15 ms·

The dark side of Shopify

782 points by danpalmer 4y ago

m0llusk 4y ago
Also sad that Shopify isn't all that good. Their scale enables them to have a community with helpful guides and videos and stuff, but the actual product is arguably less sophisticated than what competitors offer. What they have is a zinger of a name and a big marketing budget. Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives. Unless there is a specific plug in or use case you want to use there is not much good reason to choose Shopify.
- Readywater 4y ago
  What are some of the alternatives you’d recommend?
  - jdjdjdjdjd 4y ago
    Bigcommerce
  - m0llusk 4y ago
    primarily volusion.com, but it is a big space and often one or two key features make an offering work for a particular enterprise
- zippergz 4y ago
  Sophisticated is not what is called for in a LOT of ecommerce setups. I have assisted employers and clients with Shopify, Bigcommerce, Miva Merchant, and selling on platforms like Amazon and eBay. For most "small business" style use cases, I find Shopify far better than the others, because it's a lot easier for the business owner (who isn't an ecommerce expert) to run, and they don't need or miss the flexibility that the others offer. Invariably it costs more to configure and run something like bigcommerce, and that's only justified if you actually need what they offer.
- thanatos519 4y ago
  Indeed. An e-commerce site on which I have 4weekly subscriptions of multiple products has an astoundingly bad UX ... and it's driven by Shopify. Either Shopify's recurring order system is fundamentally broken, or this particular site is misconfigured. In either case, it's a deficiency of Shopify.
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    Shopify has no recurring system. They are using a plug-in.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dannyw 4y ago
      That's on Shopify, not them.
  - core-utility 4y ago
    As stated, Shopify has no recurring subscription system (which is astounding since it seems basic enough for them to offer, but I guess they're getting profits either way). I've experimented with a few popular recurrence "apps" and I can say that one of the most popular ones was awful to setup and maintain. I chose a more indie option (Seal Subscriptions, if you're a Shopify store go check them out) and got much better results.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  What are your favorite alternatives, particularly if there is one that allows for use of a pin pad for in-person sales?
- soared 4y ago
  Literally nobody uses Shopify because of its cms features. They use it because it quick cheap and easy to set up a really good looking ecom site that has tons of good integrations for shipping/business needs/etc.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives. Please quickly name your top three. Then we can check the veracity by seeing how they get dissected by HN pundits.
  - m0llusk 4y ago
    It has been a while since I evaluated these, so this list is probably not all that good right now. That doesn't change the fact that Shopify is flat out not that good whether you are comparing features or price. And this is all the more reason to check out current alternatives available now instead of thinking you can get what you want from heated discussions with people on HN: volusion.com, ashopcommerce.com, bigcommerce.com are the first that come to mind. This is a big market so it might make more sense to make a list of the top dozen or so and then look more at the ones that offer features that have value for you.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - basch 4y ago
    https://www.cococart.co/ https://www.cococart.co/ found here https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=commerce&status=Active https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=commerce&status=... https://www.techinasia.com/cococart-seed-funding https://www.techinasia.com/cococart-seed-funding also https://techcrunch.com/category/ecommerce/ https://techcrunch.com/category/ecommerce/ https://www.owler.com/company/shopify/competitors https://www.owler.com/company/shopify/competitors
- disantlor 4y ago
  I make my living as the developer for a few large e-comm businesses that all use Shopify and it works really really well. I never get why people (devs especially) call out whatever feature they think Shopify should have without realizing that pretty much anything you could want to do is enabled by their API.
  - dismalpedigree 4y ago
    Custom pricing for certain customers is a nightmare on shopify. I have built several sites and even made custom apps. I have figured out work arounds, but they are less than ideal. Do you have some ideas that I missed?
    - disantlor 4y ago
      It's definitely easier to discount pricing than it is to increase dynamically. The wholesale store functionality has customer based price lists. I've also added products to cart with a discount amount as line item property, which is then picked up and discounted by line item script. Some concern there with people manipulating it but I think it's pretty theoretical and there are ways to combat that. Both those require Plus though. They announced the new backend pricing API/web assembly script thing a couple weeks ago that seems like it will solve this issue for real. Similarly to how the subscription stuff was pretty janky with apps until the selling plan stuff. That said, it got the job done even if it wasnt ideal, and now they have a good solution. I prefer that model to just rolling out a bunch of half baked features. Responding more to the parent than you now, but in most cases if a business claims to critically need some specific feature, I wonder if they are not just married to the specific solution they have in mind and not the underlying problem. But if they really do need a specific thing, then certainly looking for the platform that offers it makes sense.
- WheatM 4y ago
adventured 4y ago
Nortel syndrome takes over another would-be Canadian giant (what do I mean by that? read up on the crazy behavior of the bubble era Nortel; for Shopify there will be a pre bubble valuation crash era and a post valuation crash era).
- cardy31 4y ago
  Just because they’re Canadian doesn’t mean they’ll be Nortel. Nortel had one money making division and a bunch of money losing ones. Gross mismanagement ended them. Shopify looks very different than Nortel (or Blackberry) did.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AinderS 4y ago
It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size to treat their customers and users "fairly", transparently, and without discrimination. Because giving a competitive advantage (from economies of scale) to actors willing to sell their independence to some giant corporation is rapidly leading us to where we are at the mercy of those corporations for even the smallest commercial activities, such as buying or selling a book. Such a state is incompatible with a free society, unless you redefine restrictions on freedom as only what is done by the government. A definition that is little comfort to businesses bankrupted by unaccountable corporations.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  > It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size I personally don't agree with "modest" but having two (or more) classes of corporations to divide laws and regulations between seems like an obvious step in the right direction. Right now there seems to be "monopolies" and everything else. Obviously Amazon or Shopify are not the same as a family owned business; treating them as such should be the exception not the norm.
- crmd 4y ago
  It makes perfect sense that as a firm’s market power grows, it’s regulatory burden scales appropriately.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Until it turns into regulatory capture, whereby the regulatory burden prevents others from growing their business beyond a certain point.
    - treeman79 4y ago
      Bingo
- kache_ 4y ago
  Doesn't scale :P
kitsune_ 4y ago
I just read the entire Twitter thread. What a Kafkaesque nightmare.
soared 4y ago
Why the hell would you continue using Shopify if they are freezing your accs/etc? Put a banner up on your site saying the shop is down temporarily, rebuild a barebones version of the site just for ecom, etc. Shopify needs to do better, but I can’t help but question the business decisions made by op.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  The thread talks about preorders already sold via Shopify. Switching away doesn’t help with those.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  they did switch - the issue were sales already made within shopify, and two charges to their account from shopify that shopify did not identify why they were taken such that the small business' bank considered them to be suspicious.
adrr 4y ago
I don’t understand how shopify is predatory. Shopify isn’t a merchant processor, they don’t hold merchant funds. Stripe is the merchant processor for shopify payments. They are the ones that froze the payments. Freezing money has no benefit for Shopify.
- tehwebguy 4y ago
  Shopify has operated as their own payment processor for a few years.
  - sarora27 4y ago
    Note: I work in the payments space. Shopify is one of Stripe's largest customers and a very heavy influencer of their roadmap (example: Stripe Treasury, BillPay (coming soon!), and more!)
  - adrr 4y ago
    Not yet. Still stripe. I assume their eventually do it as they seek larger merchants that will require interchange plus billing and not blended.
    - freeone3000 4y ago
      ShopPay is 100% a thing.
      - beeandapenguin 4y ago
        Shop Pay by is powered by Stripe
      - adrr 4y ago
        Still uses stripe.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    Shopify Payments is a Stripe wrapper.
tehwebguy 4y ago
> I responded with an email restating that the First Sale Doctrine makes such a request both nonsensical and illegal, and asked a few more questions. The rest of the thread notwithstanding, this is not what First Sale Doctrine does, at all!
- rhester 4y ago
  Instead of above, if replying (for the benefit of this community) why not explain how or why you disagree?
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I don't even see the above in the tweet thread, but i think its pretty obviously true that the first sale doctrine doesn't make it illegal for shopify to ask more about your business and where you are getting your products from. They don't need any excuse to ask that, they are allowed to ask their customers anything they want.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  If you buy goods from an authorized place and sell them, you do not require any authorization or proof to sell those 'branded' goods, because first sale doctrine means that the original seller has exhausted their legal rights to control the sale and distribution of those items. So it sort of is what first sale doctrine does. shopify is asking them to produce proof they have authorization to sell something they've already purchased and need no special rights to sell, regardless of whether they're branded or not.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    You're assuming his use of copyrighted and trademarked material is authorized. They're selling books and even soaps with "deadwood" in the name, and they / the publisher (sounds like they're both run by him?) appear to have directly lifted the photo for the cover of one of the books: https://mzs.press/The-Last-Western-Deadwood-and-the-End-of-American-Empire-p476587251 https://mzs.press/The-Last-Western-Deadwood-and-the-End-of-A... ...from here: https://deadwood.fandom.com/wiki/Deadwood_(episode)?file=Season-1-episode-1-deadwood.png https://deadwood.fandom.com/wiki/Deadwood_(episode)?file=Sea... My guess is that Seitz got nailed by trademark and copyright infringement claims and is now spinning a story about how his poor poor book shop is getting screwed over by the Big Evil Corporation, as witnessed by the very histrionic language he uses in his tweets.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hoten 4y ago
Isn't this what lawyers are for? Seems like he's just spinning his wheels trying to get through at the customer support level.
- lin83 4y ago
  Hiring lawyers is probably going to cost more than the 7000 dollars taken from him. Large companies probably spend that much on their legal teams per hour.
  - ShakataGaNai 4y ago
    100% this is the problem with our current legal system. The little guy is going to have to pay, by the hour, for a lawyer. Where as shopify has, I'm sure, an entire team on the payroll. It costs shopify, in effect, nothing to battle this until the heat death of the universe (or the little guy runs out of money, which ever comes first)
  - bawolff 4y ago
    IANAL, but shopify is a canadian company not american, so if the seller wins wouldn't they also get legal fees - which makes it harder to bury them under legal fees? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fees) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_f...
- webmobdev 4y ago
  I don't get this logic - why shouldn't he express his anger, frustration and annoyances with shopify publicly? If I was in his position I would do the same too, whether it gets me some response from Shopify or not. Even if I hired lawyers, I would still prefer to tell the public about shitty customer service, especially if it costs me money and time.
  - hoten 4y ago
    I think we both agree that complaining in public is cathartic. However, it isn't always the most productive nor protective (of your own emotional state) option available. If that is realized at all, it typically is only with hindsight.
jstgord 4y ago
oh.. I had assumed this referred to the _technical_ dark side .. Was just toying around with porting a friends very successful shopify store to another platform .. noticed the main home page weighed in at 89MB .. wowza. [ To be fair a lot of that was large pngs which are much smaller as jpg or webp ] Scrolling thru the endless html/css/js page sources injected plethora of 'liquid' inclusions, I can only describe as otherworldly.
- SquareWheel 4y ago
  It would take some very large images to add up to 89MB, even if they were png. I'm guessing they were not sized correctly for the web.
  - jstgord 4y ago
    indeed .. Top offenders were essentially 2048 pixel wide png photos which should have been 1024 wide jpgs at max - weighing 6MB instead of 250k for a difference the human eye probably cant detect : ) but.. more than that, just an endless stream of js html css inclusions .. I suspect 85% of which is dormant, 20% actually repeated, if I were to guess. hehe
    - raihansaputra 4y ago
      I'd hazard it's mostly images and/or the plugins the store has installed to track conversions and / or extend the Shopify store. I do admit plain Shopify stores/themes are quick and lightweight, and the plugins are to blame, but I also point at Shopify for blocking some easy features to be supplanted by plugins.
- savrajsingh 4y ago
  Fun fact: Shopify user accounts are a disaster. Customers cannot stay logged in to your site for more than 24 hrs.
  - SenHeng 4y ago
    Maybe the shops you’re using have done that on purpose? I worked on a shopify storefront for the past year and our users stay logged in for an indeterminate amount of time. We actually have a problem figuring out the exact amount of time their access token stays valid as it seems random, from a week to a month to 3 days.
fallat 4y ago
Still surprised to this day there isn't some installer that just handles everything once you give it a webhost and the payment processor you want.
- adrr 4y ago
  You can bring your own merchant account to any saas e-commerce site and not have to worry about getting your money frozen. Most banks offer merchant accounts and you just pay for a gateway like authorized.net. It’s going to be $30/m gateway and $30/m merchant account + setup fees.
  - ratww 4y ago
    Yeah, that's how I used to do, and it was quite simple. I actually had much much more trouble with things like Recurly (whose API and packages are absolute garbage, IMO) and even Stripe than with the simpler gateways. The only problems I had were solved with a few phone calls, as I had a bank manager very interested in doing business with the company I was working for. But I was not in the USA/EU when I did this stuff, so I have no idea if Stripe and co. have improved things or not. For me (I later moved to Europe) it was a massive regression.
ShakataGaNai 4y ago
Shopify should be scrambling to do a public post-mortem right now. They "Fixed" the situation within a few hours of the tweetstorm, showing that they know they f'd up. Shit happens - but how does shopify assuage small businesses that this won't happen to them next? A public apology, post-mortem and steps to make sure this never happens again.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Unless this ends up being widely reported in the media, most of their customers and potential customers won't even hear about it, and it will only change the behavior of a small fraction thereof. Shopify doesn't have to do anything, and they know it.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    Even if people read enough of these that Shopify stops seeing new merchant signups…I don’t think Shopify would understand WHY they’re not getting any new customers. They’d probably blame it on SEO or something.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- LegitShady 4y ago
  it does not sound fixed to me. It sounds like they're still threatening this small business because the business' own bank flagged payments shopify took from their account, and were reversed, and shopify can't justify the charges, and is again threatening them. I don't see anywhere its resolved, just that they sent a reply.
- Kiro 4y ago
  You're overestimating the impact. This is just one of thousands of similar stories, none of which has gotten a public apology or post-mortem.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  "sorry because we got caught"
chaostheory 4y ago
What Shopify did wrong was that it wasn’t fast enough to respond with transparency. However, I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books. Amazon is so rife with fake products that it’s no better than eBay now. I can no longer impulse buy on Amazon. Depending on the product, I will check if there are 3rd party sellers using Amazon warehousing. If there’s any evidence of commingling, I just buy it elsewhere. We’ve been slowly using Target more and more since they have limits on inventory commingling.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  >I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books. lets say a bookstore goes out of business and I buy their stock and sell it in my own store. Do I need proof that I have legal right to sell those books? First sale doctrine is established law - your discomfort with 'fake' books has nothing to do with anything - no one said anything about counterfeit goods. They're asking them to get some 'proof' they can sell merchandise they bought to sell.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    Shopify doesn’t want potential fakes, and many customers like myself are sick of them. My discomfort with shady 3rd party sellers has a lot to do with it because I will take my business elsewhere, or eat up customer support hours and ramp up costs related to returns and exchanges. It’s a free market. There are plenty of other online platforms to choose from that don’t care whether or not they sell fake garbage. You can also create your own online store if needed. Apt username
  - askafriend 4y ago
    As a customer, yes I will require proof before buying anything from your hypothetical store. If Shopify can provide that assurance to me - I will transact on Shopify-hosted stores more with confidence.
  - tzs 4y ago
bawolff 4y ago
Honestly, i strongly suspect there is more to this story. If there wasn't, seems like it would be a slam dunk lawsuit. I also dont understand why they continued to use shopify if shopify was keeping their money.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Matt apparently authored books on The Sopranos and Mad Men. And according to him in the twitter thread, HBO helped setup interviews and such for the book. If it has access to HBO like that to write the book, if they didn't like him selling soap they would probably raise it with him directly. Not go to shopify.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    From the linked tweet thread: > But all of our Deadwood items are critical, journalistic, or transformative & HBO legal told me they're fine with them existing. If this is actually true - and that's a big if - then the problem is that HBO doesn't think the work in question is infringing, but Shopify does. This is a huge problem with any kind of intermediary liability, because intermediaries do not have the capability to fairly adjudicate copyright cases. If you're selling, say, a review of copyrighted material, that's fair use. However, the problem with fair use is that it makes even the most basic copyright inquiry that much more complicated. Publishers and copyright owners don't want to have to consider fair use for every strikingly-similar infringement out there. They want platform owners to have to fix the problems they created, and they know that they will do so in the most half-assed way possible. That means fair use goes out the window - why risk six-figures-per-infringement judgements at all when we can just ignore it and refuse to host fair use content? That being said there's still problems with the original tweet's argument here. There is a huge gulf between "we don't think this is infringing" and an actual licensing agreement. At best, HBO might be estopped from suing over past infringements, but they have nothing else to mitigate the risk of their store's existence and no promise that HBO doesn't change their mind tomorrow. Copyright owners like this kind of strategic ambiguity - licensing agreements have rather high transaction costs, and every one you sign means another exclusive license[0] you can't sell anymore. They don't want to have to go after every infringement either. They want to be able to grant and revoke their largesse at will. [0] i.e. the lucrative ones. There are entire categories of licensing where nonexclusive licenses are basically worthless and nobody will accept such terms.
memorable 4y ago
Alternative front-end version: https://nitter.net/mattzollerseitz/status/1541994356521013248 https://nitter.net/mattzollerseitz/status/154199435652101324...
- ornornor 4y ago
  Thanks, so much better than twitter.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Why doesn't Twitter look like this? Now that Jack departed and the Musk dilemma, perhaps they can start disassociating from their troubled pasts
    - the_only_human 4y ago
      run by comitte
    - skybrian 4y ago
      I don't see the improvement? Nitter has smaller text and is in dark mode. It seems slightly harder to read. Maybe it's what you're used to.
      - ornornor 4y ago
        Try both twitter and nitter on a mobile without the twitter app.
      - valvar 4y ago
        The main difference is the amount of JS bloat. Twitter takes many seconds to load and navigation is sluggish.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 4y ago
Shopify nickels and dimes you at every chance.
- WheatM 4y ago
baskethead 4y ago
Companies need to spend more money on customer service. Period. End of story. But it's expensive so they would rather risk fucking over a percentage of their customers in hopes that they can contain any problems. At some point, governments need to step in and regulate this once their customer support to customer ratio drops below a certain percentage. Otherwise it's a form of tax that creates extreme victims and its usually the small customers because big customers can always pick up the phone and call someone.
jollybean 4y ago
EBay, Paypal the same. Admittedly, it's hard to be an intermediary, because the sheer amount of fraud you there. These companies become, due to liability etc. a kind of 'financial police' which isn't their role. And then have to do that for every little jurisdiction. I suggest that there needs to be way more transparency about their own terms, and paths to redress grievances. But probably we need to change regulations a bit as well for e-commerce.
hklgny 4y ago
I suspect this is more of a stripe problem than a Shopify one. Having dealt with them shutting down our customer accounts on several occasions with no information as to why and ambiguous documentation requests that seem to go on forever, it seems perfectly plausible to me that this was just as frustrating for Shopify as it was the customer. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t have handled it better, but I’ve definitely experienced the other side of this story and it’s awful.
- canucklady 4y ago
  Nope, it's de rigeur for every ecommerce company. Shopify legal gets some BS email from some big corp, and they slap some vague technological solution on it ("flag anything thay says Star Wars"). Then they get a bunch of overworked, underpaid people to try and enforce their nonsense policy based on the results of the tool. Ultimately they get what they want, because they frustrate these problematic small customers into leaving the platform. Meanwhile they continue to bend over backwards for Jeffree Star or whoever because he'll have a hissy fit on Youtube if his flash sale doesn't happen at the right time.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    Almost like tech solutions don’t always scale to handle international growth. That can’t possibly be right though… Growth is the only thing I’ve ever known. What will I do now? Nobody’s going to let me play with hundreds of millions of dollars if I merely make something that “works correctly”. (Dead inside and being sarcastic, btw)
    - datavirtue 4y ago
      No, they just can't scale to handle people because the founders are rubbing themselves just thinking about all the automated money. Anything that gets in the way of the money printer gets crushed.
ojkelly 4y ago
This problem seems endemic to big tech platforms, particularly when money is involved. I remember hearing similar stories about PayPal a decade ago (still do for what it’s worth). While I can understand the desire to not interact with a user of the platform (shopify, google, PayPal, etc), because of the cost, and because many are likely to be bots or actually fraudulent. It’s precisely at these edge cases when computers and automated performs the worst. These are the situations where the scenario is imperfectly modelled in the system. Maybe the engineers didn’t think of the edge case, or an ML model never had training data to cover it. Point is, it doesn’t matter. People problems need people solutions. Remediating edge cases involving people’s livelihoods strikes me as most likely a people problem. When you’re asking a person or company to trust them in a business relationship into the future, such as by being their shopfront, there’s only so many you can destroy before word gets around. I haven’t used or recommended businesses to use PayPal for a decade, because I saw them time and again inflict pain and financial stress with no recourse. As another example, look at the general sentiment around Google Cloud. Would you build a business on top of it? Does that include an exit strategy to multi-cloud, because you’re unsure if they’ll support the service you use? If you can’t scale to provide a human to help other humans caught in the edge cases of your own system, then you need to acknowledge you’re causing harm. A dog food company that kills a puppy every week, is really a puppy killing company that sells dog food. It’s a matter of perspective yes, but if you got into it to help feed dogs, surely the last thing you would want to do is harm them? And if you became aware your killing puppies, would it not be the top priority to ensure it never happens again?
- imachine1980_ 4y ago
  What alternative for PayPal?, and what for cloud?( I know things like linode, but I mean big cloud).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    There are many alternatives for PayPal; stripe being one but there are many others as well that won’t totally screw you as merchant like PayPal does. I use a local one who actually defend me when there are chargebacks and I can visit and talk to a human in case of other issues.
kamranjon 4y ago
This seems pretty damning and I had considered Shopify to start my own online store selling products that I make in the future. I am curious if anybody has suggestions for good alternatives to Shopify for building an online store?
system2 4y ago
WordPress / Magento / OpenCart + Stripe / Authorize.net / BrainTree / Paypal. Why use Shopify and depend on it? Host your own stuff for nearly free ($2-5) and pay very little for the payment gateways. Shopify charges additional 1% per transaction for 3rd party payment integrations. Weird.
- Brystephor 4y ago
  I work in payments. I'd guess the 1% on top of 3rd party integrations is to encourage folks to go through Shop Pay, which is owned by Shopify. As for why people don't self host, it's likely just easier not to. You start off on an easy platform because who knows if your business is gonna work, then the business grows and you're already on there so why self host when it's working right now? And you continue down that path until it doesn't anymore.
- tomnipotent 4y ago
  For most Shopify sellers, that 1% is still less than it would cost to pay the person to setup what you're suggesting. Really not weird at all.
matiasfernandez 4y ago
This exact thing happened to us. We have a store located in Puerto Rico and Shopify would randomly stop payouts every 3-4 months or so because they needed to re-verify our owner address information. Apparently, most of Puerto Rico is not verifiable by their shitty address verification API, so it triggers the freeze every time it retries the verification. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had and cost us thousands of dollars. Stripe also did the same exact thing for very similar reasons and at one point we had over $300,000 USD frozen with them, which was basically our entire monthly payroll expense. We had to explain to our bank why our accounts were suddenly drained. This one was worse than Shopify's since we actually never received any communications notifying that this was going to happen. At least we got an email from Shopify that we just hadn't noticed. They're all broken. And Know Your Customer needs to eat shit and die.
- thejosh 4y ago
  Address validation is the biggest piece of automation that needs to stop. You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show. Or the system that suddenly decides to start doing validation doesn't actually accept valid addresses. Companies think automation can handle it, but it's an absolute nightmare.
  - rexf 4y ago
    Address validation is not 100% reliable, so systems should have an override "Yes, this is my address" option. Unfortunately many forms assume address validation is foolproof, so there is no mechanism for entering in your actual address. It just gets rejected. As a customer, I wanted to buy something and the website wouldn't accept my address (since it wouldn't accept any "/" characters). Guess what? There are plenty of addresses in the US with "/", such as 50 1/2 Foobar Street. Address validation does not always work, so companies shouldn't act that way.
    - curiousgal 4y ago
      Try living in a newly built building. Every developer seems to be under the impression that if an address doesn't exist in the Google maps API, then it doesn't exist at all.
pikelet 4y ago
It's not just merchants (until reading this I actually had the impression that Shopify's intention was to protect merchants at all costs). I've heard many horror stories from other developers in the Shopify Partners Slack Community. For developers this is potentially even worse than it is for merchants, as many Shopify apps simply cannot be migrated to another platform (and your customers can't follow even if you are able to). The stories I've seen appear to come under two scenarios. 1. A new developer builds their first app (significant up front time investment). Upon submitting their app, Shopify bans their account giving some vague reason such as 'developer's name matches that of a known terrorist' (are names globally unique now?) or 'we believe your business presents a level of risk that we will be unable to support'. Shopify doesn't explain beyond that, and further communication is impossible. All the developer's hard work and trust in the platform comes to nothing, and Shopify doesn't care. 2. Existing developers with successful apps are suddenly delisted from the app store or even shut down entirely. New installs are not possible. Shopify refuses to explain the reasoning. Months pass without any resolution as the developers lose users and revenue. In the latter case, many partners suspected that these apps were being delisted due to competitors paying for services to flood their app with fake positive reviews, knowing that it would lead to the app being delisted. I don't what came of this situation; whether the matter was finally resolved or those affected just moved on; as I've seen nothing since (this was about 3 months ago). Shopify gave a few vague acknowledgements in Slack along the lines of 'we are taking this seriously, but can't offer details', but nothing more. The casual and/or secretive way Shopify dealt with these cases (where a developer's livelihood is at stake) makes me very worried that I could find myself in a similar situation at any time. It's not even act first, ask questions later. It's simply act, case closed. Shopify wasn't always like this. It's a recent trend.
- sekl 4y ago
  “developer's name matches that of a known terrorist” Happened to my wife, who has an extremely common name, when ordering something online and the shipping company blocked her package. infuriating…
whatisweb3 4y ago
An option for a crypto payment system could make a difference for this seller and shift some of the power away from Shopify. They would have no way to block access to funds or restrict a willing customer from paying the seller for an item. There should be an option for a payment provider that is a credibly neutral protocol.
- urza 4y ago
  aaand get downvoted by HN crowd in 3, 2, 1.. :)
- xmodem 4y ago
  That entirely depends on if shopify is still an intermediary in that scenario or not.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Unfortunately the "default" crypto payment acceptance providers people use are user hostile (Bitpay, Coinbase Commerce). Other options (BTCPayServer) are available, but they need more work to integrate.
kweks 4y ago
Sorry to hear about your situation. A lot of people have been pointing to the "roll your own" versions of e-commerce stacks. We've been running e-commerce for the last six years, and have tried everything (woocommerce, open commerce, bigcommerce, magento, prestashop). They are all light-years behind Shopify. We've had bumps along the way with Shopify as well (similar problems to yours). A few thoughts: - Know who you are in bed with : Shopify Payments is actually Stripe Platform in most locations, and PayPal in Europe. We refuse to work with PayPal because of their predatory behaviour, so we choose not to use Shopify Payments in the EU. - The Shopify Payments platform is for better or for worse a "start without friction, KYC later" experience. Be aware of what this entails. - Get on RocketReach, find key people in Shopify relevant to your problem and send a succinct email asking for assistance. It's unblocked every problem we ever had - Do the same with your merchant processors : Edwin from stripe actively reads HN, and can often provide assistance on Stripe related issues. - Get lawyers. Not the Go-Sue-the-Pants-off-everyone lawyers, but business / commercial lawyers. Not only can they provide excellent advice for your business, they often spécialise in these types of situations to have conversations and results that you can't access individually. At the end of the day, know your business partners and establish a relationship with them. Using a combination of the above, we've survived competitors using fake C&Ds against our processors and platforms, amongst other things.
- omnimus 4y ago
  Are you sure about the paypal in europe? AFAIK you can set it up Stripe only if your country supports Stripe which most of EU does.
  - kweks 4y ago
    We use Stripe as our primary, when Shopify Payments became available in our region (France) it routed through Paypal. I couldn't see any backend option to select the preferred Shopify Payments backend processor, but would be interested if you have insight into how to achieve this. In what gives weight to the GP, we enabled Shopify Payments, confirmed it went through PayPal and switched back to Stripe to avoid the "process with PP for a week and then have them freeze your funds for 6 months" grind.
jstummbillig 4y ago
Idk. I got scammed buying a NAS from a smb electronics shop recently. No one will ever know. No one cares. Logically I think it's far more likely that big companies are compliant because they operate so much in the open and are under constant scrutiny. Every disgruntled customer has the potential to go viral and do enormous damage. With the most empathic sigh: Shit happens. At big corps most of it. Relatively, probably not.
dperot 4y ago
nickjj 4y ago
The author mentioned they didn't like that transaction fees are not given back during refunds but unfortunately both Stripe and PayPal do the same thing. They started doing this a few years ago. If someone buys your product for $100 and Stripe's fee is $3.20 and you issue a refund to someone you will refund the user $100 and Stripe keeps the $3.20 so that refund really cost you $3.20.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Yep. It’s very sad for the owner. And I empathize. But a lot of things they blame shopify for is actually the exact same across the ecommerce spectrum.
- voiper1 4y ago
  I understand that it's common practice, but here Shopify froze their ability to withdraw but still took orders.
- tzs 4y ago
  To the processor and other entities such as the credit card companies and banks that are involved with processing the transaction there isn't much difference between a refund and charge. Both use most of the same resources on the same infrastructure the same way in the same amount. If you had a deal where you were directly exposed to all the fees involved, what I'd expect is that you net fee on a transaction would be composed of fees from three different categories. 1. Per transaction fees that apply to both charges and refunds. 2. Fees proportional to the charge amount that apply to both charges and refunds. 3. Fees proportional to the charge amount that only apply to charges. On a charge you'd pay the fees from all three categories. On a refund you might get back the fees from category #3 you paid on the charge, but you'd again pay the fees from category #1 and #2. For example if you sell an item for price P and the fees from the three categories are F1, F2, and F3, your net gain on that transaction is P - F1 - F2 - F3. A refund transaction has a net gain of -P - F1 - F2 + F3. That would bring your total net for the combined charge/refund to -2 F1 - 2 F2. This we should expect some net fee for a charge followed by a refund. For small transactions that net fee could be up to almost twice what the fee was for the charge alone. Most processors though don't directly expose you to all the fees. That's because there are a bazillion different possible fees with each different subsets applicable to any particular transaction. So most processors expose a simplified structure based on averages over a large number of transactions across similar merchants. Most merchants prefer that. When doing such a simplified fee structure, they could set charge fees based on the average for F1 + F2 + F3 and refund fees based on the average F1 + F2 - F3. But refunds should be much less frequent than charges, so it seems find to me when doing a simplified fee structure to just average the refunds in too, and just deal with fees on the charge side of things.
black_puppydog 4y ago
so, I get that shopify brings more to the table than just payment processing. but I'm surprised that nobody here has brought up regular SEPA payments and SEPA direct debits. Of course they will only currently work in the EU, but fast, reliable, cheap direct transfer systems might be a model other countries could implement. The benefit is that banks (at least in Europe) are quite a bit more regulated than e.g. shopify and random lock-outs like this shouldn't be as common, or at the very least should have clearly defined escalation mechanisms. In terms of customer protection as well, direct debits are super nice here in EU.
urza 4y ago
Bitcoin fixes this. Ditch the intermediaries and 3rd parties. https://btcpayserver.org https://btcpayserver.org EDIT: aand get downvoted by HN crowd, how unexpected :)
- xmodem 4y ago
  "0% fees" (apart from the transaction costs, which are significant, and never mind how long it takes the transaction to go through)
  - urza 4y ago
    First of all, nowadays you should be using Lightning Network, where fees are negligible and the payment is finalized and settled in order of seconds. BtcPay server has first class integration of Lightning Network. And second, even if you want to accept onchain payments, current onchain fees are something $0.2 for confirmation within an hour. Which seems reasonable for having final settlement without any intermediary of your funds this fast. Compare this with traditional payment options like credit cards where you are waiting often times 30 days or even more for settlement and as the OP illustrates, you are at mercy of intermediaries.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    BTC fees are basically fuck all these days, and you can just use LN.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Stop playing the victims on how the angry HN crowd has downvoted you. You’re being downvoted because it’s a bookstore that sells to the general public. Less than 1% of their customers would know how to pay with bitcoin, and even for those who do, they would likely keep their bitcoin and hold them right now since it’s at a 1-year-low instead of using it as a currency. It’s just not helpful to the situation. That’s why you’re being downvoted.
  - urza 4y ago
    Those are valid concerns, the "hodl only" mentality, the volatility.. but you do you see discussion about this on HN? No, just downvotes. I kind of doubnt that what you say is the motivation for the downvotes. I think if you are being honest, for some reason the HN users just hate bitcoin.
inflam52 4y ago
Shameless plug: this is exactly why I built SimpleStore. An easy way to manage a small store without worrying about the platform changing the rules on you. https://chrisdiana.github.io/simplestore/ https://chrisdiana.github.io/simplestore/
chris_wot 4y ago
Holy crap… they made them take down a “Star Wars” section of their site? Why?!?
mk81 4y ago
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
Does Shopify have a marketplace like Amazon ? Ie discovering the products and stores ? I’m struggling to understand the face of it.
RichardHeart 4y ago
Someone should invent a value transfer technology that routes around middlemen. Censorship resistant, so to speak.
npx13 4y ago
We are a very long established bricks and mortar Irish retailer that chose to go online with Shopify and use Shopify Payments for online transactions only at the beginning of the pandemic. Today, we were given essentially given a couple of days to provide invoices from all our suppliers and letters of authorisation from each of them. We have a lot of suppliers all over Europe and this is the 14th July. To say that we are angry would be a gross understatement.

782 points by danpalmer 4y ago

Also sad that Shopify isn't all that good. Their scale enables them to have a community with helpful guides and videos and stuff, but the actual product is arguably less sophisticated than what competitors offer. What they have is a zinger of a name and a big marketing budget. Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives. Unless there is a specific plug in or use case you want to use there is not much good reason to choose Shopify.

Readywater 4y ago
What are some of the alternatives you’d recommend?
- jdjdjdjdjd 4y ago
  Bigcommerce
- m0llusk 4y ago
  primarily volusion.com, but it is a big space and often one or two key features make an offering work for a particular enterprise
zippergz 4y ago
Sophisticated is not what is called for in a LOT of ecommerce setups. I have assisted employers and clients with Shopify, Bigcommerce, Miva Merchant, and selling on platforms like Amazon and eBay. For most "small business" style use cases, I find Shopify far better than the others, because it's a lot easier for the business owner (who isn't an ecommerce expert) to run, and they don't need or miss the flexibility that the others offer. Invariably it costs more to configure and run something like bigcommerce, and that's only justified if you actually need what they offer.
thanatos519 4y ago
Indeed. An e-commerce site on which I have 4weekly subscriptions of multiple products has an astoundingly bad UX ... and it's driven by Shopify. Either Shopify's recurring order system is fundamentally broken, or this particular site is misconfigured. In either case, it's a deficiency of Shopify.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  Shopify has no recurring system. They are using a plug-in.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dannyw 4y ago
    That's on Shopify, not them.
- core-utility 4y ago
  As stated, Shopify has no recurring subscription system (which is astounding since it seems basic enough for them to offer, but I guess they're getting profits either way). I've experimented with a few popular recurrence "apps" and I can say that one of the most popular ones was awful to setup and maintain. I chose a more indie option (Seal Subscriptions, if you're a Shopify store go check them out) and got much better results.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
What are your favorite alternatives, particularly if there is one that allows for use of a pin pad for in-person sales?
soared 4y ago
Literally nobody uses Shopify because of its cms features. They use it because it quick cheap and easy to set up a really good looking ecom site that has tons of good integrations for shipping/business needs/etc.
jancsika 4y ago
> Anyone in this space should really check out alternatives. Please quickly name your top three. Then we can check the veracity by seeing how they get dissected by HN pundits.
- m0llusk 4y ago
  It has been a while since I evaluated these, so this list is probably not all that good right now. That doesn't change the fact that Shopify is flat out not that good whether you are comparing features or price. And this is all the more reason to check out current alternatives available now instead of thinking you can get what you want from heated discussions with people on HN: volusion.com, ashopcommerce.com, bigcommerce.com are the first that come to mind. This is a big market so it might make more sense to make a list of the top dozen or so and then look more at the ones that offer features that have value for you.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- basch 4y ago
  https://www.cococart.co/ https://www.cococart.co/ found here https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=commerce&status=Active https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=commerce&status=... https://www.techinasia.com/cococart-seed-funding https://www.techinasia.com/cococart-seed-funding also https://techcrunch.com/category/ecommerce/ https://techcrunch.com/category/ecommerce/ https://www.owler.com/company/shopify/competitors https://www.owler.com/company/shopify/competitors
disantlor 4y ago
I make my living as the developer for a few large e-comm businesses that all use Shopify and it works really really well. I never get why people (devs especially) call out whatever feature they think Shopify should have without realizing that pretty much anything you could want to do is enabled by their API.
- dismalpedigree 4y ago
  Custom pricing for certain customers is a nightmare on shopify. I have built several sites and even made custom apps. I have figured out work arounds, but they are less than ideal. Do you have some ideas that I missed?
  - disantlor 4y ago
    It's definitely easier to discount pricing than it is to increase dynamically. The wholesale store functionality has customer based price lists. I've also added products to cart with a discount amount as line item property, which is then picked up and discounted by line item script. Some concern there with people manipulating it but I think it's pretty theoretical and there are ways to combat that. Both those require Plus though. They announced the new backend pricing API/web assembly script thing a couple weeks ago that seems like it will solve this issue for real. Similarly to how the subscription stuff was pretty janky with apps until the selling plan stuff. That said, it got the job done even if it wasnt ideal, and now they have a good solution. I prefer that model to just rolling out a bunch of half baked features. Responding more to the parent than you now, but in most cases if a business claims to critically need some specific feature, I wonder if they are not just married to the specific solution they have in mind and not the underlying problem. But if they really do need a specific thing, then certainly looking for the platform that offers it makes sense.
WheatM 4y ago

adventured 4y ago

Nortel syndrome takes over another would-be Canadian giant (what do I mean by that? read up on the crazy behavior of the bubble era Nortel; for Shopify there will be a pre bubble valuation crash era and a post valuation crash era).

cardy31 4y ago
Just because they’re Canadian doesn’t mean they’ll be Nortel. Nortel had one money making division and a bunch of money losing ones. Gross mismanagement ended them. Shopify looks very different than Nortel (or Blackberry) did.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

AinderS 4y ago

It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size to treat their customers and users "fairly", transparently, and without discrimination. Because giving a competitive advantage (from economies of scale) to actors willing to sell their independence to some giant corporation is rapidly leading us to where we are at the mercy of those corporations for even the smallest commercial activities, such as buying or selling a book. Such a state is incompatible with a free society, unless you redefine restrictions on freedom as only what is done by the government. A definition that is little comfort to businesses bankrupted by unaccountable corporations.

throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
> It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size I personally don't agree with "modest" but having two (or more) classes of corporations to divide laws and regulations between seems like an obvious step in the right direction. Right now there seems to be "monopolies" and everything else. Obviously Amazon or Shopify are not the same as a family owned business; treating them as such should be the exception not the norm.
crmd 4y ago
It makes perfect sense that as a firm’s market power grows, it’s regulatory burden scales appropriately.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Until it turns into regulatory capture, whereby the regulatory burden prevents others from growing their business beyond a certain point.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    Bingo
kache_ 4y ago
Doesn't scale :P

kitsune_ 4y ago

I just read the entire Twitter thread. What a Kafkaesque nightmare.

soared 4y ago

Why the hell would you continue using Shopify if they are freezing your accs/etc? Put a banner up on your site saying the shop is down temporarily, rebuild a barebones version of the site just for ecom, etc. Shopify needs to do better, but I can’t help but question the business decisions made by op.

ceejayoz 4y ago
The thread talks about preorders already sold via Shopify. Switching away doesn’t help with those.
LegitShady 4y ago
they did switch - the issue were sales already made within shopify, and two charges to their account from shopify that shopify did not identify why they were taken such that the small business' bank considered them to be suspicious.

adrr 4y ago

I don’t understand how shopify is predatory. Shopify isn’t a merchant processor, they don’t hold merchant funds. Stripe is the merchant processor for shopify payments. They are the ones that froze the payments. Freezing money has no benefit for Shopify.

tehwebguy 4y ago
Shopify has operated as their own payment processor for a few years.
- sarora27 4y ago
  Note: I work in the payments space. Shopify is one of Stripe's largest customers and a very heavy influencer of their roadmap (example: Stripe Treasury, BillPay (coming soon!), and more!)
- adrr 4y ago
  Not yet. Still stripe. I assume their eventually do it as they seek larger merchants that will require interchange plus billing and not blended.
  - freeone3000 4y ago
    ShopPay is 100% a thing.
    - beeandapenguin 4y ago
      Shop Pay by is powered by Stripe
    - adrr 4y ago
      Still uses stripe.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  Shopify Payments is a Stripe wrapper.

tehwebguy 4y ago

> I responded with an email restating that the First Sale Doctrine makes such a request both nonsensical and illegal, and asked a few more questions. The rest of the thread notwithstanding, this is not what First Sale Doctrine does, at all!

rhester 4y ago
Instead of above, if replying (for the benefit of this community) why not explain how or why you disagree?
- bawolff 4y ago
  I don't even see the above in the tweet thread, but i think its pretty obviously true that the first sale doctrine doesn't make it illegal for shopify to ask more about your business and where you are getting your products from. They don't need any excuse to ask that, they are allowed to ask their customers anything they want.
LegitShady 4y ago
If you buy goods from an authorized place and sell them, you do not require any authorization or proof to sell those 'branded' goods, because first sale doctrine means that the original seller has exhausted their legal rights to control the sale and distribution of those items. So it sort of is what first sale doctrine does. shopify is asking them to produce proof they have authorization to sell something they've already purchased and need no special rights to sell, regardless of whether they're branded or not.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  You're assuming his use of copyrighted and trademarked material is authorized. They're selling books and even soaps with "deadwood" in the name, and they / the publisher (sounds like they're both run by him?) appear to have directly lifted the photo for the cover of one of the books: https://mzs.press/The-Last-Western-Deadwood-and-the-End-of-American-Empire-p476587251 https://mzs.press/The-Last-Western-Deadwood-and-the-End-of-A... ...from here: https://deadwood.fandom.com/wiki/Deadwood_(episode)?file=Season-1-episode-1-deadwood.png https://deadwood.fandom.com/wiki/Deadwood_(episode)?file=Sea... My guess is that Seitz got nailed by trademark and copyright infringement claims and is now spinning a story about how his poor poor book shop is getting screwed over by the Big Evil Corporation, as witnessed by the very histrionic language he uses in his tweets.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hoten 4y ago

Isn't this what lawyers are for? Seems like he's just spinning his wheels trying to get through at the customer support level.

lin83 4y ago
Hiring lawyers is probably going to cost more than the 7000 dollars taken from him. Large companies probably spend that much on their legal teams per hour.
- ShakataGaNai 4y ago
  100% this is the problem with our current legal system. The little guy is going to have to pay, by the hour, for a lawyer. Where as shopify has, I'm sure, an entire team on the payroll. It costs shopify, in effect, nothing to battle this until the heat death of the universe (or the little guy runs out of money, which ever comes first)
- bawolff 4y ago
  IANAL, but shopify is a canadian company not american, so if the seller wins wouldn't they also get legal fees - which makes it harder to bury them under legal fees? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fees) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_f...
webmobdev 4y ago
I don't get this logic - why shouldn't he express his anger, frustration and annoyances with shopify publicly? If I was in his position I would do the same too, whether it gets me some response from Shopify or not. Even if I hired lawyers, I would still prefer to tell the public about shitty customer service, especially if it costs me money and time.
- hoten 4y ago
  I think we both agree that complaining in public is cathartic. However, it isn't always the most productive nor protective (of your own emotional state) option available. If that is realized at all, it typically is only with hindsight.

jstgord 4y ago

oh.. I had assumed this referred to the _technical_ dark side .. Was just toying around with porting a friends very successful shopify store to another platform .. noticed the main home page weighed in at 89MB .. wowza. [ To be fair a lot of that was large pngs which are much smaller as jpg or webp ] Scrolling thru the endless html/css/js page sources injected plethora of 'liquid' inclusions, I can only describe as otherworldly.

SquareWheel 4y ago
It would take some very large images to add up to 89MB, even if they were png. I'm guessing they were not sized correctly for the web.
- jstgord 4y ago
  indeed .. Top offenders were essentially 2048 pixel wide png photos which should have been 1024 wide jpgs at max - weighing 6MB instead of 250k for a difference the human eye probably cant detect : ) but.. more than that, just an endless stream of js html css inclusions .. I suspect 85% of which is dormant, 20% actually repeated, if I were to guess. hehe
  - raihansaputra 4y ago
    I'd hazard it's mostly images and/or the plugins the store has installed to track conversions and / or extend the Shopify store. I do admit plain Shopify stores/themes are quick and lightweight, and the plugins are to blame, but I also point at Shopify for blocking some easy features to be supplanted by plugins.
savrajsingh 4y ago
Fun fact: Shopify user accounts are a disaster. Customers cannot stay logged in to your site for more than 24 hrs.
- SenHeng 4y ago
  Maybe the shops you’re using have done that on purpose? I worked on a shopify storefront for the past year and our users stay logged in for an indeterminate amount of time. We actually have a problem figuring out the exact amount of time their access token stays valid as it seems random, from a week to a month to 3 days.

fallat 4y ago

Still surprised to this day there isn't some installer that just handles everything once you give it a webhost and the payment processor you want.

adrr 4y ago
You can bring your own merchant account to any saas e-commerce site and not have to worry about getting your money frozen. Most banks offer merchant accounts and you just pay for a gateway like authorized.net. It’s going to be $30/m gateway and $30/m merchant account + setup fees.
- ratww 4y ago
  Yeah, that's how I used to do, and it was quite simple. I actually had much much more trouble with things like Recurly (whose API and packages are absolute garbage, IMO) and even Stripe than with the simpler gateways. The only problems I had were solved with a few phone calls, as I had a bank manager very interested in doing business with the company I was working for. But I was not in the USA/EU when I did this stuff, so I have no idea if Stripe and co. have improved things or not. For me (I later moved to Europe) it was a massive regression.

ShakataGaNai 4y ago

Shopify should be scrambling to do a public post-mortem right now. They "Fixed" the situation within a few hours of the tweetstorm, showing that they know they f'd up. Shit happens - but how does shopify assuage small businesses that this won't happen to them next? A public apology, post-mortem and steps to make sure this never happens again.

nerdponx 4y ago
Unless this ends up being widely reported in the media, most of their customers and potential customers won't even hear about it, and it will only change the behavior of a small fraction thereof. Shopify doesn't have to do anything, and they know it.
- runnerup 4y ago
  Even if people read enough of these that Shopify stops seeing new merchant signups…I don’t think Shopify would understand WHY they’re not getting any new customers. They’d probably blame it on SEO or something.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
LegitShady 4y ago
it does not sound fixed to me. It sounds like they're still threatening this small business because the business' own bank flagged payments shopify took from their account, and were reversed, and shopify can't justify the charges, and is again threatening them. I don't see anywhere its resolved, just that they sent a reply.
Kiro 4y ago
You're overestimating the impact. This is just one of thousands of similar stories, none of which has gotten a public apology or post-mortem.
hackernewds 4y ago
"sorry because we got caught"

chaostheory 4y ago

What Shopify did wrong was that it wasn’t fast enough to respond with transparency. However, I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books. Amazon is so rife with fake products that it’s no better than eBay now. I can no longer impulse buy on Amazon. Depending on the product, I will check if there are 3rd party sellers using Amazon warehousing. If there’s any evidence of commingling, I just buy it elsewhere. We’ve been slowly using Target more and more since they have limits on inventory commingling.

LegitShady 4y ago
>I do agree with them in requiring proof that 3rd party sellers have a legal right to sell “trademarked” or “branded” products especially for books. lets say a bookstore goes out of business and I buy their stock and sell it in my own store. Do I need proof that I have legal right to sell those books? First sale doctrine is established law - your discomfort with 'fake' books has nothing to do with anything - no one said anything about counterfeit goods. They're asking them to get some 'proof' they can sell merchandise they bought to sell.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Shopify doesn’t want potential fakes, and many customers like myself are sick of them. My discomfort with shady 3rd party sellers has a lot to do with it because I will take my business elsewhere, or eat up customer support hours and ramp up costs related to returns and exchanges. It’s a free market. There are plenty of other online platforms to choose from that don’t care whether or not they sell fake garbage. You can also create your own online store if needed. Apt username
- askafriend 4y ago
  As a customer, yes I will require proof before buying anything from your hypothetical store. If Shopify can provide that assurance to me - I will transact on Shopify-hosted stores more with confidence.
- tzs 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago

Honestly, i strongly suspect there is more to this story. If there wasn't, seems like it would be a slam dunk lawsuit. I also dont understand why they continued to use shopify if shopify was keeping their money.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Matt apparently authored books on The Sopranos and Mad Men. And according to him in the twitter thread, HBO helped setup interviews and such for the book. If it has access to HBO like that to write the book, if they didn't like him selling soap they would probably raise it with him directly. Not go to shopify.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  From the linked tweet thread: > But all of our Deadwood items are critical, journalistic, or transformative & HBO legal told me they're fine with them existing. If this is actually true - and that's a big if - then the problem is that HBO doesn't think the work in question is infringing, but Shopify does. This is a huge problem with any kind of intermediary liability, because intermediaries do not have the capability to fairly adjudicate copyright cases. If you're selling, say, a review of copyrighted material, that's fair use. However, the problem with fair use is that it makes even the most basic copyright inquiry that much more complicated. Publishers and copyright owners don't want to have to consider fair use for every strikingly-similar infringement out there. They want platform owners to have to fix the problems they created, and they know that they will do so in the most half-assed way possible. That means fair use goes out the window - why risk six-figures-per-infringement judgements at all when we can just ignore it and refuse to host fair use content? That being said there's still problems with the original tweet's argument here. There is a huge gulf between "we don't think this is infringing" and an actual licensing agreement. At best, HBO might be estopped from suing over past infringements, but they have nothing else to mitigate the risk of their store's existence and no promise that HBO doesn't change their mind tomorrow. Copyright owners like this kind of strategic ambiguity - licensing agreements have rather high transaction costs, and every one you sign means another exclusive license[0] you can't sell anymore. They don't want to have to go after every infringement either. They want to be able to grant and revoke their largesse at will. [0] i.e. the lucrative ones. There are entire categories of licensing where nonexclusive licenses are basically worthless and nobody will accept such terms.

memorable 4y ago

Alternative front-end version: https://nitter.net/mattzollerseitz/status/1541994356521013248 https://nitter.net/mattzollerseitz/status/154199435652101324...

ornornor 4y ago
Thanks, so much better than twitter.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Why doesn't Twitter look like this? Now that Jack departed and the Musk dilemma, perhaps they can start disassociating from their troubled pasts
  - the_only_human 4y ago
    run by comitte
  - skybrian 4y ago
    I don't see the improvement? Nitter has smaller text and is in dark mode. It seems slightly harder to read. Maybe it's what you're used to.
    - ornornor 4y ago
      Try both twitter and nitter on a mobile without the twitter app.
    - valvar 4y ago
      The main difference is the amount of JS bloat. Twitter takes many seconds to load and navigation is sluggish.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ipaddr 4y ago

Shopify nickels and dimes you at every chance.

WheatM 4y ago

baskethead 4y ago

Companies need to spend more money on customer service. Period. End of story. But it's expensive so they would rather risk fucking over a percentage of their customers in hopes that they can contain any problems. At some point, governments need to step in and regulate this once their customer support to customer ratio drops below a certain percentage. Otherwise it's a form of tax that creates extreme victims and its usually the small customers because big customers can always pick up the phone and call someone.

jollybean 4y ago

EBay, Paypal the same. Admittedly, it's hard to be an intermediary, because the sheer amount of fraud you there. These companies become, due to liability etc. a kind of 'financial police' which isn't their role. And then have to do that for every little jurisdiction. I suggest that there needs to be way more transparency about their own terms, and paths to redress grievances. But probably we need to change regulations a bit as well for e-commerce.

hklgny 4y ago

I suspect this is more of a stripe problem than a Shopify one. Having dealt with them shutting down our customer accounts on several occasions with no information as to why and ambiguous documentation requests that seem to go on forever, it seems perfectly plausible to me that this was just as frustrating for Shopify as it was the customer. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t have handled it better, but I’ve definitely experienced the other side of this story and it’s awful.

canucklady 4y ago
Nope, it's de rigeur for every ecommerce company. Shopify legal gets some BS email from some big corp, and they slap some vague technological solution on it ("flag anything thay says Star Wars"). Then they get a bunch of overworked, underpaid people to try and enforce their nonsense policy based on the results of the tool. Ultimately they get what they want, because they frustrate these problematic small customers into leaving the platform. Meanwhile they continue to bend over backwards for Jeffree Star or whoever because he'll have a hissy fit on Youtube if his flash sale doesn't happen at the right time.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Almost like tech solutions don’t always scale to handle international growth. That can’t possibly be right though… Growth is the only thing I’ve ever known. What will I do now? Nobody’s going to let me play with hundreds of millions of dollars if I merely make something that “works correctly”. (Dead inside and being sarcastic, btw)
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    No, they just can't scale to handle people because the founders are rubbing themselves just thinking about all the automated money. Anything that gets in the way of the money printer gets crushed.

ojkelly 4y ago

This problem seems endemic to big tech platforms, particularly when money is involved. I remember hearing similar stories about PayPal a decade ago (still do for what it’s worth). While I can understand the desire to not interact with a user of the platform (shopify, google, PayPal, etc), because of the cost, and because many are likely to be bots or actually fraudulent. It’s precisely at these edge cases when computers and automated performs the worst. These are the situations where the scenario is imperfectly modelled in the system. Maybe the engineers didn’t think of the edge case, or an ML model never had training data to cover it. Point is, it doesn’t matter. People problems need people solutions. Remediating edge cases involving people’s livelihoods strikes me as most likely a people problem. When you’re asking a person or company to trust them in a business relationship into the future, such as by being their shopfront, there’s only so many you can destroy before word gets around. I haven’t used or recommended businesses to use PayPal for a decade, because I saw them time and again inflict pain and financial stress with no recourse. As another example, look at the general sentiment around Google Cloud. Would you build a business on top of it? Does that include an exit strategy to multi-cloud, because you’re unsure if they’ll support the service you use? If you can’t scale to provide a human to help other humans caught in the edge cases of your own system, then you need to acknowledge you’re causing harm. A dog food company that kills a puppy every week, is really a puppy killing company that sells dog food. It’s a matter of perspective yes, but if you got into it to help feed dogs, surely the last thing you would want to do is harm them? And if you became aware your killing puppies, would it not be the top priority to ensure it never happens again?

imachine1980_ 4y ago
What alternative for PayPal?, and what for cloud?( I know things like linode, but I mean big cloud).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tluyben2 4y ago
  There are many alternatives for PayPal; stripe being one but there are many others as well that won’t totally screw you as merchant like PayPal does. I use a local one who actually defend me when there are chargebacks and I can visit and talk to a human in case of other issues.

kamranjon 4y ago

This seems pretty damning and I had considered Shopify to start my own online store selling products that I make in the future. I am curious if anybody has suggestions for good alternatives to Shopify for building an online store?

system2 4y ago

WordPress / Magento / OpenCart + Stripe / Authorize.net / BrainTree / Paypal. Why use Shopify and depend on it? Host your own stuff for nearly free ($2-5) and pay very little for the payment gateways. Shopify charges additional 1% per transaction for 3rd party payment integrations. Weird.

Brystephor 4y ago
I work in payments. I'd guess the 1% on top of 3rd party integrations is to encourage folks to go through Shop Pay, which is owned by Shopify. As for why people don't self host, it's likely just easier not to. You start off on an easy platform because who knows if your business is gonna work, then the business grows and you're already on there so why self host when it's working right now? And you continue down that path until it doesn't anymore.
tomnipotent 4y ago
For most Shopify sellers, that 1% is still less than it would cost to pay the person to setup what you're suggesting. Really not weird at all.

matiasfernandez 4y ago

This exact thing happened to us. We have a store located in Puerto Rico and Shopify would randomly stop payouts every 3-4 months or so because they needed to re-verify our owner address information. Apparently, most of Puerto Rico is not verifiable by their shitty address verification API, so it triggers the freeze every time it retries the verification. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had and cost us thousands of dollars. Stripe also did the same exact thing for very similar reasons and at one point we had over $300,000 USD frozen with them, which was basically our entire monthly payroll expense. We had to explain to our bank why our accounts were suddenly drained. This one was worse than Shopify's since we actually never received any communications notifying that this was going to happen. At least we got an email from Shopify that we just hadn't noticed. They're all broken. And Know Your Customer needs to eat shit and die.

thejosh 4y ago
Address validation is the biggest piece of automation that needs to stop. You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show. Or the system that suddenly decides to start doing validation doesn't actually accept valid addresses. Companies think automation can handle it, but it's an absolute nightmare.
- rexf 4y ago
  Address validation is not 100% reliable, so systems should have an override "Yes, this is my address" option. Unfortunately many forms assume address validation is foolproof, so there is no mechanism for entering in your actual address. It just gets rejected. As a customer, I wanted to buy something and the website wouldn't accept my address (since it wouldn't accept any "/" characters). Guess what? There are plenty of addresses in the US with "/", such as 50 1/2 Foobar Street. Address validation does not always work, so companies shouldn't act that way.
  - curiousgal 4y ago
    Try living in a newly built building. Every developer seems to be under the impression that if an address doesn't exist in the Google maps API, then it doesn't exist at all.

pikelet 4y ago

It's not just merchants (until reading this I actually had the impression that Shopify's intention was to protect merchants at all costs). I've heard many horror stories from other developers in the Shopify Partners Slack Community. For developers this is potentially even worse than it is for merchants, as many Shopify apps simply cannot be migrated to another platform (and your customers can't follow even if you are able to). The stories I've seen appear to come under two scenarios. 1. A new developer builds their first app (significant up front time investment). Upon submitting their app, Shopify bans their account giving some vague reason such as 'developer's name matches that of a known terrorist' (are names globally unique now?) or 'we believe your business presents a level of risk that we will be unable to support'. Shopify doesn't explain beyond that, and further communication is impossible. All the developer's hard work and trust in the platform comes to nothing, and Shopify doesn't care. 2. Existing developers with successful apps are suddenly delisted from the app store or even shut down entirely. New installs are not possible. Shopify refuses to explain the reasoning. Months pass without any resolution as the developers lose users and revenue. In the latter case, many partners suspected that these apps were being delisted due to competitors paying for services to flood their app with fake positive reviews, knowing that it would lead to the app being delisted. I don't what came of this situation; whether the matter was finally resolved or those affected just moved on; as I've seen nothing since (this was about 3 months ago). Shopify gave a few vague acknowledgements in Slack along the lines of 'we are taking this seriously, but can't offer details', but nothing more. The casual and/or secretive way Shopify dealt with these cases (where a developer's livelihood is at stake) makes me very worried that I could find myself in a similar situation at any time. It's not even act first, ask questions later. It's simply act, case closed. Shopify wasn't always like this. It's a recent trend.

sekl 4y ago
“developer's name matches that of a known terrorist” Happened to my wife, who has an extremely common name, when ordering something online and the shipping company blocked her package. infuriating…

whatisweb3 4y ago

An option for a crypto payment system could make a difference for this seller and shift some of the power away from Shopify. They would have no way to block access to funds or restrict a willing customer from paying the seller for an item. There should be an option for a payment provider that is a credibly neutral protocol.

urza 4y ago
aaand get downvoted by HN crowd in 3, 2, 1.. :)
xmodem 4y ago
That entirely depends on if shopify is still an intermediary in that scenario or not.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
Unfortunately the "default" crypto payment acceptance providers people use are user hostile (Bitpay, Coinbase Commerce). Other options (BTCPayServer) are available, but they need more work to integrate.

kweks 4y ago

Sorry to hear about your situation. A lot of people have been pointing to the "roll your own" versions of e-commerce stacks. We've been running e-commerce for the last six years, and have tried everything (woocommerce, open commerce, bigcommerce, magento, prestashop). They are all light-years behind Shopify. We've had bumps along the way with Shopify as well (similar problems to yours). A few thoughts: - Know who you are in bed with : Shopify Payments is actually Stripe Platform in most locations, and PayPal in Europe. We refuse to work with PayPal because of their predatory behaviour, so we choose not to use Shopify Payments in the EU. - The Shopify Payments platform is for better or for worse a "start without friction, KYC later" experience. Be aware of what this entails. - Get on RocketReach, find key people in Shopify relevant to your problem and send a succinct email asking for assistance. It's unblocked every problem we ever had - Do the same with your merchant processors : Edwin from stripe actively reads HN, and can often provide assistance on Stripe related issues. - Get lawyers. Not the Go-Sue-the-Pants-off-everyone lawyers, but business / commercial lawyers. Not only can they provide excellent advice for your business, they often spécialise in these types of situations to have conversations and results that you can't access individually. At the end of the day, know your business partners and establish a relationship with them. Using a combination of the above, we've survived competitors using fake C&Ds against our processors and platforms, amongst other things.

omnimus 4y ago
Are you sure about the paypal in europe? AFAIK you can set it up Stripe only if your country supports Stripe which most of EU does.
- kweks 4y ago
  We use Stripe as our primary, when Shopify Payments became available in our region (France) it routed through Paypal. I couldn't see any backend option to select the preferred Shopify Payments backend processor, but would be interested if you have insight into how to achieve this. In what gives weight to the GP, we enabled Shopify Payments, confirmed it went through PayPal and switched back to Stripe to avoid the "process with PP for a week and then have them freeze your funds for 6 months" grind.

jstummbillig 4y ago

Idk. I got scammed buying a NAS from a smb electronics shop recently. No one will ever know. No one cares. Logically I think it's far more likely that big companies are compliant because they operate so much in the open and are under constant scrutiny. Every disgruntled customer has the potential to go viral and do enormous damage. With the most empathic sigh: Shit happens. At big corps most of it. Relatively, probably not.

dperot 4y ago

nickjj 4y ago

The author mentioned they didn't like that transaction fees are not given back during refunds but unfortunately both Stripe and PayPal do the same thing. They started doing this a few years ago. If someone buys your product for $100 and Stripe's fee is $3.20 and you issue a refund to someone you will refund the user $100 and Stripe keeps the $3.20 so that refund really cost you $3.20.

jeromegv 4y ago
Yep. It’s very sad for the owner. And I empathize. But a lot of things they blame shopify for is actually the exact same across the ecommerce spectrum.
voiper1 4y ago
I understand that it's common practice, but here Shopify froze their ability to withdraw but still took orders.
tzs 4y ago
To the processor and other entities such as the credit card companies and banks that are involved with processing the transaction there isn't much difference between a refund and charge. Both use most of the same resources on the same infrastructure the same way in the same amount. If you had a deal where you were directly exposed to all the fees involved, what I'd expect is that you net fee on a transaction would be composed of fees from three different categories. 1. Per transaction fees that apply to both charges and refunds. 2. Fees proportional to the charge amount that apply to both charges and refunds. 3. Fees proportional to the charge amount that only apply to charges. On a charge you'd pay the fees from all three categories. On a refund you might get back the fees from category #3 you paid on the charge, but you'd again pay the fees from category #1 and #2. For example if you sell an item for price P and the fees from the three categories are F1, F2, and F3, your net gain on that transaction is P - F1 - F2 - F3. A refund transaction has a net gain of -P - F1 - F2 + F3. That would bring your total net for the combined charge/refund to -2 F1 - 2 F2. This we should expect some net fee for a charge followed by a refund. For small transactions that net fee could be up to almost twice what the fee was for the charge alone. Most processors though don't directly expose you to all the fees. That's because there are a bazillion different possible fees with each different subsets applicable to any particular transaction. So most processors expose a simplified structure based on averages over a large number of transactions across similar merchants. Most merchants prefer that. When doing such a simplified fee structure, they could set charge fees based on the average for F1 + F2 + F3 and refund fees based on the average F1 + F2 - F3. But refunds should be much less frequent than charges, so it seems find to me when doing a simplified fee structure to just average the refunds in too, and just deal with fees on the charge side of things.

black_puppydog 4y ago

so, I get that shopify brings more to the table than just payment processing. but I'm surprised that nobody here has brought up regular SEPA payments and SEPA direct debits. Of course they will only currently work in the EU, but fast, reliable, cheap direct transfer systems might be a model other countries could implement. The benefit is that banks (at least in Europe) are quite a bit more regulated than e.g. shopify and random lock-outs like this shouldn't be as common, or at the very least should have clearly defined escalation mechanisms. In terms of customer protection as well, direct debits are super nice here in EU.

urza 4y ago

Bitcoin fixes this. Ditch the intermediaries and 3rd parties. https://btcpayserver.org https://btcpayserver.org EDIT: aand get downvoted by HN crowd, how unexpected :)

xmodem 4y ago
"0% fees" (apart from the transaction costs, which are significant, and never mind how long it takes the transaction to go through)
- urza 4y ago
  First of all, nowadays you should be using Lightning Network, where fees are negligible and the payment is finalized and settled in order of seconds. BtcPay server has first class integration of Lightning Network. And second, even if you want to accept onchain payments, current onchain fees are something $0.2 for confirmation within an hour. Which seems reasonable for having final settlement without any intermediary of your funds this fast. Compare this with traditional payment options like credit cards where you are waiting often times 30 days or even more for settlement and as the OP illustrates, you are at mercy of intermediaries.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  BTC fees are basically fuck all these days, and you can just use LN.
jeromegv 4y ago
Stop playing the victims on how the angry HN crowd has downvoted you. You’re being downvoted because it’s a bookstore that sells to the general public. Less than 1% of their customers would know how to pay with bitcoin, and even for those who do, they would likely keep their bitcoin and hold them right now since it’s at a 1-year-low instead of using it as a currency. It’s just not helpful to the situation. That’s why you’re being downvoted.
- urza 4y ago
  Those are valid concerns, the "hodl only" mentality, the volatility.. but you do you see discussion about this on HN? No, just downvotes. I kind of doubnt that what you say is the motivation for the downvotes. I think if you are being honest, for some reason the HN users just hate bitcoin.

inflam52 4y ago

Shameless plug: this is exactly why I built SimpleStore. An easy way to manage a small store without worrying about the platform changing the rules on you. https://chrisdiana.github.io/simplestore/ https://chrisdiana.github.io/simplestore/

chris_wot 4y ago

Holy crap… they made them take down a “Star Wars” section of their site? Why?!?

mk81 4y ago

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

Does Shopify have a marketplace like Amazon ? Ie discovering the products and stores ? I’m struggling to understand the face of it.

RichardHeart 4y ago

Someone should invent a value transfer technology that routes around middlemen. Censorship resistant, so to speak.

npx13 4y ago

We are a very long established bricks and mortar Irish retailer that chose to go online with Shopify and use Shopify Payments for online transactions only at the beginning of the pandemic. Today, we were given essentially given a couple of days to provide invoices from all our suppliers and letters of authorisation from each of them. We have a lot of suppliers all over Europe and this is the 14th July. To say that we are angry would be a gross understatement.