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Comment by jameslevy | Hacker News Reader

"We’re also working more closely with partners like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce..."

Is Facebook Shops not a direct competitor to Shopify? Or is this just "embrace, extend, and extinguish"?

My guess is that they will try to integrate Shopify sites into the platform, to give the FB Shops platform some momentum, then gradually push the non FBS stores down the page. My reasoning is that they are emulating Google.

Alternatively, they could be looking to make FB Shops an advertising platform, similar to Amazon Seller Central, where they don't care who you buy from, but they want each seller to pay for ads and/or payment processing.

Although being a simple shopify drop in replacement would have its advantages in simplicity, there is probably more long term potential if they embrace multi-channel sales, and become a storefront management tool ala https://www.ecomdash.com/ and https://www.shipstation.com/ Some people are going to keep shopping on amazon, some on ebay, some on walmart, some on etsy, some directly on websites.

Im not saying that's what they are doing, but its a way to skim off all transactions instead of trying to force business into facebook.

Probably the right answer. If you have a shop that's getting some sales on etsy, amazon or ebay or wherever else you're not going to want to close it down in favor of facebook – you'll just open a second storefront there.

Amazon cares who you buy from. Amazon Basics pushes out sellers.

Not just Basics, they have so many other brands of their own that most customers will never even know that.

Your guess appears to be wrong. I couldn't find anything about FB Shops using Shopify platform. Only that you can stock your store from the Shopify store.. which is a tool that Shopify provides. In other words, Shopify is using the FB Merchant and Store APIs. Like anyone can.

It seems like a bad deal for Shopify sellers. They must pay FB 5% and Shopify 2% of each transaction. If they jettisoned Shopify, they'd just pay FB 5%.

For a lot of stores, Shopify is just an API for your store. There's a big trend in ecommerce of going "headless" and using Shopify's API to push your products out to many channels. In that sense, Shopify is merely a special database (similar to Salesforce) to track your customers, orders, products, inventory, discounts, etc which is then pushed out to channels like Facebook Shop or Amazon.

Yes, its interesting shopify have a product called Lite (https://www.shopify.com/lite) which does not have any UI

Nothing lite about the payment terms. You pay them over a 100 a year plus part of every transaction.

For keeping a database of photos and descriptions & integrating with APIs?

Doesn't that seem overpriced?

Interesting - sounds like gumroad?

https://gumroad.com/

Shopify seems to overcharge for that sort of functionality.

Merchants are paying Shopify per transaction while customers shop on another site & pay using Google Pay, Paypal, FB Pay, or Apple Pay.

I don't get it. If you buy something from Facebook Shop does Facebook take a fee or Shopify for example. I'm guessing Facebook is trying to get rid off websites and essentially Google and hoping all discovery happens on Facebook and Instagram.

I'm wondering how Facebook Shops is going to impact Shopify,Amazon and Google Shopping in the long term.

They will probably do it for free, and then just limit visibility unless you pay to advertise the products.

Facebook is going to handle everything (search, display, cart, checkout, payments) and will charge 5%.

Shopify is doing nothing on a transaction level & yet they have a stock that requires growth, so they are charging 2% per transaction.

I kid you not.

I read the tweet from Shopify CEO and I thought Facebook went and partnered with Shopify only. Turns out that is not true.

Anyway out of all those listed, I would think Shopify has the biggest to gain. While I dont know enough about the possibility of Facebook doing Triple E, at least All of a sudden Shopify's insane valuation makes a little more sense and justifying the possible potential. Currently market cap at ˜90B and trading at ˜50x revenue.

Wow, I haven't been following Shopify, but their stock is going gangbusters.

A mid level employee who joined around their IPO, with ~$300k of stock vesting over four years would be worth almost $18MM today.

Wow.

Just thank J Powell and Trump.

Not really.

Shopify is only using FB's merchant APIs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/commerce-platform/ And that's it.

They are allowing Shopify merchants to publish their inventories to the FB store. In exchange Shopify wants 2% of every transaction and 30 bucks a month or 9 bucks for their "lite" version.

Or you can just use FB directly to stock your store & pay Shopify zilch.

I wonder if slashdot has a Borg avatar for Zuck yet...

No props/photoshop needed.

Savage.

This image works pretty well: https://i.imgflip.com/288d4p.jpg

Looks like slashdot beta may not do avatars. Fuck slashdot bêta.

Both partner and potential competitor?

Depends how serious FB wants to invest in building out their own e-commerce backend platform. Not sure it is that valuable to them when IG is the more differentiating part of the product.

Why not just fork Magento? I bet with Facebook's infrastructure you could get it running at Shopify scale for a few million bucks a year.

Nowadays it's more "embrace, extend, and acquire"

It's a really interesting question. My gut tells me that Shopify is looking for a suitor and this is facebook's way of de-risking (validating?) a potential investment.

Shopify is definitely not looking for a suitor - no way. They still have so much growth potential - that rocketship is looking to add more channels. Once on Shopify it's tough to leave - that whole switching cost.

A lot of Shopify's competitive advantage comes from being a giant, Canadian tech company. Similar to Blackberry before it, the government is extremely generous and investors price the stock accordingly. If Shopify moved to the States or was acquired by an American company I think it would take away that unique appeal.

Also the founder is an egomaniac and would never sell.

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