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Comment by imafish | Hacker News Reader

I am a Shopify partner through 3 years, paying 20% of my revenue to Shopify, and every time I have been in contact with "partner support" it has been, to put it mildly, an underwhelming experience.

You have to argue your way through an army of outsourced supporters who are equipped with nothing but the public Shopify docs, until you get to a real employee who concludes it with a "sorry, but we can't help".

Some of my issues:

1. If you're not American, you will be forced to hand over 3% of your 80% revenue cut to PayPal. (Unless your MRR cut is >$30k)

2. Sometimes Shopify just kills features, which merchants and partners rely on. Sure, we get a notice that the API will change - but how does that help, when there is no alternative way to achieve the removed functionality? I was lucky enough to get through to someone who knew someone at the dev team, but the response was once again "sorry, you're not a priority".

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Why would any one use Shopify 20% instead of 3 -4 % of stripe? Sounds like Shopify is total rip off.

I think the 20% is the fee for Shopify as a whole, not the payment processing fee. Since payment processing is a small portion of what they offer at Shopify its not an apples to apples comparison with Stripe.

Yeah it sucks, I just think of it as the marketing fee. I have done literally zero marketing other than put my app on their store and it has been selling for 6 years now.

As of now, the app pays for the mortgage, car payment and then some so I can't complain too much I guess.

may I ask what exactly you sell?

I have an app on the Shopify app store that helps users manage their inventory.

There is some confusion.

This is revshare of what the shopify partner bills the shopify store owner.

It's identical to apple charging developers a revshare of payments billed through the app store.

Not saying it's good here, just clarifying that it's not card processing fees, it's platform fees + billing fees.

Shopify does provide other qualities for the 20%:

- Seamless integration with the merchant billing system. I.e. free trial(s) are credit card up-front automatically, with zero friction for the user.

- "Free" marketing in the App Store.

- Access to paid advertising in the App Store.

Good partner support is just not one of them :)

> If you're not American, you will be forced to hand over 3% of your 80% revenue cut to PayPal.

That's wild considering they're headquarters is in Ottawa, Canada.

If you look through the history of Shopify, majority of their features are launched US first and sometimes never make it back to Canada. They also only bill in USD for their service and don't allow Canadian merchants to pay in Canadian dollars... and yes this is a Canadian company. They know where their biggest market is and Canadian market is often way down the priority list.

This is helpful insight into the company.

Offtopic: They are a large Rails shop and apparently are on a hiring binge this year.

It sounds like developers don't really own their app/code, own in the sense of you build, maintain and support it. Working in an organization with support outsourced makes me think they are getting large enough that bureaucracy is growing.

You'd think being an org with lots of engineering they would understand that API support for devs building things on their platform is kinda important and maybe shouldn't be lumped into general support. There are reasons why devs pick Stripe.

Off topic:

How much of a revenue bonus would be enough incentive to install a specific shopify/plugin/minor-UI-tweaks addition to your store ?

3%? 10% 1%? Lets assume I can convince you we dont share your data or harm your business.

I run an app, not a store :)

Probably he meant in your cart inside the app

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