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Comment by senttoschool | Hacker News Reader

How did they lose $1.47B on $1.2B revenue last quarter? Wow.

Personally, I haven't bought a single item from a Shopify store. I prefer Amazon because of prime shipping, reviews, and the ability to compare similar products with one single search.

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I called it quits with Amazon after my last three orders:

- Received a clearly counterfeit product (not even a good attempt at a fake)

- Received a product that looked nothing like the description with a note included offering me a $10 Amazon Gift card for providing proof of giving the seller a 5 star review. I reported this to Amazon and no action was taken.

- My last order, the product never even arrived. No response from the seller despite repeated attempts. (In Amazon's defence, a refund was quick and painless once the 2 week waiting period ended)

In all of these cases, the sellers had thousands of 5 star reviews. I feel a turning point will come where Amazon will either have to do some major housecleaning to fix the gaming / fake reviews, scams, and counterfeit products that infest their entire business, or customers will reach a breaking point and leave en-masse.

I too purchase a lot from the junk bin that has become Amazon. Even still if there is anything I want to buy from the specialty retailer - it is almost certainly a shopify store. Probably dozens in the last year. They white label them fairly well.

They reported a loss on an investment in Affirm iirc. They're actually cash flow positive as a company, the loss is mostly just an accounting quirk.

The company might not be in major trouble, just using recent low share prices, tech industry layoffs and freezes to make some cuts on underperformers.

Yea, 10% doesn't scream disaster to me. A couple % from low performers across the company, a couple % from underperforming parts of the org, a couple % from reducing long-term/optimistic investments, and Shopify can drop 10% and keep growing.

The layoff-consultant folks often say you can drop a third of a company and not see a major difference in performance. If Shopify were struggling, they might have seen if the consultants were right.

10% is pretty big actually for a public company not fighting for their life or with a runway, imagine 1 out of 10 of your coworkers gone, in addition to natural attrition.

$97 million operating loss on $1.2b in sales.

That one isn't an accounting quirk. Nor is the wall that their sales growth just ran into. The pandemic pulled future results forward by many years, Shopify will suffer near-term accordingly.

> Personally, I haven't bought a single item from a Shopify store.

Unless you literally only buy from Amazon, you probably wouldn't be able to tell. They are white labeled. https://store.ui.com is one for example.

I'm a uMatrix user. I can tell.

lol Amazon is now more like Ebay than a store with their own inventory, as in the majority of sales come from shady third party marketplace vendors. If you think it’s safer it’s most likely because they’ve gotten very good at rigging reviews.

Amazon is AliExpress with faster shipping.

AliExpress allows you to select who you are buying from. Not allowing that is my one problem with Amazon.

I can't think of an item I've bought from a store that was Shopify branded, but I know that a lot of big retailers online are using Shopify behind the scenes - Huel are, I believe Gymshark are - so unless you use Amazon exclusively (also entirely possible!), there's every chance you have used Shopify without knowing

I actually buy quite a bit from Shopify stores. A lot of products like personal care, zero-waste and sustainable products, etc, are on Shopify. Once you've seen one, the checkout flow is often recognizable.

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