Having a huge market player release a feature that seems to overlap with your business can seem like bad news, but hearken! it's not all downside. The case stu

Having a huge market player release a feature that seems to overlap with your business can seem like bad news, but hearken! it's not all downside. The case study here is Facebook introducing the ability to schedule posts in Facebook directly, theoretically hurting Buffer et al. Take a look at Buffer's publicly-available revenue data [1]. Can you see when this change occurred? In general, by lowering the barriers to entry into an activity, MORE people participate in it. This makes the general market larger. A portion of those users have a measure of success and end up wanting more advanced functionality, so they move to a tool that will give them more advanced functionality. In this case: Stripe Payment Links will enable a lot more people to conduct ecommerce, most of who would never have tried. Some of those people will be successful, find that ecommerce merchants need a lot of tools to manage their businesses, and will acquire those tools. I believe this is good news for Shopify, rather than bad. [1] https://buffer.com/revenue https://buffer.com/revenue