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Shopify to Acquire Delivrr for $2.1B

355 points by agd 4y ago

mahidol 4y ago
Shopify seems to be moving from an asset-light to asset-heavy mode, but also significantly dialing down their investor communication: this is just so unlike them, considering how things have always been.
qilo 4y ago
Can someone fix the typo in the title? Deliverr (with e), not Delivrr.
bradly 4y ago
For those of us unfamilir with Delivrr: Our Mission: Large online marketplaces like Amazon have trained consumers to expect products delivered to their doorsteps within 1-2 days at no extra cost. As a result, millions of merchants on other marketplaces are falling behind, unable to cost-effectively deliver products to their customers within 1-2 days. Our mission is to enable any merchant, regardless of size, to delight their customers with fast and cost-effective fulfillment.
- hef19898 4y ago
  That sounds like a very good summary of what I tried a couple of years ago. good to see the idea succeed!
  - vdfs 4y ago
    Shopify is actually doing that too, they have a fulfillment service/network https://www.shopify.com/fulfillment https://www.shopify.com/fulfillment
- Avalaxy 4y ago
  Sounds just like a normal postal service then? At least in my country it's the default that the national post service delivers your packages in 1 day.
  - jeffreyrogers 4y ago
    It takes several days to drive across the US. You need a logistics network with warehouses spread across the country to service a meaningful portion of the country in 1-2 days.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Small merchants probably don't want to be going to the post office multiple times a day. Even if they were large enough for that to make sense the US is too big for cost effective next day delivery to the entire country, you need to have distribution centers all over.
  - KoftaBob 4y ago
    I assume based on your bio, that your country is the Netherlands? The US is 236x the size of the Netherlands, so you can imagine getting something to a customer in 1-2 days requires a more complex and extensive logistics system.
  - rabidonrails 4y ago
    But to be fair, in your country (looks like NL) the square mileage is 16,040. The US has a sq mileage of the US is 3,797,000.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
firstSpeaker 4y ago
Aiming at Amazon by setting deeper and deeper vertical
brianwawok 4y ago
Congratulations! We have been a partner with Deliverr since they were quite small, and has been fun to watch their growth. They help a lot of my clients ship packages fast.
toddmorey 4y ago
Anyone else worry that we don't really need everything "port to porch" in two days? It's impressive logistics, but I worry about the environmental impact when we so strongly stress urgency over efficiency. Or are there ways to make rapid home deliveries efficient in ways I don't comprehend?
- DaltonCoffee 4y ago
  Absolutely agree. Jimmy jet set is getting his vibrolux pen set delivered biweekly in record time, meanwhile some of the world waits exorbodently for deliveries of life saving medicine and food, or are otherwise greatly dissserviced by supply and delivery operations.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cjrp 4y ago
  I know what you mean, my assumption is that quicker (on-demand) delivery requires more vehicle miles than a slower, batched delivery.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    then again, if deliveries took 5-7 days instead of 1-2, more people would probably just drive out and buy what they want, which is worse for the environment than one truck making 200 deliveries per day.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    Does it, though? The Amazon truck that delivers my packages drives down our street stopping every few houses. Stopping once extra for my house isn't going to add extra fuel usage. If the truck is full every day, and drives the same route every day, it won't save fuel to batch deliveries.
- tjbiddle 4y ago
  I wouldn't expect Deliverr to add much, if any, environmental impact. The way they work is by partnering with hundreds/thousands of warehouses throughout the US. The merchant sends units in to a few of these, and now the units are closer to the end customer, so it can get there faster. Whether it's all stored in one central warehouse, and then distributed, or done via Deliverr (& Amazon FBA & Walmart's) way, it still needs to get from A to B. Just now it's closer. There might be a little extra shuffling. What I love about Deliverr is they have very predictable pricing. I used them for some small units I experimented with adding to my catalog.
kareemm 4y ago
I love this move by Shopify. As a merchant (in Canada, where typical shipping prices are extortionate) I'd love to give Shopify more money (but presumably less than we pay 3rd party shippers) for better overall delivery service for my customers. As a buyer, I'd love to spend more with not-Amazon and get comparable service. I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon is pushing me to smaller brands who have a face and stand behind their product for key purchases. This move by Shopify will just accelerate that transition away from Amazon. Just waiting for the search bar to shop every Shopify store so I have a viable alternative to Amazon to buy whatever I need.
- noboostforyou 4y ago
  > I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon Anyone remember eBay?
  - detritus 4y ago
    Me. I use eBay a few times a month, but never, ever touch Amazon. *shrug
- AnonMO 4y ago
  Shopify is mostly crappy drop shippers buying of Alibaba and selling for x more. If you add a search bar the problem will just come to the surface. Just say you don't like amazon.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Isn't shopify also a lot of non-Shopify branded web shops? I don't think crappy dropshipping stuff from Asia will ever go away, that's why middlemen are important, those can filter out the bad crap products. At which point those middlemen also become a brand, it doesn't work without reputation. Funny little commerce actually changed from the first time someone sold a stone knife for a handful of berries.
colesantiago 4y ago
This is HUGE. A direct hit to Amazon, nice move Shopify!
- relueeuler 4y ago
  It isn’t. $AMZN accelerated capex in the last two years to meet the demand brought on by Covid. They even over built, but have also launched Buy With Prime to open up their logistical infrastructure as a service. It takes a long time to get where $AMZN is at.
vishnugupta 4y ago
Amazon’s catalog quality and customer service is going downhill very fast. Shopify has a real opportunity to fill that void. Amazon was known for maintaining high quality of their catalogue. But since opening up their store front for third party sellers it’s resembling flee market by the day. For example they had a very strict policy of one product one page I.e Single Detail Page (SDP), indexed by ASIN. But now exact same product has multiple ASINs. You don’t know if it’s a fake or genuine.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Quite a while ago I was asked what a potential Amazon killer could be. My answer was someone who could scale drop shipping to every brick-and-mortar store in a seamless suite covering last-mile delivery all the way down to in shop inventories and POS solutions. Because that would be a limitless catalogue, from local shops and businesses as well as big name brands and everything in between, without any significant inventories. It seems that Shopify is kind of going in that direction.
  - desiarnezjr 4y ago
    This would be way harder than most could imagine. Each of these pieces in aggregate would be interesting but aggregating, expanding, managing each part of the experience would be close to impossible. Kind of like asking what a killer car might be and throwing every feature you can think of into the BOM (like the Simpson's Homer car). Supply chain, logistics, retail and back office applications of each are very messy. Businesses are messy.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  Not to mention that it is somehow possible to hijack totally unrelated product pages so you get the reviews. Or straight up offering to pay for a good review and not be instantly and permanently banned.
- greatpostman 4y ago
  Not sure if I’m allowed to post this, but I worked that exact technical problem in the Amazon catalog. It’s extremely difficult to keep high data integrity of the Amazon catalog when all these 3rd parties are contributing information. It gets abused in every possible way. Basically third party sellers add info about Asins, which in real time gets merged with existing Asin information. It’s all automated
mherdeg 4y ago
Holey moley, we're down to $400/share - the time machine to 2020 is complete. Is this a bargain yet? Can I buy it yet? I have really enjoyed the Shopify checkout experience as a customer.
- blantonl 4y ago
  Take it from someone who was assigned 300 shares of SHOP @ 1100/share, this hurts. It hurts bad.
  - upupandup 4y ago
    that's $330,000 is now $150,000. What percentage of your portfolio was it? I never really understood what shopify was, it seemed like most of it were drop shippers and people thinking they can make $100 t-shirts. Especially after Citron Research came out with a damning report on inflation of metrics. I really don't get all the people cheering on Shopify in the comments for this acquisition when they are missing earnings by a huge margin and faces existential crisis...it's ngmi
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      If you were working in e-commerce you'd know why millions of merchant use them, it's a good and easy software to use. They have tons of problems, like any company, but people are migrating TOWARDS shopify, not the other way around, in huge majority. Etsy, amazon, eBay, all missed earnings due to lower ecom growth after covid. People are cheering the product, not the stock price. Clearly those 2 are not always correlated (even if clearly they could do better)
      - ineedasername 4y ago
        I don't know about the others but Amazon missed things because of a $7B+ loss on Rivian investments. Otherwise their growth had slowed, but the actual core business is still growing. The Rivian investment is a bit of a head scratcher though. I get that electricity costs could bring down shipping costs vs. ICE vehicles, but they could order their 100,000 trucks without buying 20% of a business that's somewhat orthogonal to their core competency, which is definitively not vehicle manufacturing. Sure they're more of a logistics business than retailer at this point but owning a manufacturer... do they have big stakes in the established traditional manufacturers?
awillen 4y ago
I own an ecommerce business, and I recently moved away from my previous 3PL (third party logistics company, like Deliverr). In doing so, I evaluated a number of 3PLs, including Deliverr. For those who aren't familiar, Amazon Multi Channel Fulfillment, which allows you to fulfill orders not placed on Amazon from their warehouses, is much cheaper than all alternatives for a lot of smaller packages. As an example, I have one item that's 2.5 pounds, and about 8.5"x4"x4". To ship it via USPS would cost me $10-12, depending on where it's going. Amazon charges me $6.77. Deliverr, at least when I evaluated them about six months ago, matched Amazon's pricing exactly. That was pretty shocking to me, since Amazon's clearly only able to maintain those prices because they have their own fulfillment network and lots of revenue from elsewhere to subsidize the actual cost of delivery. I am currently using Amazon MCF as my 3PL, and one of the reasons I went with them over Deliverr was a genuine concern that Deliverr had a money-losing business model that would only work at Amazon scale, which is obviously a nigh-impossible thing to achieve. I'm glad to see they got acquired by Shopify, as I think the competition for Amazon is a good thing in the marketplace. That said, I'm definitely curious to see if Shopify will be able to maintain price parity with Amazon.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Not sure about the US, but for my, failed, start-up that went in a similar direction like Deliverr I did some price calculations. And for Europe it was, before Covid, very realistic to achieve price parity with FBA. I'd have too look the numbers up again, but the volumes were easily within reach for a single, not too big FBA merchant. Not enough to make a whole business based on that profitable, with all the overhead and such, but profitable on a transaction basis.
  - awillen 4y ago
    Here it definitely depends on the types of packages, and my experience is very much in the 1-5 pound range - as you get larger, it's clearly more profitable. Still, however I ran the numbers, I just couldn't see Deliverr taking on my company as a client and not losing money on shipping alone (before factoring in all the overhead). Obviously it'd depend on their mix of business, but overall I just think being a 3PL, unless you have some specialty that allows you to charge a premium, is just a brutal, low-margin, race-to-the-bottom kind of business. I'm glad that Shopify made the acquisition, as having both Deliverr and Amazon MCF run as part of broader ecommerce platforms, as opposed to standalone 3PLs, will be good for ecommerce merchants and customers.
g-unit33 4y ago
Anyone know how many warehouses deliverr works with ?
bdefore 4y ago
I'm probably thinking about this backwards, but I'm embarrassingly well trained to search for anything I need on Amazon. if I want to support Shopify at Amazon's expense, is there a straightforward way of breaking out of this training and find what I need among Shopify-powered merchants? Without getting lost in SEO-spam or influencer peddling?
- Vendazzo_daniel 4y ago
  There totally is... My co-founder and I created a search engine in early 2021 that indexes 100 million items from 140,000 Shopify shops and makes them searchable to shoppers. We built this with the specific goal of helping small businesses be discovered by consumers looking for a way to support. You nailed the problem... without a place to search for items, it seems that there isn't an easy way to support small businesses, and bypass Amazon. From the shop's perspective, getting eyeballs is extremely difficult for them, so they end up relying on influencers and SEO in order to get eyeballs. We would love to help you shop online without defaulting to Amazon first... Would love your feedback. daniel https://vendazzo.com/ https://vendazzo.com/
  - bdefore 4y ago
    This is interesting. I'll need a few days to try some more searches out. But my initial thoughts is this is presenting unique results. One query that could use some cleanup is 'router', which is filled with 'Route Package Protection' items. https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1 https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1
    - senecaso 4y ago
      Oh, wow! Thanks for pointing that out. I'll take a look and try to get that cleaned up. We don't have a lot of shops with electronics at the moment, so a query for "router" would be light anyway, but these particular results are not useful at all.
      - 4y ago
airstrike 4y ago
This was rumored about a couple weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31102655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31102655
axg11 4y ago
Great acquisition in the short-medium term for Shopify. I do wonder how Shopify will differentiate itself in the long term. From the outside it looks like Shopify’s plan to compete with Amazon is to handle more of the logistics, create an ad network, and ultimately drive discovery across Shopify stores (via unified search?). That plan will result in the same issues that Amazon has today. There is nothing inherently higher quality about products sold through Shopify today. Shopify attracts brand-focused sellers that correlates with higher quality. In order to grow they will have to attract high-volume (lower quality) less brand focused sellers, ending up with the same issue.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  > From the outside it looks like Shopify’s plan to compete with Amazon A lot of customers (retailers) sell on both a DTC platfor like Shopify, Magento, Hybris, Woocommerce, whatever AND Amazon. Of course running a woocommerce site is more expensive, but the margins are better than amazon. The question is after shopify adds all this stuff, will the margins still be better than an amazon store?
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    Yes, retailers can purchase software (well, usually rent via SaaS) where they can manage their catalog of inventory, fulfillment, product imagery, etc., all from a single interface.
ale42 4y ago
... and Shopify stock goes down by 17% today... (not sure whether it's related or not)
- sleepyhead 4y ago
  no, due to slow growth in Q1 and generic tech meltdown.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
no_wizard 4y ago
I been itching to work at Shopify for a little while now. This makes me even more excited for them! This should be interesting in how they are positioning themselves against the backdrop of Amazon and Walmart. Its strange to think that Shopify is almost the upstart against a giant like Walmart or Amazon in terms of capturing the retail end / customer experience side of things. I suppose its a strategy to diverse their commerce portfolio.
- mabbo 4y ago
  We are hiring. Full remote from almost anywhere worldwide.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    Lets get in touch, if possible? If that is something you'd be open to doing anyways. email is in profile.
  - ForTheWin98 4y ago
    Good luck getting through the process. Shopify HR is very slow. It was not pleasant dealing with them. I heard one reason for the slowness is that many HR employees have quit.
    - d4mi3n 4y ago
      I recently accepted an offer from Shopify and they did a reasonable job. 3 or 4 calls over 2 weeks, with an offer less than 3 days after my last call. Rates were very competitive for my roll and skillset. That said, they do seem to be going through--or have recently gone through--a fair amount of attrition due to declining stock prices. Not surprising given the stock situation and all, but definitely something to factor in if you're considering working there. EDIT: I'd also like to mention that it was a very humane interview process. I felt well treated, and they definitely seem to be screening more for successful employees than they are to filter out as many applicants as they can. Take that as you will, but I respect an org that treats it's employees well.
kadomony 4y ago
So is this why Shopify pays peanuts to their employees? For the big acquisitions?
- boringg 4y ago
  I haven't heard that Shopify underpays their employees .. What are you talking about? I know Amazon underpays their delivery people/warehouse.
  - kadomony 4y ago
    Shopify absolutely underpays its tech employees. It's often below market average, but they think the prestige of Shopify is akin to Google, so people will settle for less.
    - boringg 4y ago
      Can you define underpays its tech employees more specifically - salary or total comp? I mean they don't have the same capital as a company like Amazon/Google/Facebook so obviously can't go toe to toe if that's who you are comparing against. However Shopify's equity compensation aligns with Tesla (underpay but employees earn on equity) probably more than made up and then some compared to all those companies if you have worked there for more than one year. If you just joined then yeah your equity packages just tanked - as did all the major tech companies.
      - dvdhnt 4y ago
        Not OP but current employee. They "underpay" compared to Google, etc and compared to the Bay. But Shopify is a Canadian company first (I'm in the US) and they pay me a salary well over the average for my area (double), not much less than what I was offered by other remote companies (within ~$10k) but pushed north of $200k/yr by adding stock. We also recently received info on a new pay structure that basically lets us choose how much of our TC is $$$ and how much is stock. We're excited and people will be given raises. There are news articles you can read online. Shopify also aims to be a "100 year" company. It means not paying in the top 10, but also not overworking employees or firing the bottom 10% every year. As someone who isn't in the Bay... they pay just fine for new hires and for tenured employees once they finish raises.
JonathanBeuys 4y ago
marketplaces like Amazon have trained consumers to expect products delivered to their doorsteps within 1-2 days I am always surprised that delivery takes so long. Why does it have to take days? If I have a fleet of cars and/or bikes that constantly swarm out from my distribution center, why can't a delivery be done in hours or even minutes?
- SteveNuts 4y ago
  Proximity to where the products are housed. Most companies, especially small ones don't do the volume required to make stockpiling enough products close to the consumer to make it worthwhile.
  - JonathanBeuys 4y ago
    But they are talking about Amazon. That is not a small company.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Rephrased, individual merchants on Amazon don’t move enough volume to have their products stocked at every warehouse on the planet. And the ones that do Amazon has started offering “tonight” delivery.
- tommoor 4y ago
  This video is a good explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qanMpnYsjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qanMpnYsjk
- tyrfing 4y ago
  Cost. I'll list some reasons why hours is often not possible. - Products can't always be fulfilled by the closest location. Especially for products that you can't assume infinite stock of, this is a big deal, but in general there is an incredibly long tail of things sold. Look around the sites of Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and similar, look at what's in stock where. It's not universal coverage, and Amazon has much lower density of locations as well as higher SKU counts. If an order is split across multiple locations, it would be cheaper but take longer to first combine them at one rather than deliver the parts separately. - Last-mile efficiency. Stops are clustered and dispatched together, which reduces labor time and mileage. The total cost of 10 spread out stops could easily be the same as 40 more tightly packed ones, and the second won't be an option if they're out for delivery within hours. - Labor efficiency. There are a lot of humans involved still, despite the best efforts of these companies, and a bit of latency allows for consistent utilization despite hour-to-hour and day-to-day changes. Lastly, delivery within hours is offered. Walmart calls it Express Delivery, Amazon has Same-Day Delivery (as well as some 2 hour delivery), Target has Same Day Delivery. These are just premium services with limited selection because it's expensive to do, and modern Free Shipping is an illusion of shipping being too cheap to price when it really isn't. It's cost optimizations all the way down and still not enough.
blobbers 4y ago
SHOP stock has been absolutely slaughtered in the last 6 months. They're either super geniuses with long term vision the markets can't see, or people have completely lost faith with them for exactly these kinds of moves.
- blobbers 4y ago
  (which are they?)
- JonathanBeuys 4y ago
  The market values them at $53B. That's not a small sum.
  - blobbers 4y ago
    Indeed. But it also devalued them by $150B in the span of 6 months.
- toephu2 4y ago
  I don't think Shopify stock being down so much in the last 6 month has much to do with their business fundamentals but rather is part of the broader tech sell off. Which tech stocks haven't been slaughtered in the last 6 months? To name a few that have: Square, Snap, FB, DoorDash, CoinBase, Pinterest, Lyft, Uber, Robinhood, etc.
- sexy_seedbox 4y ago
  So has NET, was 200 a few months ago, now at 77 today.
e-clinton 4y ago
I like the tracking features of Shop app, hate the recommendation of products. Just be a tracker and don’t try and sell my more crap.
FunnyLookinHat 4y ago
This is a classic example of "The best acquisitions start as partnerships." I'm not privy to any internal details of either, but reading the writing on the wall from Deliverr's website and posts around the web, Shopify was a huge integration for them (likely a majority of their business). I am willing to get they've worked together at a C-Suite level to make sure that's a good relationship for a while now, and that has a tendency to produce excellent terms for acquisition (for both parties)!

355 points by agd 4y ago

Shopify seems to be moving from an asset-light to asset-heavy mode, but also significantly dialing down their investor communication: this is just so unlike them, considering how things have always been.

qilo 4y ago

Can someone fix the typo in the title? Deliverr (with e), not Delivrr.

bradly 4y ago

For those of us unfamilir with Delivrr: Our Mission: Large online marketplaces like Amazon have trained consumers to expect products delivered to their doorsteps within 1-2 days at no extra cost. As a result, millions of merchants on other marketplaces are falling behind, unable to cost-effectively deliver products to their customers within 1-2 days. Our mission is to enable any merchant, regardless of size, to delight their customers with fast and cost-effective fulfillment.

hef19898 4y ago
That sounds like a very good summary of what I tried a couple of years ago. good to see the idea succeed!
- vdfs 4y ago
  Shopify is actually doing that too, they have a fulfillment service/network https://www.shopify.com/fulfillment https://www.shopify.com/fulfillment
Avalaxy 4y ago
Sounds just like a normal postal service then? At least in my country it's the default that the national post service delivers your packages in 1 day.
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  It takes several days to drive across the US. You need a logistics network with warehouses spread across the country to service a meaningful portion of the country in 1-2 days.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Small merchants probably don't want to be going to the post office multiple times a day. Even if they were large enough for that to make sense the US is too big for cost effective next day delivery to the entire country, you need to have distribution centers all over.
- KoftaBob 4y ago
  I assume based on your bio, that your country is the Netherlands? The US is 236x the size of the Netherlands, so you can imagine getting something to a customer in 1-2 days requires a more complex and extensive logistics system.
- rabidonrails 4y ago
  But to be fair, in your country (looks like NL) the square mileage is 16,040. The US has a sq mileage of the US is 3,797,000.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

firstSpeaker 4y ago

Aiming at Amazon by setting deeper and deeper vertical

brianwawok 4y ago

Congratulations! We have been a partner with Deliverr since they were quite small, and has been fun to watch their growth. They help a lot of my clients ship packages fast.

toddmorey 4y ago

Anyone else worry that we don't really need everything "port to porch" in two days? It's impressive logistics, but I worry about the environmental impact when we so strongly stress urgency over efficiency. Or are there ways to make rapid home deliveries efficient in ways I don't comprehend?

DaltonCoffee 4y ago
Absolutely agree. Jimmy jet set is getting his vibrolux pen set delivered biweekly in record time, meanwhile some of the world waits exorbodently for deliveries of life saving medicine and food, or are otherwise greatly dissserviced by supply and delivery operations.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cjrp 4y ago
I know what you mean, my assumption is that quicker (on-demand) delivery requires more vehicle miles than a slower, batched delivery.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  then again, if deliveries took 5-7 days instead of 1-2, more people would probably just drive out and buy what they want, which is worse for the environment than one truck making 200 deliveries per day.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  Does it, though? The Amazon truck that delivers my packages drives down our street stopping every few houses. Stopping once extra for my house isn't going to add extra fuel usage. If the truck is full every day, and drives the same route every day, it won't save fuel to batch deliveries.
tjbiddle 4y ago
I wouldn't expect Deliverr to add much, if any, environmental impact. The way they work is by partnering with hundreds/thousands of warehouses throughout the US. The merchant sends units in to a few of these, and now the units are closer to the end customer, so it can get there faster. Whether it's all stored in one central warehouse, and then distributed, or done via Deliverr (& Amazon FBA & Walmart's) way, it still needs to get from A to B. Just now it's closer. There might be a little extra shuffling. What I love about Deliverr is they have very predictable pricing. I used them for some small units I experimented with adding to my catalog.

kareemm 4y ago

I love this move by Shopify. As a merchant (in Canada, where typical shipping prices are extortionate) I'd love to give Shopify more money (but presumably less than we pay 3rd party shippers) for better overall delivery service for my customers. As a buyer, I'd love to spend more with not-Amazon and get comparable service. I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon is pushing me to smaller brands who have a face and stand behind their product for key purchases. This move by Shopify will just accelerate that transition away from Amazon. Just waiting for the search bar to shop every Shopify store so I have a viable alternative to Amazon to buy whatever I need.

noboostforyou 4y ago
> I'm increasingly disappointed with Amazon. It's full of knockoff crappy products with unrelated 5 star reviews. That eroding trust in Amazon Anyone remember eBay?
- detritus 4y ago
  Me. I use eBay a few times a month, but never, ever touch Amazon. *shrug
AnonMO 4y ago
Shopify is mostly crappy drop shippers buying of Alibaba and selling for x more. If you add a search bar the problem will just come to the surface. Just say you don't like amazon.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Isn't shopify also a lot of non-Shopify branded web shops? I don't think crappy dropshipping stuff from Asia will ever go away, that's why middlemen are important, those can filter out the bad crap products. At which point those middlemen also become a brand, it doesn't work without reputation. Funny little commerce actually changed from the first time someone sold a stone knife for a handful of berries.

colesantiago 4y ago

This is HUGE. A direct hit to Amazon, nice move Shopify!

relueeuler 4y ago
It isn’t. $AMZN accelerated capex in the last two years to meet the demand brought on by Covid. They even over built, but have also launched Buy With Prime to open up their logistical infrastructure as a service. It takes a long time to get where $AMZN is at.

vishnugupta 4y ago

Amazon’s catalog quality and customer service is going downhill very fast. Shopify has a real opportunity to fill that void. Amazon was known for maintaining high quality of their catalogue. But since opening up their store front for third party sellers it’s resembling flee market by the day. For example they had a very strict policy of one product one page I.e Single Detail Page (SDP), indexed by ASIN. But now exact same product has multiple ASINs. You don’t know if it’s a fake or genuine.

hef19898 4y ago
Quite a while ago I was asked what a potential Amazon killer could be. My answer was someone who could scale drop shipping to every brick-and-mortar store in a seamless suite covering last-mile delivery all the way down to in shop inventories and POS solutions. Because that would be a limitless catalogue, from local shops and businesses as well as big name brands and everything in between, without any significant inventories. It seems that Shopify is kind of going in that direction.
- desiarnezjr 4y ago
  This would be way harder than most could imagine. Each of these pieces in aggregate would be interesting but aggregating, expanding, managing each part of the experience would be close to impossible. Kind of like asking what a killer car might be and throwing every feature you can think of into the BOM (like the Simpson's Homer car). Supply chain, logistics, retail and back office applications of each are very messy. Businesses are messy.
stefan_ 4y ago
Not to mention that it is somehow possible to hijack totally unrelated product pages so you get the reviews. Or straight up offering to pay for a good review and not be instantly and permanently banned.
greatpostman 4y ago
Not sure if I’m allowed to post this, but I worked that exact technical problem in the Amazon catalog. It’s extremely difficult to keep high data integrity of the Amazon catalog when all these 3rd parties are contributing information. It gets abused in every possible way. Basically third party sellers add info about Asins, which in real time gets merged with existing Asin information. It’s all automated

mherdeg 4y ago

Holey moley, we're down to $400/share - the time machine to 2020 is complete. Is this a bargain yet? Can I buy it yet? I have really enjoyed the Shopify checkout experience as a customer.

blantonl 4y ago
Take it from someone who was assigned 300 shares of SHOP @ 1100/share, this hurts. It hurts bad.
- upupandup 4y ago
  that's $330,000 is now $150,000. What percentage of your portfolio was it? I never really understood what shopify was, it seemed like most of it were drop shippers and people thinking they can make $100 t-shirts. Especially after Citron Research came out with a damning report on inflation of metrics. I really don't get all the people cheering on Shopify in the comments for this acquisition when they are missing earnings by a huge margin and faces existential crisis...it's ngmi
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    If you were working in e-commerce you'd know why millions of merchant use them, it's a good and easy software to use. They have tons of problems, like any company, but people are migrating TOWARDS shopify, not the other way around, in huge majority. Etsy, amazon, eBay, all missed earnings due to lower ecom growth after covid. People are cheering the product, not the stock price. Clearly those 2 are not always correlated (even if clearly they could do better)
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      I don't know about the others but Amazon missed things because of a $7B+ loss on Rivian investments. Otherwise their growth had slowed, but the actual core business is still growing. The Rivian investment is a bit of a head scratcher though. I get that electricity costs could bring down shipping costs vs. ICE vehicles, but they could order their 100,000 trucks without buying 20% of a business that's somewhat orthogonal to their core competency, which is definitively not vehicle manufacturing. Sure they're more of a logistics business than retailer at this point but owning a manufacturer... do they have big stakes in the established traditional manufacturers?

awillen 4y ago

I own an ecommerce business, and I recently moved away from my previous 3PL (third party logistics company, like Deliverr). In doing so, I evaluated a number of 3PLs, including Deliverr. For those who aren't familiar, Amazon Multi Channel Fulfillment, which allows you to fulfill orders not placed on Amazon from their warehouses, is much cheaper than all alternatives for a lot of smaller packages. As an example, I have one item that's 2.5 pounds, and about 8.5"x4"x4". To ship it via USPS would cost me $10-12, depending on where it's going. Amazon charges me $6.77. Deliverr, at least when I evaluated them about six months ago, matched Amazon's pricing exactly. That was pretty shocking to me, since Amazon's clearly only able to maintain those prices because they have their own fulfillment network and lots of revenue from elsewhere to subsidize the actual cost of delivery. I am currently using Amazon MCF as my 3PL, and one of the reasons I went with them over Deliverr was a genuine concern that Deliverr had a money-losing business model that would only work at Amazon scale, which is obviously a nigh-impossible thing to achieve. I'm glad to see they got acquired by Shopify, as I think the competition for Amazon is a good thing in the marketplace. That said, I'm definitely curious to see if Shopify will be able to maintain price parity with Amazon.

hef19898 4y ago
Not sure about the US, but for my, failed, start-up that went in a similar direction like Deliverr I did some price calculations. And for Europe it was, before Covid, very realistic to achieve price parity with FBA. I'd have too look the numbers up again, but the volumes were easily within reach for a single, not too big FBA merchant. Not enough to make a whole business based on that profitable, with all the overhead and such, but profitable on a transaction basis.
- awillen 4y ago
  Here it definitely depends on the types of packages, and my experience is very much in the 1-5 pound range - as you get larger, it's clearly more profitable. Still, however I ran the numbers, I just couldn't see Deliverr taking on my company as a client and not losing money on shipping alone (before factoring in all the overhead). Obviously it'd depend on their mix of business, but overall I just think being a 3PL, unless you have some specialty that allows you to charge a premium, is just a brutal, low-margin, race-to-the-bottom kind of business. I'm glad that Shopify made the acquisition, as having both Deliverr and Amazon MCF run as part of broader ecommerce platforms, as opposed to standalone 3PLs, will be good for ecommerce merchants and customers.

g-unit33 4y ago

Anyone know how many warehouses deliverr works with ?

bdefore 4y ago

I'm probably thinking about this backwards, but I'm embarrassingly well trained to search for anything I need on Amazon. if I want to support Shopify at Amazon's expense, is there a straightforward way of breaking out of this training and find what I need among Shopify-powered merchants? Without getting lost in SEO-spam or influencer peddling?

Vendazzo_daniel 4y ago
There totally is... My co-founder and I created a search engine in early 2021 that indexes 100 million items from 140,000 Shopify shops and makes them searchable to shoppers. We built this with the specific goal of helping small businesses be discovered by consumers looking for a way to support. You nailed the problem... without a place to search for items, it seems that there isn't an easy way to support small businesses, and bypass Amazon. From the shop's perspective, getting eyeballs is extremely difficult for them, so they end up relying on influencers and SEO in order to get eyeballs. We would love to help you shop online without defaulting to Amazon first... Would love your feedback. daniel https://vendazzo.com/ https://vendazzo.com/
- bdefore 4y ago
  This is interesting. I'll need a few days to try some more searches out. But my initial thoughts is this is presenting unique results. One query that could use some cleanup is 'router', which is filled with 'Route Package Protection' items. https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1 https://vendazzo.com/products?q=router&currency&page=1
  - senecaso 4y ago
    Oh, wow! Thanks for pointing that out. I'll take a look and try to get that cleaned up. We don't have a lot of shops with electronics at the moment, so a query for "router" would be light anyway, but these particular results are not useful at all.
    - 4y ago

airstrike 4y ago

This was rumored about a couple weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31102655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31102655

axg11 4y ago

Great acquisition in the short-medium term for Shopify. I do wonder how Shopify will differentiate itself in the long term. From the outside it looks like Shopify’s plan to compete with Amazon is to handle more of the logistics, create an ad network, and ultimately drive discovery across Shopify stores (via unified search?). That plan will result in the same issues that Amazon has today. There is nothing inherently higher quality about products sold through Shopify today. Shopify attracts brand-focused sellers that correlates with higher quality. In order to grow they will have to attract high-volume (lower quality) less brand focused sellers, ending up with the same issue.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
> From the outside it looks like Shopify’s plan to compete with Amazon A lot of customers (retailers) sell on both a DTC platfor like Shopify, Magento, Hybris, Woocommerce, whatever AND Amazon. Of course running a woocommerce site is more expensive, but the margins are better than amazon. The question is after shopify adds all this stuff, will the margins still be better than an amazon store?
- ineedasername 4y ago
  Yes, retailers can purchase software (well, usually rent via SaaS) where they can manage their catalog of inventory, fulfillment, product imagery, etc., all from a single interface.

ale42 4y ago

... and Shopify stock goes down by 17% today... (not sure whether it's related or not)

sleepyhead 4y ago
no, due to slow growth in Q1 and generic tech meltdown.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

no_wizard 4y ago

I been itching to work at Shopify for a little while now. This makes me even more excited for them! This should be interesting in how they are positioning themselves against the backdrop of Amazon and Walmart. Its strange to think that Shopify is almost the upstart against a giant like Walmart or Amazon in terms of capturing the retail end / customer experience side of things. I suppose its a strategy to diverse their commerce portfolio.

mabbo 4y ago
We are hiring. Full remote from almost anywhere worldwide.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Lets get in touch, if possible? If that is something you'd be open to doing anyways. email is in profile.
- ForTheWin98 4y ago
  Good luck getting through the process. Shopify HR is very slow. It was not pleasant dealing with them. I heard one reason for the slowness is that many HR employees have quit.
  - d4mi3n 4y ago
    I recently accepted an offer from Shopify and they did a reasonable job. 3 or 4 calls over 2 weeks, with an offer less than 3 days after my last call. Rates were very competitive for my roll and skillset. That said, they do seem to be going through--or have recently gone through--a fair amount of attrition due to declining stock prices. Not surprising given the stock situation and all, but definitely something to factor in if you're considering working there. EDIT: I'd also like to mention that it was a very humane interview process. I felt well treated, and they definitely seem to be screening more for successful employees than they are to filter out as many applicants as they can. Take that as you will, but I respect an org that treats it's employees well.

kadomony 4y ago

So is this why Shopify pays peanuts to their employees? For the big acquisitions?

boringg 4y ago
I haven't heard that Shopify underpays their employees .. What are you talking about? I know Amazon underpays their delivery people/warehouse.
- kadomony 4y ago
  Shopify absolutely underpays its tech employees. It's often below market average, but they think the prestige of Shopify is akin to Google, so people will settle for less.
  - boringg 4y ago
    Can you define underpays its tech employees more specifically - salary or total comp? I mean they don't have the same capital as a company like Amazon/Google/Facebook so obviously can't go toe to toe if that's who you are comparing against. However Shopify's equity compensation aligns with Tesla (underpay but employees earn on equity) probably more than made up and then some compared to all those companies if you have worked there for more than one year. If you just joined then yeah your equity packages just tanked - as did all the major tech companies.
    - dvdhnt 4y ago
      Not OP but current employee. They "underpay" compared to Google, etc and compared to the Bay. But Shopify is a Canadian company first (I'm in the US) and they pay me a salary well over the average for my area (double), not much less than what I was offered by other remote companies (within ~$10k) but pushed north of $200k/yr by adding stock. We also recently received info on a new pay structure that basically lets us choose how much of our TC is $$$ and how much is stock. We're excited and people will be given raises. There are news articles you can read online. Shopify also aims to be a "100 year" company. It means not paying in the top 10, but also not overworking employees or firing the bottom 10% every year. As someone who isn't in the Bay... they pay just fine for new hires and for tenured employees once they finish raises.

JonathanBeuys 4y ago

marketplaces like Amazon have trained consumers to expect products delivered to their doorsteps within 1-2 days I am always surprised that delivery takes so long. Why does it have to take days? If I have a fleet of cars and/or bikes that constantly swarm out from my distribution center, why can't a delivery be done in hours or even minutes?

SteveNuts 4y ago
Proximity to where the products are housed. Most companies, especially small ones don't do the volume required to make stockpiling enough products close to the consumer to make it worthwhile.
- JonathanBeuys 4y ago
  But they are talking about Amazon. That is not a small company.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Rephrased, individual merchants on Amazon don’t move enough volume to have their products stocked at every warehouse on the planet. And the ones that do Amazon has started offering “tonight” delivery.
tommoor 4y ago
This video is a good explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qanMpnYsjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qanMpnYsjk
tyrfing 4y ago
Cost. I'll list some reasons why hours is often not possible. - Products can't always be fulfilled by the closest location. Especially for products that you can't assume infinite stock of, this is a big deal, but in general there is an incredibly long tail of things sold. Look around the sites of Target, Walmart, Home Depot, and similar, look at what's in stock where. It's not universal coverage, and Amazon has much lower density of locations as well as higher SKU counts. If an order is split across multiple locations, it would be cheaper but take longer to first combine them at one rather than deliver the parts separately. - Last-mile efficiency. Stops are clustered and dispatched together, which reduces labor time and mileage. The total cost of 10 spread out stops could easily be the same as 40 more tightly packed ones, and the second won't be an option if they're out for delivery within hours. - Labor efficiency. There are a lot of humans involved still, despite the best efforts of these companies, and a bit of latency allows for consistent utilization despite hour-to-hour and day-to-day changes. Lastly, delivery within hours is offered. Walmart calls it Express Delivery, Amazon has Same-Day Delivery (as well as some 2 hour delivery), Target has Same Day Delivery. These are just premium services with limited selection because it's expensive to do, and modern Free Shipping is an illusion of shipping being too cheap to price when it really isn't. It's cost optimizations all the way down and still not enough.

blobbers 4y ago

SHOP stock has been absolutely slaughtered in the last 6 months. They're either super geniuses with long term vision the markets can't see, or people have completely lost faith with them for exactly these kinds of moves.

blobbers 4y ago
(which are they?)
JonathanBeuys 4y ago
The market values them at $53B. That's not a small sum.
- blobbers 4y ago
  Indeed. But it also devalued them by $150B in the span of 6 months.
toephu2 4y ago
I don't think Shopify stock being down so much in the last 6 month has much to do with their business fundamentals but rather is part of the broader tech sell off. Which tech stocks haven't been slaughtered in the last 6 months? To name a few that have: Square, Snap, FB, DoorDash, CoinBase, Pinterest, Lyft, Uber, Robinhood, etc.
sexy_seedbox 4y ago
So has NET, was 200 a few months ago, now at 77 today.

e-clinton 4y ago

I like the tracking features of Shop app, hate the recommendation of products. Just be a tracker and don’t try and sell my more crap.

FunnyLookinHat 4y ago

This is a classic example of "The best acquisitions start as partnerships." I'm not privy to any internal details of either, but reading the writing on the wall from Deliverr's website and posts around the web, Shopify was a huge integration for them (likely a majority of their business). I am willing to get they've worked together at a C-Suite level to make sure that's a good relationship for a while now, and that has a tendency to produce excellent terms for acquisition (for both parties)!