For everyone that's trying to compare Shopify to marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, you really can't. They are apples to oranges. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that gives you your own website where you’re required to do your own marketing, SEO, and develop your own customer base. Selling on eBay and Amazon on the other hand gives you the advantage of putting your products in front of millions of customers who are actively window shopping. The former gives you ownership of the customer while the latter doesn’t.
Both types of sales channels have their own value props and are complimentary to each other. Furthermore, even each marketplace attracts their own customer archetypes so they can also be complimentary to each other. This isn’t a binary strategy where you choose to sell on one or the other!
I’m the founder of Trunk[1] which helps online e-commerce stores sync their inventory in real-time across their sales channels. Most of my customers on average sell on least 3 places (e.g. Shopify, eBay, and Amazon).
Congrats to Tobias and his team. He’s come a long way from being a Rails core team member back in the day!