Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, Hacker News now used for stock pumping. nice.

Now that the longs had their say, here is the short side.

Shopify has an API. Someone wrote a plugin to allow a shop keeper to publish inventory into the Walmart API. When sellers sell on Walmart's platform, Shopify sees zero transactional revenue.

That's the actual technical story.

The linked "article" which actually included a quote from the COO includes a page of bullet points about how Shopify is really knocking it out of the park. Including the "Facebook deal".

Actually the Facebook deal is FB pulling the cart & payments features into their FB & Instagram apps. So, effectively killing Shopify web store use. Apparently FB is doing something special for Shopify so that Shopify can charge 2% on top of FB's 5% fee. But sellers can also just make their shops directly on FB and skip the 2% Shopify surcharge.

I would have expected fellow programmers to understand a bit of math & show some constraint with bubble valuation stocks!

So sellers will create a different FB shop, a different Walmart shop, a different website shop, download and pay for a whole bunch of software to keep all the inventory in sync, and have to merge different interfaces and APIs to try and figure out what their final sales, revenue, etc are.

Or they can use Shopify and get all of those, and manage their inventory, and pricing, and shipping rules, etc all from one place and pay Shopify a few hundred dollars a year, when they would have paid thousands in software annually to replicate the same anyways.

Yeah, I can totally see why they would go the non Shopify route.

This. I simply don’t get the hype behind Shopify. They’re not making money even this year. That’s saying a lot about the business model which is why they are forced to show “fluff” top line growth through these deals. The problem Shopify solves in the e-commerce space is really trivial. If anything, the real gem of this decade is Stripe.

But it isn't just about the technical, is it?

The idea behind it is "headless commerce" -- a shop owner can operate single backend while diversifying the front-end channels from which customers are able to transact (marketplace, webshop, third-party, mobile app). It's a value-add service that all ecommerce sites will eventually move toward to retain customers.

With higher transaction volumes, provided customer data is collected and passed through, the shopkeeper can now access analytics for multi-channel targeting, marketing etc. Shopify can then sell all kinds of value-added services based on this data.

I think healthy skepticism is in order, but for now the markets have spoken. We'll have to wait for future earning reports to see what effect this has.

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