are for every person with the knowhow to do this, there are 100+ who don't even know what "open source" is, let alone have the skills and understanding to even attempt what you describe. Even among those who know what it is and might consider doing it, some portion rather spend their time selling their products (aka making money) rather than doing a bunch of things that might get them ready to make money at some point in the future.
- dragonsh 6y ago
  For those 100+ there are many companies and service provider which will help them built a highly customized and resilient system based on these open source that too with better flexibility and still very cost effective. The advantage offered by Shopify and Bigcommerce is good for companies with few SKU's or mom-pop kind of stores. If you really go through the links you can see the quality of the code and ease of use, its much better than what's offered by both Shopify and BigCommerce. Also as the source is under the company using the system, they maintain a full control over their own destiny instead of depending on the whims of Shopify and BigCommerce.
  - arcturus17 6y ago
    > If you really go through the links you can see the quality of the code and ease of use Disagree on this completely; I've studied this space before and using something like Spree and Saleor seems like a world of trouble unless you are willing to commit significant, permanent, and highly specialized development resources to it. Also, the ecosystems for many of the solutions you describe are quite fragmented and niche; I looked into Spree / Solidus / Saleor devs in my country and couldn't find one, whereas I could find thousands for other more popular (PHP-based) solutions. In my case this would mean that if you wanted to hire local Python / Rails devs, you would have to train every single one of them in the use of the framework. Finally, I don't think these solutions are as fully featured as some of their competitors. In my comparison I saw that Spree had a plugin for bundled products but the code repo looked desolate, full of issues and left to rot for years, whereas many others had much better support baked in. Due to all of the above, many medium-sized companies with typical use cases are going to be better served by a more out-of-the-box solution, rather than taking charge of a Rails or Python codebase that's going to grow wild with custom code. As for Shopify, it's definitely not for mom and pops anymore - they are serving massive customers throught their Plus offering, and their move to an open and comprehensive API (with both REST and GraphQL) allows anyone to build highly customized headless apps around it.
byroot 6y ago
> Indeed shopify itself use many components from rails eco-system built by Spree and Solidus community. I highly doubt that. Which ones do you have in mind?
agustif 6y ago
I would add vendure.io to the list. It's an awesome TypeScript/NestJS/Vue modular e-commerce FOSS. and Michael is a great stweard too, can't recommend it enough: https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/ https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/
tomphoolery 6y ago
https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea is another great choice.

nl 6y ago

Shopify is profitable[1] even with the high levels of growth they are undergoing. There's little reason to think BigCommerce would be anything else. Most commerce companies don't want or need complete control. They want a unique look and feel (which Shopify/BigCommerce gives) but beyond they they want reliability and ease of integration with things like stock control. [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200212005238/en/Shopify-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Full-Year-2019-Financial-Results https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200212005238/en/Sho...

dragonsh 6y ago
Sorry to burst your bubble Shopify is loss making except when it was itself a small service provider. In 2020 has a loss of 132 million dollars so far. It's a listed entity so you can check Income, Balance Sheet and Cashflow. The most important thing cashflow and Incomes both are negative for shopify. Since it's listing never made a single dime of profit. So please before putting a link to news verify on their annual reports [1]. 2019-12-30: Total Revenue: 1.578173 billion dollars Operating Income : -141.147 million dollars Net Income: -124.842 million dollars (i.e. loss of 125 million dollars) To this month (TTM): Total Revenue: 1.727692 billion dollars Operating Income: -178.590 million dollars Net Income: -132.120 million dollars (i.e. loss of 132 million dollars) [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHOP/financials?p=SHOP https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHOP/financials?p=SHOP
- nl 6y ago
  > So please before putting a link to news verify on their annual reports The link I had in my comment was to their 2019-12-30 financial release to the SEC. It has the same 2019 information you have: Net income (loss): (124,842) But that includes their selling and marketing expenses of over $400M, and their cash and cash equivalents at hand went from $1.97B (2018) to $2.46B (2019). They are making lots of money and they have good accountants. Astonishing..
  - dragonsh 6y ago
    > They have good accountant That’s true their accountant are good at sugar-coating the bad state of company, negative cashflow along with net income loss which is consistently increasing since listing. Not making one dime in profit and still claim profitable business. For $1 revenue they spend more than $1, so sorry they are loss making company not profitable and on top due to negative cash-flow much worse. The numbers speaks for itself without sugar coating that shopify is loss making venture. As long as investors money through stocks will keep coming they will survive and will be bought out by someone one day to cash-out those investors. Anyways with cost of borrowing 0, sooner or later someone will acquire it.

caseysoftware 6y ago

> Its very easy to build a highly customized and resilient system using cloud offering combined with these open source systems. For you, maybe. Odds are for every person with the knowhow to do this, there are 100+ who don't even know what "open source" is, let alone have the skills and understanding to even attempt what you describe. Even among those who know what it is and might consider doing it, some portion rather spend their time selling their products (aka making money) rather than doing a bunch of things that might get them ready to make money at some point in the future.

dragonsh 6y ago
For those 100+ there are many companies and service provider which will help them built a highly customized and resilient system based on these open source that too with better flexibility and still very cost effective. The advantage offered by Shopify and Bigcommerce is good for companies with few SKU's or mom-pop kind of stores. If you really go through the links you can see the quality of the code and ease of use, its much better than what's offered by both Shopify and BigCommerce. Also as the source is under the company using the system, they maintain a full control over their own destiny instead of depending on the whims of Shopify and BigCommerce.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  > If you really go through the links you can see the quality of the code and ease of use Disagree on this completely; I've studied this space before and using something like Spree and Saleor seems like a world of trouble unless you are willing to commit significant, permanent, and highly specialized development resources to it. Also, the ecosystems for many of the solutions you describe are quite fragmented and niche; I looked into Spree / Solidus / Saleor devs in my country and couldn't find one, whereas I could find thousands for other more popular (PHP-based) solutions. In my case this would mean that if you wanted to hire local Python / Rails devs, you would have to train every single one of them in the use of the framework. Finally, I don't think these solutions are as fully featured as some of their competitors. In my comparison I saw that Spree had a plugin for bundled products but the code repo looked desolate, full of issues and left to rot for years, whereas many others had much better support baked in. Due to all of the above, many medium-sized companies with typical use cases are going to be better served by a more out-of-the-box solution, rather than taking charge of a Rails or Python codebase that's going to grow wild with custom code. As for Shopify, it's definitely not for mom and pops anymore - they are serving massive customers throught their Plus offering, and their move to an open and comprehensive API (with both REST and GraphQL) allows anyone to build highly customized headless apps around it.

byroot 6y ago

> Indeed shopify itself use many components from rails eco-system built by Spree and Solidus community. I highly doubt that. Which ones do you have in mind?

agustif 6y ago

I would add vendure.io to the list. It's an awesome TypeScript/NestJS/Vue modular e-commerce FOSS. and Michael is a great stweard too, can't recommend it enough: https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/ https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/

tomphoolery 6y ago

https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea is another great choice.