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This is PR about Shopify’s use/promise of WebAssembly—cool. I get WebAssembly tech is cool. I’m interested why Shopify is practically the only sales platform t

This is PR about Shopify’s use/promise of WebAssembly—cool. I get WebAssembly tech is cool. I’m interested why Shopify is practically the only sales platform that gets ‘airtime’ at HN. Is this because partner apps are using Ruby? Does it have something to do with the governance of Shopify? Community of Canadians on HN? I have some experience with Square, and a few others. I’m an interested party.

louis-paul 6y ago
Do Shopify's competitors produce similarly high-quality engineering content? (if you know some, please link!)
- bdcravens 6y ago
  Bigcommerce does have a developer blog, but it seems a bit more limited in scope: https://medium.com/bigcommerce-developer-blog https://medium.com/bigcommerce-developer-blog
christophilus 6y ago
Amazon gets lots of airtime and is a Shopify competitor. Stripe gets lots of airtime and is a Shopify competitor. Anyway, Shopify’s engineering blogs can be worthwhile, so they make it to the front page. They do interesting work at pretty big scale, provide in depth writeups from time to time, and folks like me enjoy reading them. I see nothing suspicious about it.
- hobofan 6y ago
  > Stripe gets lots of airtime and is a Shopify competitor. Barely. AFAIK Shopify Payments is built on top of Stripe. They only compete on their Capital products, though given that most of Shopify's financial products seem to be built on Stripe, I'm not even sure if that's true.
- xtiansimon 6y ago
  > "I see nothing suspicious about it." I didn't intend to imply anything of the sort. I gather from your response including Amazon you might have a different perspective. I'm interested in sales platforms for small business retail. Platforms which let business owners put a store on the web and maintain their own website design. Shopify's turn-key solution lets you have a stores without all of the Platform cruff. You can seel goods on Amazon, but you're just a another 'seller' under the branding of Amazon.com (unless there is another competing service I'm unaware of). Personally, I get to see a lot of small businesses from the Admin side. And Shopify's partner platform is one of the most robust. Pricing is competitive (for the businesss) and they're very developer friendly. No. I really like Shopify, and I was curious why others _like_ it so much. haha. I understand where you might default to thinking I'm suspicious. We're all suspicious. And I see a lot of businesses who go full-in on a platform (POS, online retail) and when it comes to getting financial reports or API access you might want, they are unhelpful and very costly. (Don't get me started on Third-Party Online Ordering Services like DoorDash or Ubereats).
sradman 6y ago
Maybe because it is the largest platform alternative to Amazon [1]: > The company reported that it had more than 1,000,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform as of June 2019. The total gross merchandise volume exceeded US$61 billion for calendar 2019. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
NicoJuicy 6y ago
An interested party in Ecom or ..?
- xtiansimon 6y ago
  Not sure why you're downvoted. I'm in retail small business. Easy to get started on a turn-key platform, but due to different governance strategies they are more or less cooperative about their deficiencies.

louis-paul 6y ago

Do Shopify's competitors produce similarly high-quality engineering content? (if you know some, please link!)

bdcravens 6y ago
Bigcommerce does have a developer blog, but it seems a bit more limited in scope: https://medium.com/bigcommerce-developer-blog https://medium.com/bigcommerce-developer-blog

christophilus 6y ago

Amazon gets lots of airtime and is a Shopify competitor. Stripe gets lots of airtime and is a Shopify competitor. Anyway, Shopify’s engineering blogs can be worthwhile, so they make it to the front page. They do interesting work at pretty big scale, provide in depth writeups from time to time, and folks like me enjoy reading them. I see nothing suspicious about it.

hobofan 6y ago
> Stripe gets lots of airtime and is a Shopify competitor. Barely. AFAIK Shopify Payments is built on top of Stripe. They only compete on their Capital products, though given that most of Shopify's financial products seem to be built on Stripe, I'm not even sure if that's true.
xtiansimon 6y ago
> "I see nothing suspicious about it." I didn't intend to imply anything of the sort. I gather from your response including Amazon you might have a different perspective. I'm interested in sales platforms for small business retail. Platforms which let business owners put a store on the web and maintain their own website design. Shopify's turn-key solution lets you have a stores without all of the Platform cruff. You can seel goods on Amazon, but you're just a another 'seller' under the branding of Amazon.com (unless there is another competing service I'm unaware of). Personally, I get to see a lot of small businesses from the Admin side. And Shopify's partner platform is one of the most robust. Pricing is competitive (for the businesss) and they're very developer friendly. No. I really like Shopify, and I was curious why others _like_ it so much. haha. I understand where you might default to thinking I'm suspicious. We're all suspicious. And I see a lot of businesses who go full-in on a platform (POS, online retail) and when it comes to getting financial reports or API access you might want, they are unhelpful and very costly. (Don't get me started on Third-Party Online Ordering Services like DoorDash or Ubereats).

sradman 6y ago

Maybe because it is the largest platform alternative to Amazon [1]: > The company reported that it had more than 1,000,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform as of June 2019. The total gross merchandise volume exceeded US$61 billion for calendar 2019. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

NicoJuicy 6y ago

An interested party in Ecom or ..?

xtiansimon 6y ago
Not sure why you're downvoted. I'm in retail small business. Easy to get started on a turn-key platform, but due to different governance strategies they are more or less cooperative about their deficiencies.